She demonstrates that between the 1690s and 1780s, Indian peoples including Caddos, Apaches, Payayas, Karankawas, Wichitas, and Comanches formed relationships with Spaniards in Texas that refuted European claims of imperial control.Barr argues that Indians not only retained control over their territories but also imposed control over Spaniards. Instead of being defined in racial terms, as was often the case with European constructions of power, diplomatic relations between the Indians and Spaniards in the region were dictated by Indian expressions of power, grounded in gendered terms of kinship. By examining six realms of encounter--first contact, settlement and intermarriage, mission life, warfare, diplomacy, and captivity--Barr shows that native categories of gender provided the political structure of Indian-Spanish relations by defining people's identity, status, and obligations vis-a-vis others. Because native systems of kin-based social and political order predominated, argues Barr, Indian concepts of gender cut across European perceptions of racial difference.

    The book develops the historic cultural contexts of these ceremonies, and tackles the implications of these histories for contemporary nation-states of the post-colonial era.

    We have in particular given a large place to the rôle and to the history of the Church which dominates all this period, and which has been ordinarily so neglected in our schoolbooks, and have sought to make clear how France obtained in the thirteenth century a sort of political and intellectual hegemony in Europe. We hope those who read will understand what were the great ideas and directive tendencies which determined the historical evolution of the Middle Ages. We have always kept in mind in writing the conclusion to which we were advancing." - Charles Bémont & Gabriel MonodContents: The Roman Empire at the End of the Fourth Century. The Barbarians. The Germanic Invasions – The Vandals, The Visigoths, and the Huns (376-476). The Germanic Invasions – The Ostrogoths. The Germanic Invasions – The Barbarians in Gaul – Clovis. The Frankish Kingdom from 511 to 639. Institutions of Gaul after the Invasions. The Roman Empire of the East in the Sixth Century. The Last Invasions and the Papacy – The Lombards and Gregory the Great – The Anglo-Saxons and Monasticism. The Arabs – Mohammed. Arabian Empire – Conquests and Civilization. The Fainéant Kings – Foundation of the Carolingian Dynasty – Charlemagne. Empire of the Franks – Carolingian Customs and Institutions. The Carolingian Decadence, 814-888. The Last Carolingians – Invasions of the Saracens, Hungarians, and Norsemen – Origin of Feudalism. The Feudal System. Germany and Italy (888-1056). Emperor and Pope – Church Reform – Gregory VII. The Guelfs and Hohenstaufen – Alexander III. and Frederick I. Barbarossa. End of the Hohenstaufen – Victory of the Papacy over the Empire. The Christian and Mussulman Orient from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. The Crusades. The Country Districts and Cities of France - Emancipation of Peasants and Bourgeois. French Royalty (987-1154). French Royalty (1154-1270). Institutions of Capetian Royalty. England from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Century. Continental Europe. The Roman Church in the Thirteenth Century. The Church and Heresies. Christian and Feudal Civilization – Instruction And Sciences – Literature And Arts – Worship. General Summary.

    In that fateful year, the Spanish landed in San Francisco, the Russians pushed into Alaska to hunt valuable sea otters, and the Sioux discovered the Black Hills. Hailed by critics for challenging our conventional view of the birth of America, West of the Revolution “[coaxes] our vision away from the Atlantic seaboard” and “exposes a continent seething with peoples and purposes beyond Minutemen and Redcoats” (Wall Street Journal).

    Miguel León-Portilla had the incomparable success of organizing texts translated from Nahuatl by Ángel María Garibay Kintana to give us the The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico: Indigenous people of Tenochtitlán, Tlatelolco, Texcoco, Chalco and Tlaxcala were formed about the struggle against the conquerors and the final ruin of the Aztec world.An account of the omens that announced the disaster, a description of Cortes' progress, a chronicle of the heroic battle of the ancient Mexicans in defense of their culture and of their own lives, a civilization that was lost forever, a great epic poem of the origins of Mexican nationality, The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico is already a classic book and an indispensable reading work.

