The Health of the Country How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land

In this vivid history of American western expansion, Conevery Bolton Valencius captures the excitement, romanticism, confusion, and terror of the frontier experience. In a time when good health was thought to involve perfectly balanced "humors," settlers thought that the wild extremes of the borderlands disrupted the delicate equilibrium of their bodies. Valencius is the first historian to show that the settlers' primary criterion for uncharted land was its perceived health or sickliness. The Health of the Country is a beautifully written, fresh account of the gritty details of American expansion, animated by the voices of the settlers themselves. Book jacket.

Conevery Bolton Valencius received her Ph.D. from Harvard. In 2000 she won the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians for best-written dissertation in American history. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she is an assistant professor at Washington University.