When considering the history of the Southwest, scholars have typically viewed Apaches, Navajos, and other Athabaskans as marauders who preyed on Pueblo towns and Spanish settlements. William B. Carter now offers a multilayered reassessment of historical events and environmental and social change to show how mutually supportive networks among Native peoples created alliances in the centuries before and after Spanish settlement. Combining recent scholarship on southwestern prehistory and the history of northern New Spain, Carter describes how environmental changes shaped American Indian settlement in the Southwest and how Athapaskan and Puebloan peoples formed alliances that endured until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and even afterward. Established initially for trade, Pueblo-Athapaskan ties deepened with intermarriage and developments in the political realities of the region. Carter also shows how Athapaskans influenced Pueblo economies far more than previously supposed, and helped to erode Spanish influence. In clearly explaining Native prehistory, Carter integrates clan origins with archeological data and historical accounts. He then shows how the Spanish conquest of New Mexico affected Native populations and the relations between them. His analysis of the Pueblo Revolt reveals that Athapaskan and Puebloan peoples were in close contact, underscoring the instrumental role that Athapaskan allies played in Native anticolonial resistance in New Mexico throughout the seventeenth century. Written to appeal to both students and general readers, this fresh interpretation of borderlands ethnohistory provides a broad view as well as important insights for assessing subsequent social change in the region.

A sweeping saga of the Spanish history and influence in North America over five centuries, from the acclaimed author of Empire’s Crossroads. Because of our shared English language, as well as the celebrated origin tales of the Mayflower and the rebellion of the British colonies, the United States has prized its Anglo heritage above all others. However, as Carrie Gibson explains with great depth and clarity in El Norte, the nation has much older Spanish roots?ones that have long been unacknowledged or marginalized. The Hispanic past of the United States predates the arrival of the Pilgrims by a century, and has been every bit as important in shaping the nation as it exists today. El Norte chronicles the dramatic history of Hispanic North America from the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century to the present?from Ponce de Leon’s initial landing in Florida in 1513 to Spanish control of the vast Louisiana territory in 1762 to the Mexican-American War in 1846 and up to the more recent tragedy of post-hurricane Puerto Rico and the ongoing border acrimony with Mexico. Interwoven in this narrative of events and people are cultural issues that have been there from the start but which are unresolved to this day: language, belonging, community, race, and nationality. Seeing them play out over centuries provides vital perspective at a time when it is urgently needed. In 1883, Walt Whitman meditated on his country’s Spanish past: “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them,” predicting that “to that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts.” That future is here, and El Norte, a stirring and eventful history in its own right, will make a powerful impact on our national understanding. “This history debunks the myth of American exceptionalism by revisiting a past that is not British and Protestant but Hispanic and Catholic. Gibson begins with the arrival of Spaniards in La Florida, in 1513, discusses Mexico’s ceding of territory to the U.S., in 1848, and concludes with Trump’s nativist fixations. Along the way, she explains how California came to be named after a fictional island in a book by a Castilian Renaissance writer and asks why we ignore a chapter of our history that began long before the Pilgrims arrived. At a time when the building of walls occupies so much attention, Gibson makes a case for the blurring of boundaries.” —New Yorker “A sweeping and accessible survey of the Hispanic history of the U.S. that illuminates the integral impact of the Spanish and their descendants on the U.S.’s social and cultural development. . . . This unusual and insightful work provides a welcome and thought-provoking angle on the country’s history, and should be widely appreciated.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review, PW Pick

This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands separating what are now Mexico and the United States. While most scholars describe the decades after 1790 as a period of relative peace between the occupying Spaniards and the Apaches, Mark Santiago sees in the Mescalero Apache attacks on the Spanish beginning in 1795 a sustained, widespread, and bloody conflict. He argues that Commandant General Pedro de Nava’s coordinated campaigns against the Mescaleros were the culmination of the Spanish military’s efforts to contain Apache aggression, constituting one of its largest and most sustained operations in northern New Spain. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting. This conflict occurred immediately after the Spanish military had succeeded in making an uneasy peace with portions of all Apache groups. The Mescaleros were the first to break the peace, annihilating two Spanish patrols in August 1795. Galvanized by the loss, Commandant General Nava struggled to determine the extent to which Mescaleros residing in “peace establishments” outside Spanish settlements near El Paso, San Elizario, and Presidio del Norte were involved. Santiago looks at the impact of conflicting Spanish military strategies and increasing demands for fiscal efficiency as a result of Spain’s imperial entanglements. He examines Nava’s yearly invasions of Mescalero territory, his divide-and-rule policy using other Apaches to attack the Mescaleros, and his deportation of prisoners from the frontier, preventing the Mescaleros from redeeming their kin. Santiago concludes that the consequences of this war were overwhelmingly negative for Mescaleros and ambiguous for Spaniards. The war’s legacy of bitterness lasted far beyond the end of Spanish rule, and the continued independence of so many Mescaleros and other Apaches in their homeland proved the limits of Spanish military authority. In the words of Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spaniards had technically won a “good war” against the Mescaleros and went on to manage a “bad peace.”

The Great American Turquoise Rush was the period of the largest concerted effort to mine, process and market turquoise in the history of the United States. It started when traditional markets for the clear sky blue Persian turquoise closed and the east coast jewelers, who controlled the jewelry trade in the United States, were forced from necessity to reappraise the quality of turquoise from the southwest. The efforts to control this new market were begun in New Mexico but would expand into other states. This is the true story of that time, largely forgotten or remembered only from oral tradition.

"'Discovering Texas History' is a historiographical reference book that will be invaluable to teachers, students, and researchers of Texas history. Chapter authors are familiar names in Texas history circles--a 'who's who' of high profile historians. Conceived as a follow-up to the award winning (but increasingly dated) 'A Guide the History of Texas' (1988), 'Discovering Texas History' focuses on the major trends in the study of Texas history since 1990. In part one, topical essays address significant historical themes, from race and gender to the arts and urban history. In part two, chronological essays cover the full span of Texas historiography from the Spanish era to the modern day. In each case, the goal is to analyze and summarize the subjects that have captured the attention of professional historians so that 'Discovering Texas History' will take its place as the standard work on the history of Texas history"--

More than two centuries after the Coronado Expedition first set foot in the region, the northern frontier of New Spain in the late 1770s was still under attack by Apache raiders. Mark Santiago’s gripping account of Spanish efforts to subdue the Apaches illuminates larger cultural and political issues in the colonial period of the Southwest and northern Mexico. To persuade the Apaches to abandon their homelands and accept Christian “civilization,” Spanish officials employed both the mailed fist of continuous war and the velvet glove of the reservation system. “Hostiles” captured by the Spanish would be deported, while Apaches who agreed to live in peace near the Spanish presidios would receive support. Santiago’s history of the deportation policy includes vivid descriptions of colleras, the chain gangs of Apache prisoners of war bound together for the two-month journey by mule and on foot from the northern frontier to Mexico City. The book’s arresting title, The Jar of Severed Hands, comes from a 1792 report documenting a desperate break for freedom made by a group of Apache prisoners. After subduing the prisoners and killing twelve Apache men, the Spanish soldiers verified the attempted breakout by amputating the left hands of the dead and preserving them in a jar for display to their superiors. Santiago’s nuanced analysis of deportation policy credits both the Apaches’ ability to exploit the Spanish government’s dual approach and the growing awareness on the Spaniards’ part that the peoples they referred to as Apaches were a disparate and complex assortment of tribes that could not easily be subjugated. The Jar of Severed Hands deepens our understanding of the dynamics of the relationship between Indian tribes and colonial powers in the Southwest borderlands.

Colonial America stretched from Quebec to Buenos Aires and from the Atlantic littoral to the Pacific coast. Although European settlers laid claim to territories they called New Spain, New England, and New France, the reality of living in those spaces had little to do with European kingdoms. Instead, the New World's holdings took their form and shape from the Indian territories they inhabited. These contested spaces throughout the western hemisphere were not unclaimed lands waiting to be conquered and populated but a single vast space, occupied by native communities and defined by the meeting, mingling, and clashing of peoples, creating societies unlike any that the world had seen before. Contested Spaces of Early America brings together some of the most distinguished historians in the field to view colonial America on the largest possible scale. Lavishly illustrated with maps, Native art, and color plates, the twelve chapters span the southern reaches of New Spain through Mexico and Navajo Country to the Dakotas and Upper Canada, and the early Indian civilizations to the ruins of the nineteenth-century West. At the heart of this volume is a search for a human geography of colonial relations: Contested Spaces of Early America aims to rid the historical landscape of imperial cores, frontier peripheries, and modern national borders to redefine the way scholars imagine colonial America. Contributors: Matthew Babcock, Ned Blackhawk, Chantal Cramaussel, Brian DeLay, Elizabeth Fenn, Allan Greer, Pekka Hämäläinen, Raúl José Mandrini, Cynthia Radding, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Alan Taylor, and Samuel Truett.