COLUMBIAN ENCOUNTERS: BEYOND 1992
James Axtell
William and Mary Quarterly, April, 1992
 
     America has profited economically more than educationally
from its major historical anniversaries.  Typical was 1976 when
popular and scholastic understanding of America's revolutionary
heritage and distinctive political origins was advanced much less
than were the profits of corporate hucksters who cashed in on
what Jesse Lemisch aptly called "Bicentennial Schlock."(1) 
Despite the considerable scholarship spawned by the Bicentennial,
one of every three high school juniors in the late 1980s could
not place the Declaration of Independence in its correct half-
century, did not know that it signaled the colonists' break from
England, and did not recognize its best-known passage about
"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  Even one in four
college seniors could not distinguish the ideas of Karl Marx from
those of the U. S. Constitution or explain the purpose of the
Federalist Papers.(2)  Patriotism sells; it doesn't always
educate.
     The Quincentenary of Columbus's voyage of discovery has a
much better chance of realizing its educational potential. 
Certainly, the challenge exists.  In the 1988 National Assessment
of Educational Progress, 56 percent of fourth graders could name
Columbus's ships, but only 36 percent understood why he sailed to
the Americas.  Nearly a third of seventeen-year-olds thought the
Columbus reached the New World after 1750.  Only 60 percent knew
that the American southwest was explored and settled by Spain,
the same number who knew that the eastern seaboard was settled
mainly by England.(3)
     The Columbian Quincentenary is likely to make a deeper
public and pedagogical impact for five reasons.  First, we are
choosing to commemorate rather than celebrate the event, with a
greater degree of serious reflection on its much more mixed
results.  Second, the event we commemorate is less the single sea
voyage than the five-centuries-long "encounter" of populations,
institutions, and ideas from all of the world's continents that
followed.  Third, since the event belongs to the world and not
exclusively to the United States, patriotism and hucksterism are
much less likely to steal the show.  Fourth, unlike the American
Revolution, which for much of this century has been intensively
studied by scholars and widely taught in schools and colleges,
the concept of the Columbian Encounter is quite new and provides
myriad opportunities for scholars, teachers, and educational
institutions.  And finally, thanks largely to the planning,
economic sponsorship, and scholarly oversight of the National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the community of serious
history makers and interpreters has been able to take advantage
of those opportunities and thereby to dominate the proceedings.
     As the theme of the Quincentenary, Encounter has much to
recommend it.  Encounters are mutual, reciprocal - two-way rather
than one-way streets.  Encounters are generically capacious:
there are encounters of people but also of ideas, institutions,
habits, values, plants, animals, and micro-organisms.  Encounters
are temporally and spatially fluid: they can occur at any time in
any place, before or after 1492, around the globe.  And, although
natives, critics, and activists may not approve the idea,
encounters are morally neutral: the term does not prejudge the
nature of the contact or its outcome.  In sum, encounter is a
spacious description that jettisons normative baggage to make
room for disinterestedness and parity.  It is a salutary word for
our conflicted postmodern commemoration of a conflicted
protomodern event.  
     So great are the historical and interpretive projects of the
Quincentenary, in Latin America and much of Europe as well as the
United States, that it is a challenge just to keep track of them,
much less to take full stock of their contributions to our
understanding of the Encounter.  Fortunately, beginning in the
fall of 1984, three newsletters have publicized the great variety
of serious undertakings aimed at 1992.(4)  Supplemented by
regular announcements of Quincentenary-related grants by NEH,
these publications comprise a reasonably complete record of the
rich educational dividends we can expect from the Columbian
anniversary, for they describe literally hundreds of projects,
the majority of them capable of making lasting contributions to
scholarship. 
     What have we learned from all this productivity?  How can we
most fruitfully incorporate the new history on Encounter into our
teaching and scholarship, both academic and public?  What, in
other words, remains to be done beyond 1992, after the replicas
of the Ni$a, Pinta, and Santa Mar!a have sailed home?
 
     The most striking difference between the fourth and fifth
Columbian centenaries is that native Americans a century ago were
relegated to footnotes while today they not only dominate the
text but have begun to rewrite it.  The Columbian Expositions in
Chicago and Madrid in 1892-1893 were brash celebrations of Euro-
American culture superiority and "progress," in which the Indians
were visible only as glass-cased souvenirs of "primitive life" or
as well-scrubbed models of Western education and
"civilization."(5)  Today, nearly  every Quincentenary planning
group, conference panel, museum design staff, and film advisory
board includes native American members.  The reason is less
affirmative action or political correctness than a marked change
of focus from the benefits of Columbus's discovery to its costs,
particularly for the victims of European colonialism.  As earlier
historiographical trends shifted our viewpoint from Seville,
Paris and London to Santo Domingo, Quebec, and Jamestown, the
Indians who surrounded those capitals have also moved toward the
center of our attention, just as they occupied the schemes,
dreams, and fears of European colonists for much of the colonial
period.  Not surprisingly, some of the best scholarship generated
by the Quincentenary is devoted to the Indian side of the
Encounter.
