Kategoria BISAC: History >> North American

"An excellent book, lively and well written, and likely to appeal to a wider audience than the typical academic monograph."--William D. Phillips, Jr., author of The Worlds of Christopher Columbus

Sinking Columbus describes and analyzes the failure of the 1992 commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage from Spain to the New World, once "universally" hailed as the "discovery of America." Despite this failure, the book recognizes the Quincentenary as an important and illuminating event in the recent political and cultural history of the United...

" The Spanish incursion into the New World, with its brutal destruction of indigenous peoples and their cultures and its material exploitation of much of two continents, reverberates in our history down to the present century. So contends prize-winning writer Barry Lopez in this beautifully written book. "The quest for personal possessions," he observes, "was to be, from the outset, a series of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an end to it was never visible... in which an end to it had no meaning." In this luminous essay, written five hundred years after the Spanish...

2008 United States Postal System's Rita Lloyd Moroney Award

In the era before airplanes and e-mail, how did immigrants keep in touch with loved ones in their homelands, as well as preserve links with pasts that were rooted in places from which they voluntarily left? Regardless of literacy level, they wrote letters, explains David A. Gerber in this path-breaking study of British immigrants to the U.S. and Canada who wrote and received letters during the nineteenth century.

Scholars have long used immigrant letters as a lens to examine the experiences of...

Cabeza de Vaca came to the New world in 1527 as part of a Spanish expedition to conquer the region north of the Gulf of Mexico. His exploration party lost contact with their ships, set out northward on foot, and traveled, their numbers soon reduced from 300 to 4, across Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico for the next eight years. In addition to being one of the great true adventure stories of all time, Cabeza de Vaca's account of their travels is an unparalleled source of firsthand information on the pre-European Southwest--the variety of its climate, its flora and...