Trends in Native American and borderlands history reveal how Native Americans controlled the interior for much longer than previously imagined. Moreover, the settlement of the interior of North America benefited from a hidden history of Indigenous roads/trading paths, cleared fields, agricultural products and techniques, and labor. Nonetheless, European and American settlers crafted new narratives in which Euro-American ingenuity enabled them to build the first roads, clear the first fields, and settle the region.

Dr. Andrew Frank is an ethnohistorian who specializes on the history of the Florida Seminoles and the Native South. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from institutions that include the American Philosophical Society, American Historical Association, Newberry Library, and Huntington Library. Dr. Frank is currently finishing a book-length manuscript on the history of the Florida Seminoles tentatively entitled Those Who Camp at a Distance: The Seminoles and Indians of Florida. He has published more than two dozen book chapters and journal articles, including “Red, Black, and Seminole: Community Convergence on the Florida Borderlands, 1780-1840,” in A. Glenn Crothers and Andrew K. Frank Borderland Narratives: Exploring North America's Contested Spaces, 1500-1850.