James Nichols shows how a dizzying array of historical actors used the early U.S.-Mexico border for their own purposes, sometimes pleasing national authorities and sometimes greatly vexing them. We are accustomed to thinking of borders as barriers, but Nichols shows how this border invited crossing and inspired dreams of hope and freedom. This deeply empathetic and creative study should be required reading for borderlands historians.Benjamin H. Johnson, associate professor of history at Loyola University. Chicago
As James Nichols reveals in this important new book, the U.S.-Mexico border has simultaneously functioned as a space of liberation and opportunity as well as a zone of confinement and limitation. Grounded in research in archives on both sides of the border and peopled with a fascinating cast of fugitive slaves, escaped peones, and indigenous peoples, The Limits of Liberty is essential reading for all borderlands historians.Karl Jacoby, professor of history at Columbia University
The Limits of Liberty skillfully captures a range of borderlanders along this developing and changing line of liberty; it especially excels by providing new perspectives on slaves and slavery, debt peons, vecinos, and the Lipan Apaches, using narrative accounts based on archival materials to reveal new dimensions of the U.S.-Mexico border.Todd W. Wahlstrom, visiting assistant professor of history in Seaver College at Pepperdine University Nichols offers a prismatic view of the various peoples moving through the Texas-Mexico borderlands during tumultuous points in the nineteenth century. . . . By stimulating our thinking on what liberty has meant to different people, and in what ways freedom can appear and disappear, Nichols continues the important work of delving into the long-intertwined histories of Texas, Mexico, and the still-swirling spaces and societies between.Lori A. Flores, associate professor of history at Stony Brook University, SUNY
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