Volume 40, Number 12 · June 24, 1993
The Rediscovery of America
By J.H. Elliott
Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America
by James Axtell
Oxford University Press, 376 pp., $14.95 (paper)
American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World
by David E. Stannard
Oxford University Press, 358 pp., $26.00
1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History
by Robert Royal
Ethics and Public Policy Center, 203 pp., $18.95
European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism
by Anthony Pagden
Yale University Press, 216 pp., $25.00
The Spanish Frontier in North America
by David J. Weber
Yale University Press, 579 pp., $35.00
The Middle Ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650–1815
by Richard White
Cambridge University Press, 544 pp., $19.95 (paper)
The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries
by James Lockhart
Stanford University Press, 650 pp., $60.00
Now that we have bid a last lingering adiós to Columbus and his quincentennial,[1] we can look back on a noisy, and sometimes productive, encounter. 'Encounter,' indeed, has been the quintessential quincentennial word, displacing the once respectable but now suspect 'discovery,' and firmly placing the emphasis, not (as in 1892) on the superiority of Western science, technology, and civilization, but on the global confrontation between European and non-European. In a round-up of work generated by the quincentennial, and included in Beyond 1492, a lively volume of lectures and essays itself generated by the same event, James Axtell lists conferences, books, and exhibitions bearing such titles as Early European Encounters with the Americas, American Encounters, Cannibal Encounters, Rethinking the Encounter, and Maps and the Columbian Encounter. Of the making of encounters there is, it seems, no end.
Review, 6016 words
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