     Because native scholars are still too few, and fewer still
specialize in the earliest stages of contact, published native
perspectives on the Columbian Encounter have not been numerous. 
Native activists and organizers have been heard more than native
scholars.  Indian organizations have made it clear that either
they wish to mourn the Quincentenary as the anniversary of the
holocaust and the descent of the Dark Ages upon America or they
wish to celebrate it in their own way as "500 years of Native
People's resistance to colonization."  Or they want nothing to do
with it because they anticipate another self-congratulatory media
circus like those in 1892 and 1976.(6)
     The only sustained scholarly discussions of the "discovery"
from an Indian perspective have appeared in Seeds of Change, the
catalogue accompanying a major Smithsonian exhibition, and in a
special issue of Northeast Indian Quarterly entitles "View from
the Shore: American Indian Perspectives on the Quincentenary."(7) 
In the former, George Horse Capture, a Gros Ventre museologist
and historian, gives an eloquent personal reading of post-
Columbian America, looking backward and forward from the daring
Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969.  In the latter,
John Mohawk, a Seneca professor of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York-Buffalo, skillfully debunks some of
the mythology surrounding Columbus's voyages of "discovery" by
placing them in their pre-American context, and Jose Barreiro,
the journal's editor, contributes a long and thoughtful "Note on
Tainos: Whither Progress?"  Shorter pieces sample native views of
the mutual discovery, the 500-year Encounter, and the
Quincentenary itself.
     Early Quincentenary issues of Northeast Indian Quarterly
were devoted to "Indian Roots of American Democracy" and "Indian
Corn of the Americas: Gift to the World."(8)  These subjects are
typical of the "contributions" approach that has been a dominant
theme of native American studies since their inception in the
late 1960s, a phase that all minority studies seem to go through
on their way to cultural assurance and self-definition.(9)  By
concentrating on the (usually material) benefits that native
cultures have given to the dominant Euro-American cultures,
minority students marginalize their own group by making it
conform to the dominant culture and its standards of importance,
rather than asserting the integrity and value of their cultures
and histories.  The addition of non-material contributions has
broadened the discussion, without really transcending the
limitations of the genre.  Thus far consideration of Indian
contributions to American democracy has been limited to an
alleged Iroquois influence on the Founding Fathers, though in
Indian Givers and Native Roots anthropologist Jack Weatherford
seeks to describe, in the words of his subtitles, How the Indians
of the Americas Transformed the World and How the Indians
Enriched America. (10)
     Although native scholars are not participating on the
Quincentenary in large numbers, their colleagues and a number of
museums and publishers are seeing that the Indian story is
memorably told in words, maps, and images.  Archaeologists
Michael Coe, Dean Snow, and Elizabeth Benson have encompassed the
whole hemisphere in their Atlas of Ancient America, which
contains fifty-six maps and 329 illustrations.(11)  The
substantial scholarly text takes the reader from the Bering
Strait to Tierra del Fuego, through all aspects of culture from
housing to religion, and ends with the living cultures of today. 
Philip Kipper's popularization, The Smithsonian Book of North
American Indians Before the Coming of the Europeans, adds an
interesting section on scholars of native life and how they
investigate the past to a visually striking if traditional survey
of American culture areas.(12)  America in 1492, edited by Alvin
Josephy, treats in a readable way the latest scholarship on the
native cultures of all the Americas on the eve of colonization,
augmented by more than 200 illustrations.(13)  Introductory
scenes that focus on representative individuals give
geographically and culturally diverse chapters a common human
thread.
     America 1492: Portrait of a Continent 500 Years Ago, by
Spanish historian Manuel Lucena Salmoral, is a densely
illustrated coffee-table-sized depiction of America's various
Indian cultures on the eve of European colonization.(14)  Its
text and illustrations cleverly describe native religions, arts,
and everyday customs, such as sexuality, child care, and coming
of age; it is particularly good on the lives of women, as
depicted in effigy pottery.  In a smaller format, Brian M.
Fagan's Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: The Americas Before
Columbus is more historical and less personalized in describing
the evolution primarily of the urban civilizations of south and
Central America.(15)
     Two major exhibitions that resulted in important books focus
on America north of the forty-eighth parallel.  More than most
museum catalogues, both highlight their scholarship as much as
their objects and illustrations.  The Spirit Sings: Artistic
Traditions of Canada's First Peoples opened at the Glenbow Museum
in Calgary during the 1988 Winter Olympics.  Unhappily, the
appearance of this extraordinary assemblage of native artifacts -
665 lent by ninety institutions in twenty countries - met with
protests stemming from an ongoing land grievance of the Lubicon
Lake Cree in northern Alberta.(16)  It is ironic that one of the
show's main goals was to stress "the continuity and resilience of
native culture in spite of overwhelming European influence,
oppression, and suppression."(17)  But the protests could not
tarnish the visual and interpretive integrity of the exhibition
and catalogue.
