The
University of Alabama Press
La Florida del Inca and the Struggle for Social Equality in Colonial Spanish America
by Jonathan D. Steigman
A cross-disciplinary view of an important De Soto chronicle.
Among the early Spanish chroniclers who contributed to popular images of the New World was the Amerindian-Spanish (mestizo) historian and literary writer, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616). He authored several works, of which La Florida del Inca (1605) stands out as the best because of its unique Amerindian and European perspectives on the De Soto expedition (1539-1543). As the child of an Indian mother and a Spanish father, Garcilaso lived in both worlds—and saw value in each. Hailed throughout Europe for his excellent contemporary Renaissance writing style, his work was characterized as literary art. Garcilaso revealed the emotions, struggles, and conflicts experienced by those who participated in the historic and grandiose adventure in La Florida. Although criticized for some lapses in accuracy in his attempts to paint both the Spaniards and the Amerindians as noble participants in a world-changing event, his work remains the most accessible of all the chronicles.
In this volume, Jonathan Steigman explores El Inca's rationale and motivations in writing his chronicle. He suggests that El Inca was trying to influence events by influencing discourse; that he sought to create a discourse of tolerance and agrarianism, rather than the dominant European discourse of intolerance, persecution, and lust for wealth. Although El Inca's purposes went well beyond detailing the facts of De Soto's entrada, his skill as a writer and his dual understanding of the backgrounds of the participants enabled him to paint a more complete picture than most—putting a sympathetic human face on explorers and natives alike.
Jonathan D. Steigman is a specialist in Colonial Latin American Literature at Auburn University.
136 pages ISBN 0-8173-1483-0 2005 $45.00 cloth
136 pages ISBN 0-8173-5257-0 2005 $19.95 paper
The History
of the American Indians
James Adair
Edited and with an Introduction by Kathryn E. Holland Braund
New Edition
A fully annotated edition of a classic work detailing the cultures of five southeastern
American Indian tribes during the Contact Period.
James Adair was an Englishman who lived and traded among the southeastern Indians
for more than 30 years, from 1735 to 1768. During that time he covered the territory
from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. He encountered and lived
among Indians, advised governors, spent time with settlers, and worked tirelessly
for the expansion of British interests against the French and the Spanish. Adair’s
acceptance by the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Chickasaws provided him the
opportunity to record, compare, and analyze their cultures and traditions.
Adair’s written
work, first published in England in 1775, is considered one of the finest histories
of the Native Americans. His observations provide one of the earliest and what
many modern scholars regard as the best account of southeastern Indian cultures.
This edition adheres to current standards of documentary editing, following
the original closely, and provides fully annotated and indexed critical apparatus.
“Dr. Braund’s impeccable scholarship and her thorough knowledge of
the British colonial Southeast are evident in this new edition. At once authoritative
and approachable by modern readers, her edition will introduce a new generation
to this fascinating work and encourage fresh considerations of an all but forgotten
masterpiece of colonial America.”
—Gregory A. Waselkov, University of South Alabama
“This publication brings together an accomplished historical editor and
acknowledged expert on the souther Indian trade with one of the most widely-cited
but least, available contemporary texts of the subject. A very welcome new edition
adhering to modern standards of documentary editing and providing a useful critical
apparatus.”
—Patricia Galloway, University of Texas
Kathryn E. Holland Braund is Associate Professor of History at Auburn University
and editor of A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, written by
Bernard Romans.
November
600 pages, 7 illustrations
6 1/8 X 9 1/4
ISBN 0-8173-1393-1
$65.00s cloth
Header: Anthropology/Ethnohistory
Of Related Interest:
A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida
Bernard Romans
Edited and with an Introduction by Kathryn E. Holland Braund
456 pages ISBN 0-8173-0876-8 $47.50s cloth
Granville
Sharp Pattison
Anatomist and Antagonist, 1791–1851
F. L. M. Pattison
New in Paperback
The stormy life of one of the most colorful and complex characters in early 19th-century
medicine.
“There are, and doubtless always have been, men who are like Staffordshire
bull-terriers. Wherever they go they pick a fight. Granville Sharp Pattison (1791–1851),
anatomist, surgeon, and inveterate quarreler, was just such a man whose fights
and largely self-inflicted troubles were unusually flamboyant. . . . Grave-robbing,
aggressiveness, insubordination, brutal surgery, and adultery forced him to leave
Glasgow and flee to Philadelphia where he was soon quarrelling with his university
colleagues, and making a fool of himself. . . . Pattison was often described as
a charming, handsome, and attractive man. A competent anatomist and a brilliant
lecturer, he was kind to his students while at the same time displaying a belligerence,
obstinacy, and quickness to take offense that made him an impossible colleague.
