How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky From Daniel Boone to Henry Clay

How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky From Daniel Boone to Henry Clay by Aron, Professor Stephen. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780801852961.

"A first-rate piece of work and a fine read." -- Alan Taylor, University of California, Davis "This excellent history of early Kentucky resonates with the most important questions in the history of the early republic, frontier, and economic development. One of the books great strengths is its genre-busting quality, taking up ethnohistory and settlement history in the same narrative." -- John Mack Faragher, Yale University Eighteenth-century Kentucky was a place where Indian and European cultures collided -- and, surprisingly, coincided. But this mixed world did not last, and it eventually gave way to nineteenth-century commercial and industrial development. How the West Was Lost tracks the overlapping conquest, colonization, and consolidation of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Not a story of paradise lost, this is a book about possibilities lost. It focuses on the common ground between Indians and backcountry settlers which was not found, the frontier customs that were not perpetuated, the lands that were not distributed equally, the slaves who were not emancipated, the agrarian democracy that was not achieved, and the millennium that did not arrive. Seeking to explain why these dreams were not realized, Stephen Aron shows us what did happen during Kentuckys tumultuous passage from Daniel Boones world to Henry Clays.