I am a historian of the early Americas, and while I often teach courses such as “The U.S. to 1865,” my real passion lies in the Caribbean. As the first site of encounter between the Indigenous inhabitants of the place we came to call the "Americas," Africans, and Europeans, this, to me, is where "American" history began, yet the history of the Caribbean—particularly in the era surrounding European arrival—remains relatively little known. As a Canadian teaching American history at a university in the U.S., I try to disrupt familiar historical narratives by showing my students that American history also unfolded beyond the borders of the modern nation-state.
I wrote...
The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean
This book traces how Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and European settlers used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and political connections that spanned the small volcanic islands of the eastern Caribbean. In this watery borderland, colonial attempts to rule Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago were repeatedly frustrated by Kalinagos who asserted claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who fought for their social and political rights.
By looking outward from this island chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes central to understanding early American history, including European usurpation of Indigenous lands, the rise of plantations, and the creation and codification of racial difference.
This book illuminates a period that is all too often glossed over in early American history: the first few decades of Indigenous-European interaction in the Caribbean.
Stone uses archaeological evidence to painstakingly reconstruct the social and political dynamics of Indigenous societies in the larger islands of the Greater Antilles prior to the arrival of Columbus and then turns to colonial sources to show how these societies responded to European incursions.
She convincingly argues that the enslavement of Indigenous people was not just incidental but integral to Spanish exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Caribbean. By keeping Indigenous people at the center of her story, Stone shows the devastating impacts of this slave trade on the region’s original inhabitants.
Captives of Conquest is one of the first books to examine the earliest indigenous slave trade in the Spanish Caribbean. Erin Woodruff Stone shows that the indigenous population of the region did not simply collapse from disease or warfare. Rather, upwards of 250,000 people were removed through slavery, a lucrative business sustained over centuries that formed the foundation of economic, legal, and religious policies in the Spanish colonies. The enslavement of and trade in indigenous peoples was central to the processes of conquest, as the search for new sources of Indian slaves propelled much of the early Spanish exploration into…
Boucher’s book was one of the first to look beyond initial Indigenous-European contact in the Greater Antilles to focus on interactions between colonizers and the people they called “Caribs”: the mobile, multiethnic inhabitants of the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles.
Boucher convincingly shows that far from being reduced to slavery or extinction, the Lesser Antilles’ Indigenous inhabitants remained important military and political players, particularly during the seventeenth century, on which much of the book focuses.
He further explores how Indigenous actions influenced European stereotypes of the region’s inhabitants, giving rise to exaggerated depictions of fierce cannibals.
Philip Boucher analyzes the images-and the realities-of European relations with the people known as Island Caribs during the first three centuries after Columbus. Based on literary sources, travelers' observations, and missionary accounts, as well as on French and English colonial archives and administrative correspondence, Cannibal Encounters offers a vivid portrait of a troubled chapter in the history of European-Amerindian relations.
Anderson-Córdova asks readers to question many things they may have been told about the Indigenous Caribbean, including the very labels used to describe the region’s inhabitants.
The supposed dichotomy between the Taínos of the Greater Antilles and the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles obscures significant exchange and movement between islands both before and after European arrival, she argues, while the very term “Taíno” is an ahistorical one, popularized by scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Drawing on archeological and historical sources, Anderson-Córdova provides a wealth of information about the multiethnic nature of the Indigenous Caribbean before and long after colonization.
Surviving Spanish Conquest reveals the transformation that occurred in Indian communities during the Spanish conquest of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico from 1492 to 1550.
In Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Karen F. Anderson-Cordova draws on archaeological, historical, and ethnohistorical sources to elucidate the impacts of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and colonization on indigenous peoples in the Greater Antilles. Moving beyond the conventional narratives of the quick demise of the native populations because of forced labor and the spread of Old World diseases, this book shows the complexity of the initial exchange between…
Taíno scholar José Barreiro uses fiction to illuminate what historical sources cannot: how Indigenous people reacted and adapted to Spanish colonization of the Caribbean.
Barreiro spent years researching the life of Guaikán, alias Diego Colón, a Loku Taíno youth briefly mentioned in several Spanish accounts.
By telling Guaikán’s story in the form of a journal written decades after Spanish arrival in the Caribbean, Barreiro vividly narrates the young man’s varied experiences, from his life in Guanahaní before Spanish arrival, to being taken captive by Columbus, to living in the Spanish colonial city of Santo Domingo.
Most importantly, Barreiro movingly conveys how such an individual may have felt about the cataclysmic changes that accompanied European conquest.
Written" by Guaikan, the elderly Taino man who, in his youth, was adopted by Christopher Columbus and saw history unfold, Taino is the Indian chronicle of the American encounter, the Native view on Columbus and what happened in the Caribbean. This novel, based on a true story, penetrates the historical veil that still enshrines the "discovery.
I realize that few readers will be eager to pick up a textbook. But Sued-Badillo, a Puerto Rican ethnohistorian who is a leading expert on the Indigenous Caribbean, assembled archaeologists and historians from throughout the Caribbean to each offer an essay about the region’s past, from the period preceding human habitation to the era of European colonization.
The resulting volume is a great starting point for anyone interested in the earliest history of the Caribbean, as well as how that history shapes the region’s cultural patrimony to the present day.
Volume 1 of the General History of the Caribbean relates to the history of the origins of the earliest Caribbean people, and analyses their various political, social, cultural and economic organizations over time. This volume investigates the movement of Paleoindians into the islands, and looks at the agricultural societies which developed. It then explores the indigenous societies at the time of the Spanish Conquest, the hierarchy of the chiefdoms, and the development of slavery.
Two women, a century apart, seek to rebuild their lives after leaving their homelands. Arriving in tropical Singapore, they find romance, but also find they haven’t left behind the dangers that caused them to flee.
Haunted by the specter of terrorism after 9/11, Aislinn Givens leaves her New York career and joins her husband in Southeast Asia when he takes a job there. She acquires several paintings by a colonial-era British artist that she believes are a warning.
The artist, Elizabeth Pennington, tells her own tumultuous story through diary entries that end when World War I reaches the colony with catastrophic results. In the present, Aislinn and her husband learn that terrorism takes many shapes when they are ensnared by local political upheaval and corruption.
"Aislinn Givens leaves a settled life in Manhattan for an unsettled life in Singapore. That painting radiates mystery and longing. So does Clifford Garstang's vivid and simmering novel, The Last Bird of Paradise." –John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake and The Inverted Forest
Two women, nearly a century apart, seek to rebuild their lives when they reluctantly leave their homelands. Arriving in Singapore, they find romance in a tropical paradise, but also find they haven't left behind the dangers that caused them to flee.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and haunted by the specter of terrorism, Aislinn Givens leaves her…
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