On the academic side, Charles R. Poinsatte got his undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend. Thomas T. McAvoy schooled him to precision in judgment and exhaustiveness in research. Poinsatte also had the good fortune to study under Aaron I. Abell, a student of Arthur Schlesinger, Senior, whose 1933 book, _The Rise of the City, 1878-1898_, initiated a new kind of American history. Professor Abell first got Poinsatte interested in what is now called urban history. In fact, however, Poinsatte’s career embodies still another great tradition in American historiography, that of frontier history as inspired by Frederick Jackson Turner. _Frontier Outpost_ describes the _site_ of an urban area to be, but it is not truly urban history, as Dr. Poinsatte’s book, _Fort Wayne during the Canal Era, 1828-1855_ (Indiana Historical Bureau, 1969), was. Thus Dr. Poinsatte writes in this book of Fort Wayne as an aspect principally of the history of the Old Northwest. Higher education at Notre Dame, acquaintance with a student of the elder Schlesinger, and thoughts spurred by the Turner thesis are only part of the story, of course. The area Dr. Poinsatte decided to study was Fort Wayne and not Detroit or Chicago or Cincinnati. Here what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “a sort of home-feeling with the past” worked its magic. Born in Fort Wayne in 1925, Charles Poinsatte was stirred by the names he heard as a boy, Little Turtle, Anthony Wayne, and George Rogers Clarke. Some family property was part of the old Richardville estate, and in his youth he explored an old Indian burial ground there. He has never gotten over his fascination with those men, and now he examines them with his academic tools. Dr. Poinsatte has always been able to reconcile seemingly conflicting movements in American historical writing. Urban history and frontier history, he argues, are in many ways complementary, for frontier historians can explain to urban historians why the entities they study are located where they are and how they got their start. Likewise, local history and history as most often written by academic professionals benefit from cross-fertilization. Local history always needs to be written from a broad perspective which keeps the local historian from claiming unique status for developments which took place in many other localities at the same time. Likewise, in-depth studies of certain localities provide tests for the larger generalizations of academic historians, generalizations that are too often based on unrepresentative samplings of evidence from national elites and large cultural and political centers like New York and Washington.