Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Spanish Colonial America
Some men see the beginnings. The conquistador who first saw the Mississippi also took the Inca highway to fabulous Cuzco.
As slaves, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions were forced to cope with native North America on its own terms, bridging two worlds that had remained apart for 12,000 years or more.
Florida panhandle, Fall 1528 -- The 250 starving Spanish adventurers dubbed the shallow estuary near their campsite the “Bay of Horses,” because, every third day, they killed yet another draft animal, roasted it, and consumed the flesh.
After half a millennium, we scarcely feel the presence of Spain in what is now the United States. But it is all around us.
In 1883, Walt Whitman received an invitation to Santa Fe to deliver a poem at a celebration of the city’s founding.
On their weathered stone battlements can be read the whole history of the three-century struggle for supremacy in the New World.
On the northwest shoulder of South America, looking out over the blue waters of the Caribbean, an ancient citadel stands guard above a Spanish city. Three thousand miles to the north, where the Gulf of St.
No city has more energetically obliterated the remnants of its past. And yet no city has a greater sense of its history.
On the edge of a pond a few blocks from my home, there is a knee-high chunk of granite with a bronze plate on one side, marking the spot where a band of Spanish soldiers commanded by a captain named Juan Bautista de Anza pitched camp on a March afternoon in 1
The Revolution might have ended much differently for the Americans if it weren’t for their ally, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, who helped them wrestle the Mississippi valley from the British.
Imagine, for a moment, an alternate ending to the American Revolution. The thirteen rebel colonies sign a peace of exhaustion with Great Britain in 1783.
One innovation profoundly changed—and prolonged—the culture of the Plains Indians
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