Brian Fagan is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous books about archaeology, the past, and climate change for general audiences. I was asked to write my first climate change book (on El Niños) and was astounded to find that few archaeologists or historians focused on the subject, whether ancient or modern. Now that’s all changed, thanks to the revolution in paleoclimatology. I’m convinced that the past has much to tell us about climate change in the future. Apart from that, the subject is fascinating and vital.
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.
When Europeans first arrived in North America, they faced a cold new world. The average global temperature had dropped to lows unseen in millennia, and its effects were stark and unpredictable: blizzards and deep freezes, droughts and famines, and winters when even the Rio Grande froze. This period of climate change has come to be known as the Little Ice Age, and it played a decisive role in Europe's encounter with the lands and peoples of North America. In A Cold Welcome, Sam White tells the story of this crucial period in world history, from Europe's earliest expeditions in an…
The age of European exploration and colonization of North America is filled with epic tales of adventure, as people from entirely different civilizations first came in contact.
Europeans dreamed of creating colonial empires and gaining wealth and influence in a new land about which they knew nothing about, while natives were at first unsure how to respond to these curious visitors and what exactly their unexpected presence meant.
In A Land So Strange, author Andres Resendez recounts the tale of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a man who sojourned across the North American continent in the early 1500s after the disastrous failure of the expedition that brought him to the shores of the Gulf. It’s a riveting narrative of a forgotten episode that unfolds as a legendary adventure.
This is the gripping story of a doomed mission to North America - and the four survivors who journeyed for a decade across the new world just discovered by Christopher Columbus. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was a fortune-seeking Spanish nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition sent to claim for Spain a vast area of today's southern United States. Delayed by a hurricane and then knocked off course by a colossal mistake of navigation, the mission was doomed to failure when its' leaders decided to separate the men from their ships on the Florida coast. The expedition quickly turned…
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.
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.
Jenny Hale Pulsipher is a professor of history at Brigham Young University and the author of numerous articles and two award-winning books, Subjects unto theSame King: Indians, English, and the Contest of Authority in Early New England and Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England.
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).
In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers.
Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.
Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make…
I am a Professor of English at the University of Sussex. I have worked on a wide range of subjects over the years, mainly about the English Renaissance. I have a long-standing interest in travel and colonial writing, the ways in which the English interacted with other peoples and other places, which started with my interest in Ireland where I studied and which was the subject of my early books. I have broadened my perspective as I have read more on the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia, over the years and am committed to uncovering the truth of the uncomfortable, challenging, and fascinating history of the early British Empire.
A comprehensive and helpful survey of English attitudes to the peoples from the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, written in straightforward English with a host of helpful quotations and historical analyses.
A reliable guide to English encounters with peoples from the southern Mediterranean, as they sought to dominate what was then the most strategically important area of the world.
During the early modern period, hundreds of Turks and Moors traded in English and Welsh ports, dazzled English society with exotic cuisine and Arabian horses, and worked small jobs in London, while the "Barbary Corsairs" raided coastal towns and, if captured, lingered in Plymouth jails or stood trial in Southampton courtrooms. In turn, Britons fought in Muslim armies, traded and settled in Moroccan or Tunisian harbor towns, joined the international community of pirates in Mediterranean and Atlantic outposts, served in Algerian households and ships, and endured captivity from Salee to Alexandria and from Fez to Mocha. In Turks, Moors, and…
I'm a historian of gender in colonial Latin America. I'm always looking for surprises in these stories: men's and women's lives in the past were not narrower than ours, and I love to find their strategies for dealing with a system that was often stacked against them. I enjoy learning that my expectations were wrong, and thinking about the past as a living world. As a researcher who is always stumbling on unusual documents that I have to confront with fresh eyes, I really love a book that challenges me to think about how we can even know about the past, especially in terms of race and gender.
We don't know very much about Indigenous women's lives before and during the Spanish conquest. Camilla Townsend let me imagine how Malintzin, an enslaved Indigenous girl who was presented as a gift to the conquistador Hernando Cortés, experienced and made sense of that world.
