Margins to Mainstream: The Brave New World of Borderlands History * A Special Section

Abstract

This Journal of American History issue on borderlands history is dedicated to the memory of David J. Weber (1940–2010). His monumental scholarship—including such works as The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540–1846 (1971), Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (1973), The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (1982), The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992), and Bárbaros: Spanish and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (2005)—not only had a profound impact on borderlands history but also brought together histories of the U.S. West, Latin America, and Mexican America in powerful ways. He reinterpreted the Spanish and Mexican borderlands for mainstream U.S. history audiences and played an influential part in integrating the fields of colonial history and ethnohistory, and in pioneering a comparative, hemispheric approach to borderlands history. Weber received numerous honors and awards on both sides of the Atlantic and inspired countless historians to think of cross-cultural encounters and borderlands in new ways. He taught for thirty-four years at Southern Methodist University, where he launched the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies and turned it into a leading institution in the study of the history and culture of the American Southwest. Through his legendary generosity as a mentor to aspiring young scholars, Weber shaped a generation of borderlands scholars whose work bears a lasting mark of his intellectual legacy.