Overview

In 1513, when Ponce de Leon stepped ashore on a beach of what is now Florida, Spain gained its first foothold in North America. For the next 300 years, Spaniards ranged through the continent building forts, missions and farms, ranches and towns to reconstruct the Iberian world. This illustrated book presents an overview of the Spanish colonial period in North America. It provides an account not only of the Spaniards' impact on the lives, institutions and environments of the native peoples but also of the effect of native North Americans on the societies and cultures of Spanish settlers. With quotations and illustrations, David Weber describes the establishement, expansion and retraction of the Spanish frontier and recounts the forging of a Hispanic empire that ranged from Florida to California. Weber refutes the common assumption that while the English and French came to the New World to settle or engage in honest trade, the Spanish simply came to plunder. The Spanish missionaries, soldiers and traders who lived in America were influenced by diverse motives and Weber shows that their behaviour must be viewed in the context of their own time and within their own frame of reference. Throughout, Weber deals with many other issues, including the difference between English, French and Spanish treatment of Indians, the social and economic integration of Indian women into Hispanic society and the reasons why the Spanish communities in North America failed to develop at the rate that the English settlements did.

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9780300059175

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A comprehensive and copiously documented survey of 300 years of Spanish colonial activity along its northern outposts in the New World, from Weber (History/Southern Methodist Univ.). Concerned with the dynamics of a Spanish presence in the North American Southeast and Southwest across the centuries, Weber both pays homage to and distinguishes his history from the ideas of Herbert Eugene BoRon, who since the 1920's has been considered the preeminent authority on the Spanish influence in North America, and whose vision of settled Spanish borderlands corrected the previous view that those in the wake of Columbus came primarily to plunder and destroy. In this context, Weber demonstrates the multifaceted nature of the Spanish enterprise, beginning with the exploratory period of Ponce de Leon, Coronado, De Soto, and the remarkable Cabeza de Vaca in the 1500's. Settlements followed, but these were either military outposts or missions for the conversion of ever-reluctant natives, and the populations in those communities remained small in comparison with those of English communities soon established along the Atlantic seaboard. With royal policy varying from active involvement in maintaining the frontier to periods of severe neglect, and with a pervasive attitude that the Indians were to be subdued and Christianized rather than exploited as trading partners and potential wartime allies - the policy practiced by the French and English - the tensions along Spanish borders remained high. Unable to halt either the erosion of its position as a world power or the steady advance of the Anglo-American colonies, Spain was forced to relinquish its claims, although ample evidence of the Hispanic culture it inspired remains in the Southwest today. An impressive scholarly acknowledgment, full of telling details, of the important Spanish role in North America, useful to ethnohistorians and nonspecialists alike. (Kirkus Reviews)

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