Professor Thomas Slaughter provided a very thorough overview of the Whiskey Rebellion, which he believed had taken place when this book was conceived, nearly two centuries after the episode transpired, becoming a largely forgotten chapter in our nation's history since the Civil War. He cites as direct evidence of this fact the near-total absence of any mention of the event in many contemporary textbooks from the conservative era of the 1980s, something this reviewer can also attest to, having been a high school student at the end of the 70s. who had never heard of the Whiskey Rebellion until years later. Building on his thesis on the topic, the author convincingly demonstrates that the Whiskey Rebellion was in fact an event of enormous importance for the future of the nascent United States of America, generated by the head-on collision of a variety of forces and factors far-reaching in the still rather primitive environments of western Pennsylvania that summer and fall. Slaughter argues that it is necessary to place the frontier at the center of the era's great political debates and fully explore the ideological, social, political, and personal contexts surrounding the episode to fully understand the importance of its place in American history. In doing so the author has produced a very readable work that can be enjoyed by casual readers, who are likely to find the individual vignettes that open each chapter particularly fascinating and a very useful basis for further research by future scholars into the importance of border. region in relation to nationwide events in those early days of the republic. It is proposed to explore these important aspects of the drama by dividing the work into...... middle of the paper......k and George Above all Washington had personally invested real fortunes in the outcome. His work also makes clear that this was not a localized protest composed of a handful of ardent participants from what was then the extreme fringe of American civilization, but rather the dissent was in fact a widespread crisis, which had much to do with potentially the ruin of the new nation. The massacre reveals that the extreme sectionalism that plagued the nation during its first century of existence was well entrenched before the dawn of the nineteenth century. It also states that a precedent was established regarding the issue of national versus state or local authority, which has continued in place ever since. Works Cited Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1986. 291. Print.