University of Nebraska Press, 1993

It has been two generations since Verner W. Crane published The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (1928). Sparked by a master’s seminar with Frederick Jackson Turner, Crane used English and colonial sources to create a path breaking study of southeastern trade and politics between the founding of Carolina and the beginning of Oglethorpe’s Georgia colony. But colonial historians preferred to focus on seventeenth-century New England; frontier historians favored the nineteenth-century West; and southern historians remained wedded to the Virginia cavaliers and their Civil War descendants. Crane’s pathway went virtually unused for more than a generation.