In the heart of North America, the Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers come together, uniting waters from west, north, and east on a journey to the south. This is the region that Stephen Aron calls the "American Confluence." His innovative book examines the history of that region-a home to the Osage, a colony exploited by the French, a new frontier explored by Lewis and Clark. Aron focuses on the region's transition from a place of overlapping borderlands to one of oppositional Border States. American Confluence is a lively account that should delight amateur and professional historians alike.Stephen Aron, professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and executive director of the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National Center, is a specialist in frontier and western American history. He is author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (1996) and coauthor of Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World from the Mongol Empire to the Present (2002). He is currently conducting research on the intercultural experiences of Daniel Boone and his descendants and on the history of the horse in the American West.