He was in short a complex character. . . Yet it is often true that the lives of
the obscure and unsuccessful, with their catalogs of struggles, disappointments,
quarrels, and failures, provide the richest historical detail. This book is a
splendid example. Pattison has not only written an entertaining account, the book
as a whole ranks amongst the very best medical biographies.”
—Lancet
“Dr. F. L. M. Pattison has recounted the story of his great-great-great uncle
with admirable objectivity and real insight into the ways of 19th century medicine.”
—Times Literary Supplement
History of American Science and Technology logoblock
Header: American History/Biography
November
304 pages
6 x 9
ISBN 0-8173-5154-X
$37.50s paper
Twenty-Five
Years in the Black Belt
William J. Edwards
With an Introduction by Daniel T. Williams and an Epilogue by Consuela Lee
“Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt is the memoir of the founder and principal
of Snow Hill Institute, a ‘little Tuskegee,’ located in rural Wilcox
County, Alabama. . . . Edwards reveals the conditions of blacks and race relations
in Alabama between 1890 and 1917 and tells of his determination to uplift his
race through education in the years following Reconstruction.”
—Florida Historical Quarterly
“This addition to the Library of Alabama Classics has much to recommend it
to historians, scholars, and anyone interested in the early history of the African-Americans’ struggle to become educated, to be able to take an equal place in the land they
now had to call home. Though the story is told by one man and revolves around
his stubborn dedication to building a school where young people could receive
an education, it also reveals much about the social and cultural life of those
times.”
—American Library Book Review
Library of Alabama Classics logoblock
October
192 pages
5 x 7 1/4
ISBN 0-8173-0716-8
$27.50s paper
Header: Early Republic History/Native American Studies
The
Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810
Edited by H. Thomas Foster II
A comprehensive collection of the most important sources on the late historic
Creek Indians and their environment.
In 1795, Benjamin Hawkins, a former U.S. Senator and advisor to George Washington,
was appointed U.S. Indian agent, superintendent of all the tribes south of the
Ohio River. Unlike most other agents, he lived among the Creek Indians for his
entire tenure, from 1796 to 1816. Journeying forth from his home on the Flint
River in Georgia, he served southeastern Indians as government intermediary during
one of the longest eras of peace in the historic period.
Hawkins’s journals provide detailed information about European-Indian relations
in the 18th-century frontier of the South. Spanning the War of 1812 and the Creek
War, his descriptions of the natural and cultural environment are considered among
the best sources for the ethnohistory of the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and,
especially, the Creek Indians and the natural history of their territory.
Two previously published bodies of work by Benjamin Hawkins are included here—A
Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799 and The Letters, Journals,
and Writings of Benjamin Hawkins. A third body of work that has never been published,
“A Viatory or Journal of Distances” (describing routes and distances
of a 3,578-mile journey through parts of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi), has
been added. Together, these documents make up the known body of Hawkins’s
work—his talks, treaties, correspondence, aboriginal vocabularies, travel
journals, and records of the manners, customs, rites, and civil polity of the
tribes. Hawkins’s work provides an invaluable record of the time period.
“Unquestionably the best single-volume collection of Benjamin Hawkins’ writings ever assembled . . . [and] the only available version in print.”
—John E. Worth, Director of Randell Research Center and author of The Timucuan
Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida
“Central to the understanding of the history, ethnohistory, geography, and
environment of the Southeast in the last part of the 18th and early part of the
19th centuries.”
—Frank T. Schnell, Columbus Museum archaeologist and editor of Antiquities
of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes
H. Thomas Foster II is a senior archaeologist with Panamerican Consultants, Inc.,
in Columbus, Georgia, and research associate at Auburn University Mont-gomery.
October
696 pages, 5 illustrations
6 1/8 X 9 1/4
ISBN 0-8173-1367-2
$70.00s unjacketed cloth
ISBN 0-8173-5040-3
$34.95s paper
This
Destructive War
The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780–1782
John S. Pancake
Available Again
An exciting and accurate portrayal of the military action in the southern colonies
that led to a new American nation.
A companion to Pancake’s study of the northern campaign, 1777: The Year of
the Hangman, this volume deals with the American Revolution in the Carolinas.
Together, the two books constitute a complete history of the Revolutionary War.
Pancake tells a gripping story of the southern campaign, the scene of a grim and
deadly guerilla war. In the savage internecine struggle, Americans fought Americans
with a fierceness that appalled even a veteran like General Nathanael Greene.
“Utilizing extensive manuscript collections, John Pancake explains not why
the colonists won the War of Independence, but rather why the British lost. Yorktown,
he argues, was not the result of a momentary oversight by the British navy, but
the final consequence of the longstanding failure of British military and political
leadership.” So said the Journal of Southern History when This Destructive
War was first published in 1985. The Florida Historical Quarterly further opined,
“Pancake has given us a well-researched and beautifully—and tightly—written
book.”
General readers as well as scholars and students of the American Revolution will
welcome anew this classic, definitive study of the campaign in the Carolinas.
