by Elizabeth Perkins. Softbound, 252 pages, 5" x 9". In this original and sensitive ethnography of frontier life, the author recovers the rhythms of warfare, subsistence, and cultural encounter that governed existence on the margins of British America. Richly detailed, Border Life captures the intimate perceptive universe of the men and women who colonized Kentucky and southern Ohio during the Revolutionary War. In reconstructing the mental world of border inhabitants, Perkins draws on a pioneering source in oral history. In the 1840's, the Rev. John Dabney Shane conducted hundreds of interviews with surviving western settlers, gathering their recollections on topics ranging from food preparation to encounters with Native Americans. Although Shane'sinterviews have long been hailed as a rich, if complicated, source for western history, Perkins is the first scholar to consider them critically, as texts for cultural analysis.