Among the many contentious frontier zones in nineteenth-century North America, Florida was an early and important borderland where the United States worked out how it would colonize new territories.

Writing at the Threshold offers both a philosophy of composition instruction and an immediately useful set of classroom-tested teaching ideas distilled from the author's 28 years of teaching writing. He offers a set of five course sequences, each proposing a markedly different way to shape a whole writing course using methods discussed in the book.