“Anchored by Pancake’s reflections on weaponry, military organization,
tactics, and the lives of ordinary soldiers in both armies, this book emerges
as a fresh, intricate story, full of dread and derring-do.”
—Kirkus
John S. Pancake was a native of Virginia, a professor of history at The University
of Alabama, and author of studies on Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.
He is deceased.
October
320 pages, 22 illustrations
6 1/8 X 9 1/4
ISBN 0-8173-0688-9
$24.95t paper
Header: American History/Revolutionary War
Trade
and Privateering in Spanish Florida, 1732–1763
Joyce Elizabeth Harman
With a New Introduction by Carl E. Swanson
New Edition
An important study of the First Spanish Period in Florida’s history.
Trade and Privateering examines the illegal yet highly profitable and mutually
beneficial trade between Spanish Florida and the English colonies on the eastern
seaboard in the mid-18th century. In St. Augustine, the arrival of subsidies from
Spain was erratic, causing shortages of food and supplies, so authorities ignored
the restrictions on trade with foreign colonies and welcomed British goods. Likewise,
the British colonists sought Spanish products from Florida, especially oranges.
But when England and Spain became declared enemies in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the French and Indian Wars, this tacit trade arrangement was threatened,
and the result was a rise of privateering in the region. Rather than do without
Spanish goods, the English began to attack and capture Spanish vessels with their
cargoes at sea. Likewise, the Spaniards resorted to privateering as a means of
steadily supplying the Florida colony. Harman concludes that, both willingly and
unwillingly, the English colonies helped their Spanish neighbor to sustain its
position in the Southeast.
“[The author] demonstrates the undoubted value to a struggling and neglected
colony of an extensive trade conducted largely by privateers from the ports of
English colonies northward along the Atlantic seaboard. For without this generally
illegal commerce . . . the inhabitants of St. Augustine and its environs might
not have been able to maintain Spain’s hold on this strategically important
outpost until 1763.” _American Historical Review
*1970 Certificate of Commendation from the American Association for State and
Local History
Carl E. Swanson is Associate Professor of History at East Carolina University
and author of Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare,
1739–1748, which won the John Lyman Award from the North American Society
of Oceanic History.
“To escape starvation, the governors of St. Augustine ignored official policy
and allowed illicit traders from the British colonies to sell rice, beef, pork,
and other supplies for gold or silver. . . .The author has extracted worthwhile
information on privateering and smuggling, occupations that left few records.”
_Journal of American History
March
115 pages
6 x 9
ISBN 0-8173-5120-5
$16.95t paper
Header: Colonial American History/Naval History
Of Related Interest:
Laudonnière and Fort Caroline
History and Documents
Charles E. Bennett
With a New Foreword by Jerald T. Milanich
216 pages ISBN 0-8173-1122-X $19.95t paper
The Southern
Frontier, 1670–1732
Verner W. Crane
With a New Introduction by Steven C. Hahn
Available Again
A classic resource on the struggle for dominance in southern North America
during the colonial period.
This volume recounts the clashes and intrigues that played out over the landscape
of the Old Southwest and across six decades as the Spanish, French, British, and
ultimately Americans vied for control. Rivalry began soon after initial discovery,
mapping, and exploration as the world powers, particularly England and France,
competed for control of the lucrative fur trade in the Mississippi valley. The
French attempted to establish trade networks stretching from the Atlantic Ocean
inland to the Mississippi River and northward from ports on the Gulf of Mexico
to the Ohio River. But they found the British already entrenched there.
Verner Crane guides us through this multinational struggle and navigates the border
wars and diplomatic intrigues that played crucial roles in the settlement of the
South by Euro-Americans. In his new introduction, Steven Hahn places the work
in the context of its time, sketches its publication history, and provides biographical
information on Crane.
“It was during the critical period from 1670 to 1732 that the tide changed
from Spanish to English dominance of the southeastern United States. Crane’s
treatment of this colonial era is clear, concise, and persuasive. . . . Highly
recommended.”
—Frank T. Schnell, coeditor of Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly
of the Georgia Tribes
Verner Crane (1889–1930)
taught in the history department at the University of Michigan and authored
several books, including Benjamin Franklin and a Rising People. Steven C. Hahn
is a historian at St. Olaf College and author of The Invention of the Creek
Nation: A Political History of the Creek Indians in the South’s Imperial
Era, 1540-1736.
March
424 pages, 1 map
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
ISBN 0-8173-5082-9
$34.95s paper
Header: Southern History/Anthropology
Of Related Interest:
Between Contact and Colonies
Archaeological Perspectives on the Protohistoric Southeast
Cameron B. Wesson and Mark A. Rees
280 pages ISBN 0-8173-1253-6 $57.50s cloth
ISBN 0-8173-1167-X $29.95s paper
November 14, 2005