ABSTRACT
Historians in the United States have contributed to comparative history with an imposing body of work, but their efforts still bear the marks of limited peripheral vision. Borderlands historiography offers a way forward by questioning the national unit, breaking the United States up for the study of regional influences and transnational commonalities. National boundaries are important in history, but the methodology of comparative history when reliant on this unit of analysis alone is flawed. The outcome of research tends to flow from the method chosen. “Borderlands” may refer to such cases as the geographically contiguous regions of Mexico, the United States, and Canada, but the concept may also be used where other “border crossings” occur over longer distances through trade and communication. A final influence is that of the social construction of the environment: among dominant Anglo Californians, important contacts developed with Australia in the nineteenth century.
