Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (1519–1574) founded St. Augustine in 1565. His expedition was documented by his brother-in-law, Gonzalo Solís de Merás, who left a detailed and passionate account of the events leading to the establishment of America’s oldest city. Until recently, the only extant version of Solís de Merás’s record was one single manuscript that Eugenio Ruidíaz y Caravia transcribed in 1893, and subsequent editions and translations have always followed Ruidíaz’s text. In 2012, David Arbesú discovered a more complete record: a manuscript including folios lost for centuries and, more important, excluding portions of the 1893 publication based on retellings rather than the original document. In the resulting volume, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Conquest of Florida, Arbesú sheds light on principal events missing from the story of St. Augustine’s founding. By consulting the original chronicle, Arbesú provides readers with the definitive bilingual edition of this seminal text.

The first extensive study of the African American community under colonial Spanish rule, Black Society in Spanish Florida provides a vital counterweight to the better-known dynamics of the Anglo slave South. Jane Landers draws on a wealth of untapped primary sources, opening a new vista on the black experience in America and enriching our understanding of the powerful links between race relations and cultural custom. Blacks under Spanish rule in Florida lived not in cotton rows or tobacco patches but in a more complex and international world that linked the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and a powerful and diverse Indian hinterland. Here the Spanish Crown afforded sanctuary to runaway slaves, making the territory a prime destination for blacks fleeing Anglo plantations, while Castilian law (grounded in Roman law) provided many avenues out of slavery, which it deemed an unnatural condition. European-African unions were common and accepted in Florida, with families of African descent developing important community connections through marriage, concubinage, and godparent choices. Assisted by the corporate nature of Spanish society, Spain's medieval tradition of integration and assimilat

This volume presents new data and interpretations from research at Florida’s Spanish missions, outposts established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to strengthen the colonizing empire and convert Indigenous groups to Christianity. In these chapters, archaeologists, historians, and ethnomusicologists draw on the past thirty years of work at sites from St. Augustine to the panhandle. Contributors explore the lived experiences of the Indigenous people, Franciscan friars, and Spanish laypeople who lived in La Florida’s mission communities. In the process, they address missionization, ethnogenesis, settlement, foodways, conflict, and warfare. One study reconstructs the sonic history of Mission San Luis with soundscape compositions. The volume also sheds light on the destruction of the Apalachee-Spanish missions by the English. The recent investigations highlighted here significantly change earlier understandings by emphasizing the kind and degree of social, economic, and ideological relationships that existed between Apalachee and Timucuan communities and the Spanish. Unearthing the Missions of Spanish Florida updates and rewrites the history of the Spanish mission effort in the region. Contributors: Rachel M. Bani | Mark J Sciuhetti Jr | Rochelle A. Marrinan | Nicholas Yarbrough | Jerald T. Milanich | Jerry W Lee | Rebecca Douberly-Gorman | Alissa Slade Lotane | John E. Worth | Jonathan Sheppard | Laura Zabanal | Keith Ashley | Tanya M. Peres | Sarah Eyerly A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

Provides an account of America's first real Thanksgiving, celebrated by the Spanish and the native Timucua in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 with a feast that may have included a pork stew, wild turkey, corn, and beans.

Founded in 1565, St. Augustine was the multicultural, and often embattled, outpost of the Spanish empire. St. Augustine's economic, political, and religious power was reflected in other towns and villages that stretched across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. Scholars frequently refer to this broad swath of territories as the "Spanish Borderlands." Of those who accompanied the Spanish to these lands, it was members of the Franciscan Order who, as missionaries, had the most direct contact and interaction with the diverse populations of American Indians. As the 450th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine drew near, scholars from the Americas and Europe gathered on Mar 13-15, 2014, for the conference, "Franciscan Florida in Pan-Borderlands Perspective: Adaptation, Negotiation, and Resistance" at Flagler College in St. Augustine. The expressed intent of the gathering was, as David Hurst Thomas writes in the Introduction, to "address issues of acculturation, political and economic relations, religious conversions, and the nature of multiethnic relationships across the Spanish Borderlands." The result is a rich collection of essays from anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, historians, and theologians. Diverse contributions of the Navajo, Hopi, and California tribal members in attendance was a reminder of the complexity of the thematic and an on-going challenge to continue research into new, and yet unexplored territories.