''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 book's 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 collidedand, 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 Kentucky's tumultuous passage from Daniel Boone's world to Henry Clay's. ''The book shatters customary generic boundaries to incorporate insights from many types of historysocial, political, economic, ethnohistory, women's history, religious history, even the 'new' western history . . . no one prior to Aron has so thoroughly and insightfully examined the range of complex issues involved in the development of Kentucky from frontier to settlement.''Charles B. Churchill, History: Reviews of New Books ''How the West Was Lost engages the reader; it actually asks us to think about the issues it raises rather than accept the author's conclusions as a definitive last word on them. Aron has written a book that demands that attention be paid to trans-Appalachia's important role in the conquest of North America while it underscores the contested nature of its history. And for that, we are all in his debt.''Andrew R. L. Cayton, Georgia Historical Quarterly
