"This is an exciting study, intellectually stimulating and provocative, skillful in its interweaving of people and places and scholastic disciplinary skills...written in a clear and graceful style." American Historical Review "Three Fontiers is a complex, ambitious social history..." The Journal of American History "Creatively using census and economic data, Dean May has produced a well-researched, provocative study of three towns in the U.S. West--Sublimity, Oregon; Alpine, Utah; and Middleton, Idaho--thus crafting a comparative analysis of people in places." The Historian "The treatment is fair and even handed..." Western Historical Quarterly "...the most important contribution of this research is that it offers a perspective that is neither an outright rejection nor acceptance of the Turnerian or Hartzian views. The truth lies somewhere between both deterministic models, and Dean May has managed to capture the essence of this truth in a very fine book." Utah Historical Quarterly "Imaginative in using his sources to yield insight into the dreams and hopes of his settlers as well as their material existence, unafraid to speculate, sensitive to the nuances of non-quantitative sources, May has written an excellent and insightful book." Journal of Social History "May does an impressive job of gracefully integrating his observations into each chapter. This book will be most useful, and welcome, to specialists in the field." S.L. Recken, Choice "...May's project required the assembly of comparable data from the disarray of three widely separated communities in Oregon, Utah, and Idaho. What's more important, he has come up with provocative and significant results...this is an important comparative history of American communities and an essential study for historians of the American West. John Faragher, Pacific Northwest Quarterly "Creatively using census and economic data, Dean May has produced a well-researched, provocative study of three towns in the U.S. West -- Sublimity, Oregon; Alpine, Utah; and Middleton, Idaho -- thus crafting a comparative analysis of people in places." Gordon Bakken, The Historian "Three Frontiers is a masterful social history of community in the American West...richly detailed chapters..." David A. Johnson, Oregon Historical Society
