Excerpt from The Significance of the Louisiana-Texas Frontier It is in Europe that we naturally find the best ex amples for frontier study. Here for more than a thou sand years German and Slavic or German and Latin ele ments have waged unending wars in the effort to mark definite limits for national or racial units. Through the long centuries monarchs planned, diplomats schemed, armies fought, and settlers migrated in the attempt to make natural boundaries and racial elements correspond in the upbuilding of national aspirations. Lo-thringia gives way before the irrestible advance of Austria - Neus tria; or a thousand years later, Alsace and Lorraine fall to the German in order to redress the balance of Western Eu'rope. Poland disappears as a separate entity under the pressure of Muscovite, Hapsburg, and Hohenzollern. The Alps and the Pyrennes separate the Latin nations, despite the ambitious attempts of Charles VIII and Fran cis I, the boast of Louis XIV, or the decree of Napoleon. These significant examples, to say nothing of a host of minor ones, illustrate the general statements already mentioned; but they have their counterparts in the New World where, upon a territorial and physiographic scale greater than Europe affords, the three stages of develop ment are compressed within a time limit that permits a rapid survey of their significant features. Of such North American frontiers we might name the maine-acadian of our Northeastern border, the old New York frontier, the Oregon frontier, that of the Old Northwest, and that of the far Southwest all of which illustrate the points men tioned as vividly as any of their European counterparts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.