    We habitually think of the European past as the history of countries which exist today - France, Germany, Britain, Russia and so on - but often this actually obstructs our view of the past, and blunts our sensitivity to the ever-changing political landscape. Europe's history is littered with kingdoms, duchies, empires and republics which have now disappeared but which were once fixtures on the map of their age - 'the Empire of Aragon' which once dominated the western Mediterranean; the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for a time the largest country in Europe; the successive kingdoms (and one duchy) of Prussia, much of whose history is now half-remembered at best. This book shows the reader how to peer through the cracks of mainstream history writing and listen to the echoes of lost realms across the centuries.

    But the question of how we understand the British Empire - its origins, nature, purpose, and effect on the world it ruled - is far from settled. In this incisive work, David Cannadine looks at the British Empire from a new perspective - through the eyes of those who created and ruled it - and offers fresh insight into the driving forces behind the Empire.Arguing against the views of Edward Said and others, Cannadine suggests that the British were motivated not only by race, but also by class. The British wanted to domesticate the exotic world of their colonies and to reorder the societies they ruled according to an idealized image of their own class hierarchies.

    Book annotation not available for this title.Title: Traditions & EncountersAuthor: Bentley, Jerry H./ Ziegler, Herbert F.Publisher: McGraw-Hill CollegePublication Date: 2010/10/08Number of Pages: 460Binding Type: PAPERBACKLibrary of Congress: 2010036144

    It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic

    Mohawk Saint is a work of history that situates her remarkable life in its seventeenth century setting, a time of wars, epidemics, and cultural transformations for the Indian peoples of the northeast. The daughter of a Algonquin mother and an Iroquois father, Catherine/Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) has become known over the centuries as a Catholic convert so holy that, almost immediately upon her death, she became the object of a cult. Today she is revered as a patron saint by Native Americans and the patroness of ecology and the environment by Catholics more generally, the first Native North American proposed for sainthood.Tekakwitha was born at a time of cataclysmic change, as Native Americans of the northeast experienced the effects of European contact and colonization. A convert to Catholicism in the 1670s, she embarked on a physically and mentally grueling program of self-denial, aiming to capture the spiritual power of the newcomers from across the sea. Her story intersects with that of Claude Chauchetiere, a French Jesuit of mystical tendencies who came to America hoping to rescue savages from sin and paganism. But it was Claude himself who needed help to face down his own despair. He became convinced that Tekakwitha was a genuine saint and that conviction gave meaning to his life. Though she lived until just 24, Tekakwitha's severe penances and vivid visions were so pronounced that Chauchetiere wrote an elegiac hagiography shortly after her death.With this richly crafted study, Allan Greer has written a dual biography of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha and Chauchetiere, unpacking their cultures in Native America and in France. He examines the missionary and conversion activities of the Jesuits in Canada, and explains the Indian religious practices that interweave with converts' Catholic practices. He also relates how Tekakwitha's legend spread through the hagiographies and to areas of the United States, Canada, Europe, and Mexico in the centuries since her death. The book also explores issues of body and soul, illness and healing, sexuality and celibacy, as revealed in the lives of a man and a woman, from profoundly different worlds, who met centuries ago in the remote Mohawk village of Kahnawake.

    How would you feel if you woke up in a medieval castle tomorrow morning? What would your bed be like? What would you eat? What sights and smells would be around you? Whisking you back in time, this little book will show you exactly what it would be like to be there.

    He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have "Puritans as Democrats," "The Monarch's Revolution," "The Artist Prophet and Jester" -- show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras.The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth -- tomorrow or the next day.Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.

    But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers.Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating.In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity.

    This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history.This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches’ remarkable impact on the trajectory of history.Published in Association with The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

    The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cort�s, and Pizarro.Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each myth. This vividly written and authoritative book shows, for instance, that native Americans did not take theconquistadors for gods and that small numbers of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. We discover that Columbus was correctly seen in his lifetime--and for decades after--as a briefly fortunate but unexceptional participant in efforts involving manysouthern Europeans. It was only much later that Columbus was portrayed as a great man who fought against the ignorance of his age to discover the new world. Another popular misconception--that the Conquistadors worked alone--is shattered by the revelation that vast numbers of black and native alliesjoined them in a conflict that pitted native Americans against each other. This and other factors, not the supposed superiority of the Spaniards, made conquests possible.The Conquest, Restall shows, was more complex--and more fascinating--than conventional histories have portrayed it. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest offers a richer and more nuanced account of a key event in the history of the Americas.