“The Peripheral Lands”: Bernard Bailyn and the North American Backcountry

BERNARD Bailyn first aroused my curiosity about the backcountry of mainland British North America, both in his magisterial Voyagers to the West and in lectures from his course on The Revolutionary Transformation of America. As I was casting about for a dissertation topic, his treatment of what he called “the peripheral lands” caught my imagination. In sketchy but evocative chapters and lectures, Bailyn challenged me to think about what it meant to “create a world anew” in landscapes that were still themselves unformed: social worlds that were called into being by the same people who were experiencing the radical changes associated with the American Revolution. I became interested, for example, in the contest between proprietary ventures and the ideal of self-government in the era of the American Revolution, and his treatment of places like the Transylvania Colony and Fair Play, Pennsylvania sparked my interest. Here were wholly unfamiliar stories about...