Discovering Florida

John Worth's excellent collection of accounts of sixteenth-century Spanish activity along the lower Gulf Coast of modern Florida and resulting European-indigenous contacts raises the question of why Spanish Florida still remains as marginal to the study of Spanish America and the Caribbean as it does to that of the United States. In recent decades, the history of early postcontact Florida has been well served by a number of scholars, not least of them John Worth. People in the state did their best to use the quincentennial of Juan Ponce de León's 1513 visit to the Florida coast as an occasion to increase general awareness and understanding of the early period of Spanish activity. Yet conferences, books, and other commemorations seem to have done little to bring the significance of Spanish Florida into the mainstream of public or even scholarly awareness outside the state itself. St. Augustine has not taken its place alongside Jamestown, much less Plymouth Rock, as a cornerstone of the US national saga, and if asked what the oldest Spanish town in the United States is, the response of many—if response there was at all—likely would be Santa Fe.Why Spanish Florida and more generally the southeastern borderlands of the United States have failed to attract the interest that the Spanish Southwest has is perplexing. European activity began there earlier and was more sustained and continuous than in the Southwest. The Southeast's history not only hinges on Spaniards and their experiences in dealing with a number of indigenous groups but also includes decades of contention with European rivals—the French and British—as well, so it certainly does not lack for drama, intrigue, and variety. Possibly the more definitive break with the Spanish and indigenous past in the Southeast has fostered a discontinuity that has not encouraged people to look more deeply into Florida's history. Ironically, modern Florida boasts an increasingly strong Latino presence, with substantial populations that trace their origins not only to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic but also, due to the needs of the agricultural economy, to places like Guatemala. Connections between the past and Florida's present-day Latino residents and culture are seldom made, however. Although historians from Herbert E. Bolton to David J. Weber included Florida and the Southeast in their studies of Spanish borderlands, other students and scholars seem leery of following their lead and integrating Spanish Florida into historical consideration of the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, or North America, notwithstanding its geographic situation that so clearly places it at the nexus of those regions and a complex history that ties it to all of them.Perhaps this edited volume will encourage readers to take a closer look. Worth offers a set of accounts that range from excerpts from well-known histories such as those of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (published in two parts in 1535 and 1552, respectively), Antonio de Herrera (1601), and Garcilaso de la Vega (1605) to royal contracts, letters from people like Juan Ponce de León and Hernando de Soto, and much less familiar narratives such as the fascinating circa 1575 Memorial of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda's long years of captivity among the Calusa and other native groups. Some of the texts have been previously published and translated; others have not. Each appears in both Spanish and English along with introductions that contextualize them in both the history and scholarship.The volume is ably introduced and annotated and includes a useful, complete bibliography. Presumably if it were available in a paperback edition that students could afford, the original Spanish texts might be of less interest, but from a scholarly point of view they are welcome. The book is highly recommended for those who are interested in early contact history, the connections between Florida and the Caribbean—which served as the base for the expeditions of Ponce de León and Pánfilo de Narváez (which resulted in the long years that Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions spent in the Southeast and Texas), Hernando de Soto, and others—and the history of the Indians of the Southeast

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Mainstream · Narrative · Period (music) · Political science · State (computer science) · History · Law · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology

• Chronology building in the Ancestral Florida Keys

  T Ardren, Michelle J Lefebvre et al.•Southeastern Archaeology•2025

  Add to list