The Hernando de Soto Expedition
The Hernando de Soto Expedition

Author: Patricia Kay Galloway

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 9780803271326

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From 1539 to 1542 Hernando de Soto and several hundred armed men cut a path of destruction and disease across the Southeast from Florida to the Mississippi River. The eighteen contributors to this volume?anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and literary critics?investigate broad cultural and literary aspects of the resulting social and demographic collapse or radical transformation of many Native societies and the gradual opening of the Southeast to European colonization.

El Inca
El Inca

Author: John Grier Varner

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-09-10

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 1477303324

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Garcilaso de la Vega, the great chronicler of the Incas and the conquistadors, was born in Cuzco in 1539. At the age of twenty, he sailed to Spain to acquire an education, and he remained there until his death at Córdoba in 1616. As the natural son of a noble conquistador and an Indian woman of royal blood, he took immense pride in both his Spanish and Inca heritage, and, living as he did during a bewildering but stimulating epoch, he personally witnessed the last gasp of the dying Inca empire, the fratricidal conflicts that accompanied the Conquest, and the literary growth as well as the political decline of the Spain of Philip II and Philip III. Garcilaso left for posterity one of the earliest accounts of the ancient Incas, a reliable though admittedly biased chronicle of Spanish conquests in Andean America and a glowing story of Hernando de Soto’s exploration of North America. Though he never lost pride in his Spanish heritage, continued rebuffs in caste-conscious Spain strengthened his pride in his Indian heritage and his sympathy for his mother’s people. Thus his histories, while ennobling Spaniards, also ennobled the Incas, and eventually were to have some influence in the struggle of South Americans for political independence from Spain. In both blood and character El Inca Garcilaso was a true mestizo. He is generally considered to have been the first native-born American to attain the honor of publication. This was the life, and these were the times, that Varner has evoked so richly in his narrative. It rings and glitters with the sounds and colors of festivals, pageantry, and battle; it listens to the murmur of prayers, the defeated mutter of the Incas, the scratch of the scholar’s quill; it pictures both highlights and shadows. For the reader already acquainted with Garcilaso’s chronicles, this book will be a welcome complement; for those who are meeting El Inca here for the first time, it will be a rewarding and satisfying introduction.

The Florida of the Inca
The Florida of the Inca

Author: Garcilaso Vega

Publisher: Univ of TX + ORM

Published: 2010-06-28

Total Pages: 877

ISBN-13: 029276703X

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“Great endurances and deeds were surviving treasures for the soul that marched with DeSoto, and this book is their richest storehouse.” –The New York Times Book Review Perhaps the most amazing thing of all about Garcilaso de la Vega’s epic account of the De Soto expedition is the fact that, although it is easily the first great classic of American history, it had never before received a complete or otherwise adequate English translation in the 346 years which have elapsed since its publication in Spanish. Now the Inca’s thrilling narrative comes into its own in the English-speaking world. Hernando de Soto’s expedition for the conquest of North America was the most ambitious ever to brave the perils of the New World. Garcilaso tells in remarkably rich detail of the conquistadors’ wanderings over half a continent, of the unbelievable vicissitudes which beset them, of the indigenous people whom they sought to win for King and Church and by whose hands most of them died, of De Soto’s death, and of the final pitiful failure of the expedition. “When you regretfully lay aside this extraordinary volume and add it to your shelf of favorite titles, you will appreciate the tremendous adventure into history which you have had.” –San Francisco Examiner “A distinguished and beautiful book, greatly translated.” –New York Herald Tribune “A marvelous and important adventure story, admirably translated, skillfully edited, and most beautifully printed. It is a sensational first book for the University of Texas Press and should be a best seller in its class.” –Herbert E. Bolton, leading authority on Spanish explorations in the Americas