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Reading Between the Lines

The First Frontier: New York State and American Expansion, 1775-1890

This series is focused around books that explore New York State's important place in the 19th-century American frontier experience. Each session centers on a book selected by Shane Butterfield, a graduate student in the History Department of Rochester University.

The series opens with a discussion of The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution by Barnet Schecter, which sets the context for the other discussion by exploring the importance of New York at the time of the nation's founding.


This session focuses on William Cooper's Town: Power & Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, Alan Taylor's stirring account of Congressman William Cooper and his son James Fenimore Cooper, who were at the center of American political and cultural life in the early days of the Republic.


A discussion of Peter L. Bernstein's Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, an exploration of New York's greatest contribution to the American frontier: the Erie Canal.


The series concludes with a conversation about A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 by Paul E. Johnson, a seminal portrait of Rochester as a rapidly growing frontier city and a center of the religious revival sweeping the nation.