Problems and Prospects in North American Borderlands History Benjamin Johnson Southern Methodist University Abstract Scholars of North American borders have raised fundamental questions about the relationship between the discipline of history and the nation-state. Integrating the histories of the U.S.-Canadian and U.S.-Mexican borders while paying more attention to the limits of national power will allow them to write accounts of modern state-making that address questions important to all historians of the modern world. Borders have recently become the sites of deep scholarly interest. Contemporary border regions, particularly the U.S.-Mexico border, are burgeoning economically and demographically, and the movements of goods and people through them are important subjects of political debate and agitation. These developments raise an implicit challenge to the work of historians: although the modern nation-state gave birth to the discipline and continues to structure its specializations and lines of inquiry, the increasing prominence of border crossings of all sorts suggests that nations themselves are shaped by larger dynamics that may be discounted or underestimated by versions of the past tied too firmly to nation-based inquiry. Indeed, the physical edges of nations may reveal the most about the contingency of national histories and provide opportunities for creating accounts of the past that transcend both the geographic and conceptual limits imposed by international boundaries. 1 “Borderlands,” a term that a generation ago referred to the study of New Spain’s northern frontier, is now shorthand for the study of the U.S.-Mexico border region. The creation of this border from the long history of European colonialism and subsequent national projects, and its shifting meanings and implications, are the central subjects of much of this literature. Recent projects, building on a generation of more regionally oriented histories and engaging the historiographies and archives of both Mexico and the United States, have fleshed out some of the impacts of border-making in both nations. We now know that the new international boundary altered class relations in much of the Mexican north. Regional economic elites and the central state took advantage of the fact that there was no longer a need to assure subaltern men of their land rights in order to rely on them as a military © Blackwell Publishing 2006 History Compass 4/1 (2006): 186–192, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00302.x