Excerpt from A Selected Bibliography of the Florida-Louisiana Frontier With References to the Caribbean, 1492-1819 The European contact with native cultures is the watershed between prehistory and history, for it signals a common heritage shared by all Americans. Clearly, the common history of the United States and Latin America is reinforced by a pan-american heritage that began long before Europeans set foot on the Western Hemisphere. Our American Indian heritage is tens of thousands of years old, compared to our European past. Much is still to be learned about our collective past in many parts of North America. Even lesser known in the southeastern United States is our Spanish Colonial Heritage that began soon after 1492 when Christopher Columbus awakened to a New World. The colonial-native relationships that developed throughout North America are part of our national story and, when seen through the wide lens of history, it is part of a much larger heritage that unfolded in the Western Hemisphere. Spain's efforts to colonize North and South America is yet another part of our pan-american heritage. The georgia-florida frontier, the Gulf Islands frontier, the Louisiana frontier, and the Mississippi River Valley fron tier are part of the Spanish claim that took place from a common geographic point: Cuba. Today, the National Park Service, the various southeastern states and protectorates of the United States commemorate many Spanish Colonial Heritage sites in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Together with the Native American heritage, Christopher Columbus's European discovery of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands on his second voyage, 1493-96, represents a vantage point for the National Park Serv ice's efforts to preserve our historical patrimony. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Full color publication. Highlights the Hispanic imprint on the built environment of the United States. This effort by the National Park Service and partners aims to increase the awareness of the historic places associated with the nation's cultural and ethnic groups that are identified, documented, recognized, and interpreted. These constitute the foundation for Hispanic Reflections. Many of the examples are drawn from National Park Service cultural resources programs in partnership with other government agencies and private organizations.

From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.

What would the island of Hispaniola look like if viewed as a loosely connected system? That is the question Haitian-Dominican Counterpointseeks to answer as it surveys the insular space shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic throughout their parallel histories. For beneath the familiar tale of hostilities, the systemic perspective reveals a lesser-known, "unitarian" narrative of interdependencies and reciprocal influences shaping each country'sidentity. In view of the sociocultural and economic linkages connecting the two countries, their relations would have to resemble not so much acockfight (the conventional metaphor) as a serial and polyrhythmic counterpoint.

Why is the capital of the United States named in part after Christopher Columbus, a Genoese explorer commissioned by Spain who never set foot on what would become the nation's mainland? Why did Spanish American nationalists in 1819 name a new independent republic "Colombia," after Columbus, the first representative of the empire from which they had recently broken free? These are only two of the introductory questions explored in The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, a fundamental recasting of Columbus as an eminently powerful tool in imperial constructs. Bartosik-Velez seeks to explain the meaning of Christopher Columbus throughout the so-called New World, first in the British American colonies and the United States, as well as in Spanish America, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She argues that during the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, New World societies commonly imagined themselves as legitimate and powerful independent political entities by comparing themselves to the classical empires of Greece and Rome. Columbus, who had been construed as a figure of empire for centuries, fit perfectly into that framework. By adopting him as a national symbol, New World nationalists appeal to Old World notions of empire.