Founded on the banks of the Mohawk River, Schenectady was a small community, but in many respects its history mirrors much of the contemporary history of New Netherland and New York. In delineating the details of the village's political, social, and economic life, Mohawk Frontier illuminates a larger picture as well.

Thomas E. Burke, Jr., explores Schenectady's origins and its destruction in 1690, placing them in a broad context of Anglo-Dutch, Dutch-French, and Anglo-French relations extending back over the previous quarter century. In addition, he analyzes the contending political factions in the village during the period, both in their local setting and in relation to the provincewide schism that surrounded Leisler's Rebellion (1689-1691).

Burke focuses primarily on the Dutch residents, suggesting that until 1710 the community's institutions remained largely in the control of individuals and families who had settled in the colony before the English conquest of 1664. But he also tells the story of the Indian men, women, and children, French coureurs de bois, African slaves, and, from the 1690s onward, English soldiers and settlers who visited, lived in, or were garrisoned at the village

1. Mohawk Frontier should find a ready audience among historians of early American communities and those interested in frontier settlement, the fur trade, Indian relations, and the transformation of Dutch New Netherland into English-ruled New York.