Research Catalog

Columbus's outpost among the Taínos : Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498

Title: Columbus's outpost among the Taínos : Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498 / Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent.
Author: Deagan, Kathleen A.
Publication: New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, [2002], ©2002.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	F1939.I8 D43 2002	Off-site

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Details

Additional Authors

Cruxent, José María.

Description

x, 294 pages : illustrations, maps; 25 cm

Summary

"In 1493 Christopher Columbus led a fleet of seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men to found a royal trading colony in America. Columbus had high hopes for his settlement, which he named La Isabela after the queen of Spain, but just five years later it was in ruins. It remains important, however, as the first site of European settlement in America and the first place of sustained interaction between Europeans and the indigenous Tainos.".
"Kathleen Deagan and Jose Maria Cruxent now tell the story of this historic enterprise. Drawing on their ten-year archaeological investigation of the site of La Isabela, along with research into Columbus-era documents, they contrast Spanish expectations of America with the actual events and living conditions at America's first European town.
Deagan and Cruxent argue that La Isabela failed not because Columbus was a poor planner but because his vision of America was grounded in European experience and could not be sustained in the face of the realities of American life.
Explaining that the original Spanish economic and social frameworks for colonization had to be altered in America in response to the American landscape and the nonelite Spanish and Taino people who occupied it, they shed light on larger questions of American colonialism and the development of Euro-American cultural identity."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [259]-282) and index.

Contents

1. Columbus and La Isabela -- 2. The Historical Setting -- 3. Reluctant Hosts: The Tainos of Hispaniola -- 4. "Hell in Hispaniola": La Isabela, 1493-1498 -- 5. The Hand of Vandals and the Tooth of Time: La Isabela, 1500-1987 -- 6. The Medieval Enclave: Landscape, Town, and Buildings -- 7. A Spartan Domesticity: Household Life in La Isabela's Bohios -- 8. God and Glory -- 9. Commerce and Craft -- 10. Aftermath -- 11. Destinies Converged.

ISBN

0300090404

LCCN

2001046771

OCLC

ocm48092149
SCSB-8414567

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries