In potent, graceful prose that sensitively unearths the social complexity and tangled history of colonial relations, Silver presents an astonishingly vivid picture of 18th-century America. 13 illustrations; 2 maps.

In The Forgotten Diaspora Travis Jeffres explores how Native Mexicans involved in the conquest of the Greater Southwest pursued hidden agendas, deploying a covert agency that enabled them to reconstruct Indigenous communities and retain key components of their identities even as they were technically allied with and subordinate to Spaniards. Resisting, modifying, and even flatly ignoring Spanish directives, Indigenous Mexicans in diaspora co-created the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and laid enduring claims to the region. Jeffres contends that tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of central Mexican Natives were indispensable to Spanish colonial expansion in the Greater Southwest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These vital allies populated frontier settlements, assisted in converting local Indians to Christianity, and provided essential labor in the mining industry that drove frontier expansion and catapulted Spain to global hegemony. However, Nahuatl records reveal that Indigenous migrants were no mere auxiliaries to European colonial causes; they also subverted imperial aims and pursued their own agendas, wresting lands, privileges, and even rights to self-rule from the Spanish Crown. Via Nahuatl-language “hidden transcripts” of Native allies’ motivations and agendas, The Forgotten Diaspora reimagines this critical yet neglected component of the hemispheric colonial-era scattering of the Americas’ Indigenous peoples.

In the sixteenth century, silver mined by native peoples became New Spain's most important export. Silver production served as a catalyst for northern expansion, creating mining towns that led to the development of new industries, markets, population clusters, and frontier institutions. Within these towns, the need for labor, raw materials, resources, and foodstuffs brought together an array of different ethnic and social groups—Spaniards, Indians, Africans, and ethnically mixed individuals or castas. On the northern edge of the empire, 350 miles from Mexico City, sprung up Zacatecas, a silver-mining town that would grow in prominence to become the "Second City of New Spain." Urban Indians in a Silver City illuminates the social footprint of colonial Mexico's silver mining district. It reveals the men, women, children, and families that shaped indigenous society and shifts the view of indigenous peoples from mere laborers to settlers and vecinos (municipal residents). Dana Velasco Murillo shows how native peoples exploited the urban milieu to create multiple statuses and identities that allowed them to live in Zacatecas as both Indians and vecinos. In reconsidering traditional paradigms about ethnicity and identity among the urban Indian population, she raises larger questions about the nature and rate of cultural change in the Mexican north.

*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award* *A New York Times Notable Book* *Winner of the Texas Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award* This New York Times bestseller and stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West “is nothing short of a revelation…will leave dust and blood on your jeans” (The New York Times Book Review). Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads, and the amazing story of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Hailed by critics, S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.

The work and ministries of the Roman Catholic friars who gave their lives, both as martyrs for the cause of their church and in years of hard and often thankless labor, are the inspiration and basis for Missionary Practices and Spanish Steel, a theological and practical narrative that seeks to remember and understand their accomplishments in Christian mission. Missionary and theologian Andrew L. Toth investigates the roots of Christian mission as it developed into the field of Christian missiology in the chaotic, terrible, and incredibly diverse three-hundred-year Spanish conquest of North America indigenous nations. Through his research Toth shows that, in the great majority of the cases studied, the friars accomplished their goals to transform these native cultures into their own Spanish culture to account them as Roman Catholic Christians. This study us more than just a history of the friars' missionary movement. Toth not only explores how Spanish Catholic missionaries approached their work, but also asks to what extent their approach conformed to a particular theological perspective. Toth rounds out his argument by speculating on what the friars can teach us about the role of missionaries today. Comprehensive and thought-provoking, Missionary Practices and Spanish Steel offers a new perspective on the current missionary movement by looking through the lens of the past.

“Sets the record straight about the War of 1812’s Battle of Fort Dearborn and its significance to early Chicago’s evolution . . . informative, ambitious” (Publishers Weekly). In August 1812, Capt. Nathan Heald began the evacuation of ninety-four people from the isolated outpost of Fort Dearborn. After traveling only a mile and a half, they were attacked by five hundred Potawatomi warriors, who killed fifty-two members of Heald’s party and burned Fort Dearborn before returning to their villages. In the first book devoted entirely to this crucial period, noted historian Ann Durkin Keating richly recounts the Battle of Fort Dearborn while situating it within the nearly four decades between the 1795 Treaty of Greenville and the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. She tells a story not only of military conquest but of the lives of people on all sides of the conflict, highlighting such figures as Jean Baptiste Point de Sable and John Kinzie and demonstrating that early Chicago was a place of cross-cultural reliance among the French, the Americans, and the Native Americans. This gripping account of the birth of Chicago “opens up a fascinating vista of lost American history” and will become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the city and its complex origins (The Wall Street Journal). “Laid out with great insight and detail . . . Keating . . . doesn’t see the attack 200 years ago as a massacre. And neither do many historians and Native American leaders.” —Chicago Tribune “Adds depth and breadth to an understanding of the geographic, social, and political transitions that occurred on the shores of Lake Michigan in the early 1800s.” —Journal of American History