Brings to life the dramatic events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, skillfully interweaving his fast-paced narrative with the words of the colonizers themselves.
This history begins with the earliest years of human colonization of the American continent, with the Siberian migrations across the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago. It ends in around 1800 when the rough outline of modern North America could be perceived. The author conveys the story of competing interests that shaped and reshaped the continent and its suburbs in the Caribbean and the Pacific over the centuries. North America's fate is viewed through the eyes of the Spanish, French, English, Natives and Russians.
2019 William L. Proctor Award from the Historic St. Augustine Research Institute The Yamasee Indians are best known for their involvement in the Indian slave trade and the eighteenth-century war (1715–54) that took their name. Yet, their significance in colonial history is far larger than that. Denise I. Bossy brings together archaeologists of South Carolina and Florida with historians of the Native South, Spanish Florida, and British Carolina for the first time to answer elusive questions about the Yamasees’ identity, history, and fate. Until now scholarly works have rarely focused on the Yamasees themselves. In southern history, the Yamasees appear only sporadically outside of slave raiding or the Yamasee War. Their culture and political structures, the complexities of their many migrations, their kinship networks, and their survival remain largely uninvestigated. The Yamasees’ relative obscurity in scholarship is partly a result of their geographic mobility. Reconstructing their past has posed a real challenge in light of their many, often overlapping, migrations. In addition, the campaigns waged by the British (and the Americans after them) in order to erase the Yamasees from the South forced Yamasee survivors to camouflage bit by bit their identities. The Yamasee Indians recovers the complex history of these peoples. In this critically important new volume, historians and archaeologists weave together the fractured narratives of the Yamasees through probing questions about their mobility, identity, and networks.
