This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of Castaways (Naufragios), Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with Hernan Cortes.

In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native peoples along the way, learning their languages and practices and serving...

The Medieval Heritage of Mexico is the result of more than thirty years' intensive research. This work examines, more thoroughly than any other, the medieval legacy that influences life in Spanish-speaking North America to the present day. Focusing on the period from 1517-the expedition of Hernandez de Cordoba-to the middle of the seventeenth century, Weckmann describes how explorers, administrators, judges, and clergy introduced to the New World a culture that was essentially medieval. This culture was, in some respects, a flowering-a rebirth, even-of the ideals and institutions of medieval...

Carmen sits alone with her late husband, Mario, for the last time and looks back on their marriage and years together.

This is a definitive study of a major intellectual movement of nineteenth-century Spain. The 'harmonic rationalism' of the German Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781 1832), a philosophy dedicated to an ideal of universal brotherhood, had an unexpectedly powerful influence upon Spanish history, politics, education and literature in the late nineteenth century and beyond. Concerned primarily with the phase in which this all-embracing movement appears most homogeneous - between the revolution of 1854 and the early days of the Restoration - Professor Lopez-Morillas clearly outlines the Krausist...