I was transported to central Mexico and Yucatán through Townsend's careful but lively reading of art, poetry, and historical writings, her lush building of landscapes and lifeways created a space where I could place Malintzin and understand her choices. Those choices were complicated: she transformed herself from a slave into Cortés' most important interpreter and ally, translating Indigenous diplomats and leaders so that Cortés knew whom to trust, speaking back to them as his mouthpiece. I was convinced that Malintzin was both a brilliant strategist and also a woman with few options and not the outright villain or hero that a lot of the literature wishes…
Malintzin was the indigenous woman who translated for Hernando Cortes in his dealings with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in the days of 1519 to 1521. 'Malintzin', at least, was what the Indians called her. The Spanish called her dona Marina, and she has become known to posterity as La Malinche. As Malinche, she has long been regarded as a traitor to her people, a dangerously sexy, scheming woman who gave Cortes whatever he wanted out of her own self-interest. The life of the real woman, however, was much more complicated. She was sold into slavery as a child, and eventually…
I am a Professor of English at the University of Sussex. I have worked on a wide range of subjects over the years, mainly about the English Renaissance. I have a long-standing interest in travel and colonial writing, the ways in which the English interacted with other peoples and other places, which started with my interest in Ireland where I studied and which was the subject of my early books. I have broadened my perspective as I have read more on the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia, over the years and am committed to uncovering the truth of the uncomfortable, challenging, and fascinating history of the early British Empire.
A brilliant and incisive reading of European-Caribbean relations from the first encounters on Christopher Columbus’s voyages.
Peter Hulme shows how central the Caribbean was to English and European thinking about the world and how the region defined English approaches to the rest of the world in the first age of the British Empire.
Europe encountered America in 1492, a meeting of cultures graphically described in the log-book kept by Christopher Columbus. His stories of peaceful savages and cruel "cannibals" have formed the matrix for all subsequent descriptions of that native Caribbean society. The encounter itself has obsesssed colonialist writing. It reappears in the early 17th century in the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, and on the Jacobean stage in the figures of Prospero and Caliban. In the 18th century, over two hundred years after the European discovery of the Caribbean, the idea of a pristine encounter still permeated European literature through Robinson…
I'm a political historian who writes for my fellow citizens and I have chosen books by writers who do the same. Books which are written with passion and purpose: to shift political understanding, to speak truth to power, to help people understand their country and the world, and to inspire a commitment to improving them.
A confronting history of the British invasion of Australia, documenting the massacres but also the resistance of indigenous people across the continent as they defended their tribal lands well into the twentieth century. No longer could anyone imagine that Australia had been settled peacefully. The book had a profound impact on Australians’ understanding of their history, but also on the continuing political struggle for indigenous rights.
The publication of ""The Other Side of the Frontier"" in 1981 profoundly changed the way in which we understand the history of relations between indigenous Australians and European settlers. It has since become a classic of Australian history. Drawing from documentary and oral evidence, the book describes in meticulous and compelling detail the ways in which Aborigines responded to the arrival of Europeans. Henry Reynolds' argument that the Aborigines resisted fiercely was highly original when it was first published and is no less challenging today.
It totally realigned my understanding of the regional differences and distinctives in the US today. It helps explain so much of what is going on today. This is a must-read for anyone interested in US history, politics and culture.
* A New Republic Best Book of the Year * The Globalist Top Books of the Year * Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction *
Particularly relevant in understanding who voted for who in this presidential election year, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven "nations" that continue to shape North America
According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering…
I’m an archaeologist at Boston University with a transatlantic family that spans Spain and Latin America. My research has primarily focused on Mesoamerica, and prehispanic central Mexico more specifically, but the deep roots of these transatlantic entanglements have always fascinated me personally and as a historically minded scholar.
A vivid account of life in the Aztec world and the tragic Aztec-Spanish War told by Indigenous scribes writing in Nahuatl during the decades following these events and the transformation to colonial New Spain. Mexican authors began publishing translations of Native-author sources in the late eighteenth century; yet, together with his former advisor, Ángel María Garibay, León-Portilla did more than any other twentieth-century scholar to elevate the voices and perspectives of Nahua peoples, the descendants of the prehispanic Aztecs. The Broken Spears was first published in Spanish in 1959 and translated to English in 1962. It has been translated into many other languages and revised versions since. Its key sixteenth-century texts include portions of Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, and sections of the Annals of Tlatelolco. Within these composite sources, readers can sense the multivalence of the Native authors…
For hundreds of years, the history of the conquest of Mexico and the defeat of the Aztecs has been told in the words of the Spanish victors. Miguel León-Portilla has long been at the forefront of expanding that history to include the voices of indigenous peoples. In this new and updated edition of his classic The Broken Spears, León-Portilla has included accounts from native Aztec descendants across the centuries. These texts bear witness to the extraordinary vitality of an oral tradition that preserves the viewpoints of the vanquished instead of the victors. León-Portilla's new Postscript reflects upon the critical importance…
