This book helps clear up the myth about Manifest Destiny being this unstoppable force sweeping across the United States. Flawed and often stopped by Native American resistance, change was not a given.

The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850, by Andrew Isenberg offers a new way of thinking about American westward expansion. This perceptive book will shift the writing on our early nation and relations with Indigenous peoples who wielded immense power in the borderlands beyond US borders and territories claimed by other colonial powers. "Manifest Destiny" was a slogan created relatively late in the expansionist history of the US, and as this book makes clear, it was never a widely held notion nor a given. I especially found the early history of Florida to be especially revealing, in terms of Native Americans who fled there for multiple reasons, and the numbers of enslaved Africans who escaped into the Spanish territory - which of course was much closer to the Deep South slaveholding states. Fascinating and recommended!