The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders and American Expansion. By Jay Gitlin. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 269. $40.00.)Reviewed by Justin CarrollIn introduction of The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders and American Expansion, historian Jay Gitlin writes that It was misfortune of French to have their story told by one of nineteenth century's great amateur historians (2). Francis Parkman, in his seminal work France and England in North America (1865-1892), cast French in terms of racial and national characteristics. To Parkman, French were happy-go-lucky, passionate community, capable of greatness, but who usually chose frivolity. Unlike British in North America, their stifling relationship with absolutism and Catholicism made them uniquely unsuited for self-government. Combined with Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis, articulated in 1893, which argued that continual explained American history, little room existed for French fur traders and merchants, beholden to their Indian brethren and allies, to play important and transformative roles in development of American society and its republican political culture. The powerful legacy of Parkman and Turner have kept discussions of French in trans-Appalachian west in narrative and descriptive straitj acket that few scholars have managed to fully transcend, despite increasing interest in trans-Mississippian west (4).Jay Gitlin's magisterial work uncovers vibrant, dynamic, and multicultural Creole corridor stretching from Detroit to New Orleans: world of towns where wealthy, educated, and worldly French mercantile families, like Chouteaus of St. Louis, oversaw and oriented messy world of race and class in late eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries (10). The success of these elite French families resided in their cosmopolitanism; they understood wants, desires, protocols, and languages of their Indian neighbors, even as they kept wary eye on European and colonial markets and cultural developments. Operating out of frontier towns, French merchants were far from itinerant fur traders, but uniquely placed, according to Gitlin, to act as the advance guard of American (188). In aftermath of Seven Years' War, cultural and social practices that had sustained French Empire in North America and engendered fur trade, became, in hands of these French merchants living under sovereignty of Great Britain and then United States, a negotiable instrument . . . [used] to broker transition to an American regime of settlement (188). In other words, behaviors and relationships that nurtured French and Indian alliance of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries facilitate [d] dispossession of native peoples and accorded French merchants and intermediaries dominant vista from which to transform American frontier (188).In eight chapters, Gitlin traces continuing political, social, and economic influence and diversification of elite French families within context of an expansionist United States. …