Translated by Jeremy Moyle In Nature in the New World (translated into English in 1985), Antonello Gerbi examines the fascinating reports of the first Europeans to see the Americas. These accounts provided the basis for the images of strange and new flora, fauna, and human creatures that filled European imaginations.Initial chapters are devoted to the writings of Columbus, Vespucci, Cortes, Verrazzano, and others. The second portion of the book concerns the Historia general y natural de las Indias of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, a work commissioned by Charles V of Spain in 1532 but not published in its entirety until the 1850s. Antonello Gerbi contends that Oviedo, a Spanish administrator who lived in Santo Domingo, has been unjustly neglected as a historian. Gerbi shows that Oviedo was a major authority on the culture, history, and conquest of the New World.

Translated by Jeremy Moyle When Hegel described the Americas as an inferior continent, he was repeating a contention that inspired one of the most passionate debates of modern times. Originally formulated by the eminent natural scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and expanded by the Prussian encyclopedist Cornelius de Pauw, this provocative thesis drew heated responses from politicians, philosophers, publicists, and patriots on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing polemic reached its apex in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and is far from extinct today.Translated into English in 1973, The Dispute of the New World is the definitive study of this debate. Antonello Gerbi scrutinizes each contribution to the debate, unravels the complex arguments, and reveals their inner motivations. As the story of the polemic unfolds, moving through many disciplines that include biology, economics, anthropology, theology, geophysics, and poetry, it becomes clear that the subject at issue is nothing less than the totality of the Old World versus the New, and how each viewed the other at a vital turning point in history.

One of the most appealing volumes among the flood of baby boomer memoirs . . . Wright remembers in a smoothly articulate style that takes us back into history in near novelistic fashion.--Chicago Sun-Times.

Until the end of the eighteenth century, missionaries to the New World agreed that diabolism lay at the heart of the Native American belief system and at the root of their own failure to establish a church purged of Satan and pagan superstition. The Devil mattered, and he occupied a central place in discussions of all non-Christian religious systems and in the bitter disputes over how to combat them. In this elegant and sensitive analysis, Fernando Cervantes gives the Devil his due, illuminating a neglected aspect of the European encounter with America and setting the full history of the "spiritual conquest" in a rich and original context. He reveals how Native Americans reinterpreted the view of Christianity presented to them, how they refused to see the world as the missionaries saw it. Drawing on archival sources, he brings into clear focus the complex, often bewildering, and sometimes tragic clash between a theology that posited the existence of competing forces and one that insisted that all deities were multiform beings within which good and evil coexisted. He deals in compelling and persuasive detail with the social history of the interaction between the two cultures, explaining not only the impact of European ideas upon the New World but the influence of diabolism on the ideology of the Old. And he provides a subtle account of the role of diabolism in the emerging baroque culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that strikingly challenges conventional explanations of the growth of skepticism in the period.

Often compared unfavorably with colonial New England, the early Chesapeake has been portrayed as irreligious, unstable, and violent. In this important new study, James Horn challenges this conventional view and looks across the Atlantic to assess the enduring influence of English attitudes, values, and behavior on the social and cultural evolution of the early Chesapeake. Using detailed local and regional studies to compare everyday life in English provincial society and the emergent societies of the Chesapeake Bay, Horn provides a richly textured picture of the immigrants' Old World backgrounds and their adjustment to life in America. Until the end of the seventeenth century, most settlers in Virginia and Maryland were born and raised in England, a factor of enormous consequence for social development in the two colonies. By stressing the vital social and cultural connections between England and the Chesapeake during this period, Horn places the development of early America in the context of a vibrant Anglophone transatlantic world and suggests a fundamental reinterpretation of New World society.

This eloquent, pathbreaking account follows the Catawbas from their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century until they carved out a place in the American republic three centuries later. It is a story of Native agency, creativity, resilience, and endurance. Upon its original publication in 1989, James Merrell's definitive history of Catawbas and their neighbors in the southern piedmont helped signal a new direction in the study of Native Americans, serving as a model for their reintegration into American history. In an introduction written for this twentieth anniversary edition, Merrell recalls the book's origins and considers its place in the field of early American history in general and Native American history in particular, both at the time it was first published and two decades later.

A study of Ice Age Americans, highlighting genetic, archaeological and geological evidence that has revolutionized our understanding of their origins, antiquity, and adaptations.

Brief Candles (1930), Aldous Huxley's fifth collection of short fiction, consists of the following four short stories: "Chawdron" "The Rest Cure" "The Claxtons" "After the Fireworks" Brief Candles takes its title from a line in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, from Macbeth's famous soliloquy: "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Outlines the author's vision for transforming the world into a more balanced, democratic global society, in an analysis that makes proposals for a world parliament, fairly organized trade, and debt-leveraged underdeveloped nations. Reprint.

Set four hundred years in the future, Frederick Turner's epic poem, The New World, celebrates American culture in A.D. 2376. As the book opens, the nation-state has been fragmented and replaced by new political forms: the Riots, violent anarchistic matriarchies, whose members are addicted to psychedelic joyjuice; the Burbs, populations descended from the old middle classes and now slaves to the Riots; the Mad Counties, religious theocracies dominated by fanatical fundamentalists; and the Free Counties, Jeffersonian democracies where arts and sciences flourish. Within this setting, Turner's epic tells the story of a tragic family feud involving Ruth Jefferson, daughter of the political leader, Shaker McCloud; Antony Manse, a handsome aristocrat; Ruth's half-brother, the ambitious Simon Raven McCloud, who is under the influence of his grandmother, the witch Faith Raven; and the hero, James George Quincy. When banished from the Free Counties, the vengeful Simon Raven transforms himself into a messianic figure who inspires a league of Mad Counties to launch a holy war to annihilate the Free Counties. Turner's epic calls for a cultural commitment to transcend the contemporary choice between blind faith and hedonistic relativism. This bold work challenges many conventional assumptions about modern poetry and its relationship to other literary forms and the culture at large. Praise for Frederick Turner "This is a grand, glowing poem.... A thousand bravos " - James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize winning poet "The New World may be the first straight-forward heroic epic since Tennyson that really works. Turner's stroke of genius was to place the story in the future and tell it in a science-fiction mode. Suddenly all the epic formulas become not only permissible again but credible." - Dana Gioia "What astonishes me most is the way this poem builds and builds. To begin with, I was taking note of particular things that I found thrilling or delightful, but the deeper I got into the narrative, the more sustained the richness of it as a whole, and the seamless coherence of the tragic horror with the joyousness that I see as its central meaning. The poem inspires us to go back to the epics of the past, whose roots it shows us to be so much alive after all." - Amy Clampitt "If the use of epic poetry is to be more than a conceit, it has to be in the service of a tale for which it is better suited than the novel.... The epic poem] has historically enjoyed a greater ability to convey a culture's character and spirit through language. Turner uses the strengths of the epic form to good effect.... The New World is an ambitious work and Turner pulls off what he set out to accomplish: He's written good science fiction while creating and presenting a possible future in a way that a novel could not have accomplished. It's good poetry, too." - Dani Zweig "Myth, religious parable, and science fiction are genetically recombined into lyrical new forms of being. Turner has taken up the most ancient challenges of the poet, delivering work as intellectually charged as formally challenging." - Paul Lake "Frederick Turner comes across in his poems as a man of impressively broad experience, intellectual brilliance, and originality. His vocabulary alone is a tour de force. He's at his best when he unleashes his extraordinary powers of observation." - Richard Tillinghast