The missions of Spanish Florida are one of American history's best kept secrets. Between 1565 and 1763, more than 150 missions with names like San Francisco and San Antonio dotted the landscape from south Florida to the Chesapeake Bay. Drawing on archaeological and historical research, much conducted in the last 25 years, Milanich offers a vivid description of these missions and the Apalachee, Guale, and Timucua Indians who lived and labored in them. First published in 1999 by Smithsonian Institution Press, Laboring in the Fields of the Lord contends the missions were an integral part of Spain's La Florida colony, turning a potentially hostile population into an essential labor force. Indian workers grew, harvested, ground, and transported corn that helped to feed the colony. Indians also provided labor for construction projects, including the imposing stone Castillo de San Marcos that still dominates St. Augustine today. Missions were essential to the goal of colonialism. Together, conquistadors, missionaries, and entrepreneurs went hand-in-hand to conquer the people of the Americas. Though long abandoned and destroyed, the missions are an important part of our country's heritage. This reprint edition includes a new, updated preface by the author.

One of the great secrets of American history, more than 150 Spanish mission churches once dotted the landscape between modern Miami and the Chesapeake Bay. Built between the 1560s and 1760s, the missions were concentrated in what is now northern Florida and southern Georgia, but until recently their existence - and their influence on the region's native groups - has remained virtually undetected. Their wood and thatch buildings burned or rotted away, and sweeping epidemics gradually wiped out the entire populations of the Timucua, Guale, and Apalachee Indians. Drawing upon archaeological and historical research conducted during the last twenty years, archaeologist Jerald T. Milanich contends that the southeastern mission system, conceived as a way to save souls while converting a potentially hostile population into an essential labor force, was central to the Spanish colonial enterprise.

Often played down in favour of the larger competition for empire between England and France, the influence of the Spanish in English Carolina and the English in Spanish Florida created a rivalry that shaped the early history of colonial south-east America. This study is the first to tell the full story of this rivalry.