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. Aron's 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—and 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 will delight both the amateur and professional historian. "...makes a fascinating and useful contribution to Atlantic world and North American West scholarship--a claim few other monographs could make." -- H-Atlantic , Sheila McManus, Department of History, University of Lethbridge. (August, 2007) This sophisticated analysis...focuses upon the sprawling lands that marked the intersection of the country's three primary rivers...Recommended. -- CHOICE , Feb. 2007, M. L. Tate, University of Nebraska at Omaha Stephen Aron is Professor of History at UCLA and Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National Center. He is author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay.