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San Antonio, Texas, is unique among North American cities in having five former Spanish missions: San Antonio de Valero (The Alamo; founded in 1718), San José y San Miguel de Aguayo (1720), Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña (1731), San Juan Capistrano (1731), and San Francisco de la Espada (1731). These missions attract a good deal of popular interest but, until this book, they had received surprisingly little scholarly study. The San Antonio Missions and Their System of Land Tenure, a winner in the Presidio La Bahía Award competition, looks at one previously unexamined aspect of mission history—the changes in landownership as the missions passed from sacred to secula...
Landscapes of Movement and Predation is a global study of times and places where people were subject to brutality, displacement, and loss of life, liberty, livelihood, and possessions. Extensive landscapes of predation emerged in the colonial era when Europeans expanded across much of the world, appropriating land and demanding labor from Indigenous people, resulting in the enslavement of millions of Africans and Indigenous Americans. Landscapes of predation also developed in precolonial times in places where people were subjected to repeated ruthless attacks and dislocation. With contributions from archaeologists and a historian, the book provides a startling new perspective on an aspect of...
Since the early 1800s, the violent exploits of “El Indio” Rafael through the settlements of northern New Spain have become the stuff of myth and legend. For some, the fabled Apache was a hero, an indigenous Robin Hood who fought oppressive Spaniards to help the dispossessed and downtrodden. For others, he was little more than a merciless killer. In Son of Vengeance, Bradley Folsom sets out to find the real Rafael—to extract the true story from the scant historical record and superabundance of speculation. What he uncovers is that many of the legends about Rafael were true: he was both daring and one of the most prolific serial killers in North American history. Rafael was born into an ...
Twilight of the Mission Frontier examines the long process of mission decline in Sonora, Mexico after the Jesuit expulsion in 1767. By reassessing the mission crisis paradigm—which speaks of a growing internal crisis leading to the secularization of the missions in the early nineteenth century—new light is shed on how demographic, cultural, economic, and institutional variables modified life in the Franciscan missions in Sonora. During the late eighteenth century, forms of interaction between Sonoran indigenous groups and Spanish settlers grew in complexity and intensity, due in part to the implementation of reform-minded Bourbon policies which envisioned a more secular, productive, and modern society. At the same time, new forms of what this book identifies as pluriethnic mobility also emerged. Franciscan missionaries and mission residents deployed diverse strategies to cope with these changes and results varied from region to region, depending on such factors as the missionaries' backgrounds, Indian responses to mission life, local economic arrangements, and cultural exchanges between Indians and Spaniards.
The Presidio is the first full account of this important aspect of the Spanish dominion in the New World. The author spent many years in the United States, Mexico, and Spain, searching out the sites of the presidios-most of which have now crumbled to dust. In Spain he discovered detailed plans of many of them, which are included in the book.
This sweeping, richly evocative study examines the origins and legacies of a flourishing captive exchange economy within and among native American and Euramerican communities throughout the Southwest Borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century. Indigenous and colonial traditions of capture, servitude, and kinship met and meshed in the borderlands, forming a "slave system" in which victims symbolized social wealth, performed services for their masters, and produced material goods under the threat of violence. Slave and livestock raiding and trading among Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, and Spaniards provided labor resources, redistributed wealth, ...
The Mission of Guevavi on the Santa Cruz River in what is now southern Arizona served as a focal point of Jesuit missionary endeavor among the Pima Indians on New Spain's far northwestern frontier. For three-quarters of a century, from the first visit by the renowned Eusebio Francisco Kino in 1691 until the Jesuit Expulsion in 1767, the difficult process of replacing one culture with another—the heart of the Spanish mission system—went on at Guevavi. Yet all but the initial years presided over by Father Kino have been forgotten. Drawing upon archival materials in Mexico, Spain, and the United States—including accounts by the missionaries themselves and the surviving pages of the Guevav...
This study of one of the least known Apache tribes utilizes archival materials to reconstruct Lipan history through numerous threats to their society.
Colonial America stretched from Quebec to Buenos Aires and from the Atlantic littoral to the Pacific coast. Although European settlers laid claim to territories they called New Spain, New England, and New France, the reality of living in those spaces had little to do with European kingdoms. Instead, the New World's holdings took their form and shape from the Indian territories they inhabited. These contested spaces throughout the western hemisphere were not unclaimed lands waiting to be conquered and populated but a single vast space, occupied by native communities and defined by the meeting, mingling, and clashing of peoples, creating societies unlike any that the world had seen before. Con...
The story of Fray Marcos and the Seven Cities of Cíbola was a favorite of Adolph Bandelier (1840–1914). Bandelier’s combination of methodological sophistication and control of the archival data makes the Marcos de Niza paper important, not only as a landmark in Southwestern ethnohistory, but as a work of scholarship in its own rights, with insights on Cabeza de Vaca, Marcos, and early Southwestern exploration that are still valid today.