100 books like Taino

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.  

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.

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.

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.

This slim volume features six documents relating to the early years following Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean, including two by Columbus himself. The core of the volume is anthropologist Neil Whitehead’s translation of the account written by Román Pané, the Jeronymite friar sent by Columbus to live among an Indigenous group in the northern part of Hispaniola. There Pané tried, with very limited success, to spread Christianity. He also set down in writing the origin myths and beliefs described by his Native informants, a unique reflection of the Indigenous world that existed when Europeans arrived on the islands. I like this collection both for the range of documents included and Whitehead’s insights from his scholarly and ethnographic work in the Caribbean.  

Some of our state lines were cultural borders. The Colony of Massachusetts was founded by and for Puritans; Maryland was created for Catholics; Pennsylvania for Quakers. That process continued after the Revolution, regardless of state (or later-to-become state) lines. Colin Woodard’s book explores the founding of such cultural regions and reveals how those not-on-the-map lines influence our differing views to this day.

Written by a first-rate historian of wide learning, this is one of those rare books that causes one to rethink your assumptions about history. White brings climate change to the forefront in a book that ranges widely over the European settlement of America and looks at it from a climatic perspective. This is technically an academic book but is so nicely written that you’ll be glued to the page.

In Facing East, Richter uses both historical research and imagination to shift the perspective on early America from the west-facing European view to the east-facing Native American one. The result is a deeply researched, well written, and surprisingly moving book exploring a series of Native lives (Pocahontas, King Philip, Kateri Tekakwitha), events (Christian Indian missions, King Philip's War, the French and Indian War), and subjects (Native American trade, religion, the expansion of the English Empire).

I can’t stop going back to this book, which I have read in various translations under various titles. No book I know better documents the transformation of a human being. Abandoned, shipwrecked, and enslaved, Cabeza de Baca, a conquistador in the model of Cortez, begins a barefoot trek across the American Southwest as one kind of man and ends it as the opposite of the man who started out.

His memoir has the shape and structure of an adventure novel, and, truly, this narrative is where American literature begins. He leaves me in awe of his will to survive, his capacity for adaptation, and his compassion and love for the native world that he had come to the continent’s shores to subjugate.

In 1932, Peter Fleming – literary editor of The Times and elder brother of James Bond creator Ian – set off on an expedition to find the explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett who went missing in the Brazilian jungle a few years earlier while searching for the fabled Lost City of Z. The expedition itself was a fiasco, poorly planned, ill-equipped and with the party members falling out bitterly, then racing each other back to civilisation to try to be the first to get their version of events before the public eye. At times it reads like some darkly comic fiction from the pen of Evelyn Waugh. The tale is entertainingly told, with wit and flair by Fleming whose account is generally regarded as the authoritative version of events. If you enjoy this one try also Fleming’s News From Tartar: A Journey From Peking to Kashmir (1936) If you want to… show more.