General Alonso De Le N S Expeditions Into Texas 1686 1690

In the late seventeenth century, General Alonso de León led five military expeditions from northern New Spain into what is now Texas in search of French intruders who had settled on lands claimed by the Spanish crown. Lola Orellano Norris has identified sixteen manuscript copies of de León’s meticulously kept expedition diaries. These documents hold major importance for early Texas scholarship. Some of these early manuscripts have been known to historians, but never before have all sixteen manuscripts been studied. In this interdisciplinary study, Norris transcribes, translates, and analyzes the diaries from two different perspectives. The historical analysis reveals that frequent misinterpretations of the Spanish source documents have led to substantial factual errors that have persisted in historical interpretation for more than a century. General Alonso de León’s Expeditions into Texas is the first presentation of these important early documents and provides new vistas on Spanish Texas.

In the seventeenth century, South Texas and Northeastern Mexico formed El Nuevo Reino de Leon, a frontier province of New Spain where Spanish settlements were widely scattered and subject to clashes with the Native American inhabitants. In 1690, a resident Spanish official looked back over the eventful, sometimes tumultuous history of Nuevo Leon and penned a richly detailed account of the years 1630 to 1690. Although Juan Bautista Chapa's Historia de Nuevo Leon was not published until 1909, it has since been acclaimed as the key contemporary document for any historical study of Spanish colonial Texas. This book offers the only accurate and annonated English translation of Chapa's Historia. Drawing on the Discourses of Governor Alonso de Leon (the elder), which cover the years 1580 to 1649, and on his own experiences as permanent secretary to the governors of Nuevo Leon, Chapa traces the history and colonization of Texas and Northeastern Mexico from the 1630s onward. He presents the only account of the Spanish expeditions in the 1660s against the Cacaxtle Indians, who had raided south of the Rio Grande for horses and slaves, and the only diary account of Alonso (the younger) de Leon's 1686 expedition to the Gulf of Mexico in search of La Salle's French settlement. Chapa was also an authority on the local Indians, and his Historia lists the names and locations of over 300 Indian tribes. This information, together with descriptions of the vegetation, wildlife, and climate in seventeenth-century Texas, will be of interest to ethnographers, anthropologists, biogeographers, and other scholars.

"In November 1782, Vicente Gonzales de Santianes, the governor of Nuevo Leon, received a sheaf of documents from a protracted legal dispute in the Indian town of San Miguel de Aguayo. At first glance, the case seems so utterly commonplace as to be beneath the notice of the region's chief magistrate. One of San Miguel's Tlaxcalan stoneworkers had been accused of an adulterous liaison with a townswoman"--Provided by publisher.

Based on exceptionally rich private papers of Portuguese slave traders, this study provides unique insight into the diet, health and medical care of slaves during their journey from Africa to Peru in the early seventeenth century.

An account of the history and evacuation of the Portuguese merchant ship, Nossa Senhora dos Martires, sunk at the mouth of the Tagus River in 1606.

The popular image of Scotland is dominated by widely recognized elements of Celtic culture. But a significant non–Celtic influence on Scotland’s history has been largely ignored for centuries? This book argues that much of Scotland’s history and culture from 1100 forward is Jewish. The authors provide evidence that many of the national heroes, villains, rulers, nobles, traders, merchants, bishops, guild members, burgesses, and ministers of Scotland were of Jewish descent, their ancestors originating in France and Spain. Much of the traditional historical account of Scotland, it is proposed, rests on fundamental interpretive errors, perpetuated in order to affirm Scotland’s identity as a Celtic, Christian society. A more accurate and profound understanding of Scottish history has thus been buried. The authors’ wide-ranging research includes examination of census records, archaeological artifacts, castle carvings, cemetery inscriptions, religious seals, coinage, burgess and guild member rolls, noble genealogies, family crests, portraiture, and geographic place names.