     The second exhibition, Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of
Siberia and Alaska, encountered no protests when it was mounted
by the National Museum of Natural History during the heyday of
glasnost.  To produce a companion volume, William Fitzhugh and
Aron Crowell assembled twenty-eight Russian and American scholars
to write essays on the history and cultures of the international
circumpolar region.(18)  These essays, well but modestly
illustrated with maps, objects, drawings, and photographs, form a
substantial book of 350 triple-columned pages.  The broad
similarities between the native peoples of the North Pacific
revealed by this book should stimulate thinking about the Asian
origins of the original Americans perhaps thirty thousand years
before Columbus discovered his long-sought "Asians" in America.
     Another set of books will appeal to those who like their
history straight, without much visual adornment.  A Cambridge
University Press trilogy will survey all of the Americas and
focus on the evolving histories of the natives in relation to
their Euro-American invaders and neighbors.  Bruce Trigger and
Wilcomb Washburn are editing the North American volume of The
Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, the
first attempt to encompass the complex ethnohistory of the
hemisphere.(19)  That such a broad synthesis can now be made
signals the maturity of both ethnohistory and the history of
Indian-white relations and augurs well for the continued
centrality of the Indians in the history of the Encounter.
     In a more accessible medium, Robin Maw's Media Resource
Associates is producing a ten-hour series of television
documentaries on "Indian America: A History."  This series is
distinguished by its unusual coast-to-coast locations and its
imaginative use of native speakers as on-screen authorities and
narrators of their own history.  The Newberry Library also has
plans to produce a four-hour series, "Tales from the Center of
the Universe," in which four native authors from different
regions will describe the beliefs and tell the stories of their
respective people.  Another visual presentation seeks to recreate
history in three dimensions.  A 400-acre site in Columbus, Ohio,
is being transformed into Three Rivers Reserve, a circa 1792
Indian settlement that will be peopled by native interpreters. 
The portrayal of native life in the east on the eve of the
nineteenth century will be salutary for Americans misled by loose
Quincentenary talk of Columbian "genocide" into thinking that
only the post-Independence west had - and has - Indian
inhabitants.
     A prominent feature of the Ohio reserve will be its ample
fields of corn, beans, and squash.  Two of the more unusual
projects of the Quincentenary revolve around the productive
processes and exportable products of native agriculture.  In
October 1991 the National Museum of Natural History opened a
major exhibition called "Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial
Commemoration" and published a lavish and intellectually
challenging catalogue with the same title.(20)  The theme of the
exhibition and book is the transformation of the globe by flora,
fauna, and microbes exchanged between continents after 1492,
particularly sugar, maize, the potato, the horse, and epidemic
diseases.  Instead of the products of native agriculture, Indian
Agriculture in the Americas, a projected three-volume study
edited by William Denevan, concentrates on its technology.(21) 
Denevan notes that, without draft animals or wheeled vehicles,
native farmers before 1492 had developed techniques far in
advance of those used by contemporary farmers in the Old World
and obtained crop yields not equaled until the present
century.(22)
     What brought the peoples of two hitherto isolated worlds
together was imperialism.  Europeans left their own countries to
invade, conquer, and resettle the Indians' lands. 
Understandably, the invaders felt compelled to justify their
actions abroad, often before they launched their fleets.  The
compound of ancient and humanist philosophy, church doctrine,
"international" law, and colonial precedent used to carve out new
empires in the Americas is the subject of two thorough and
largely overlapping books, The Law of Nations and the New World 
by L. C. Green and Olive P. Dickason and The American Indian in
Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest by Robert A.
Williams, Jr.  These books are a useful reminder that while the
colonization of America was in part an armed invasion, those with
might also wanted right on their side in the eyes of (European)
world opinion.  Both drive home the conclusion the "a will to
empire proceeds most effectively under a rule of law."(23)
     As we think of the law as a blind lady holding the impartial
scales of justice, so we consider cartography the scientific
representation of geographical space.  The late J. Brian Harley
tried to cure us of naivet by demonstrating that maps were and
still are "active instruments of power," particularly in the
hands of those with power who aspire to more.  In a traveling
exhibition and catalogue called Maps and the Columbian Encounter, 
Harley persuasively argued that for European imperialists maps
were, like laws, essential because the invaders knew that "to
catalogue the world is to appropriate it."  "The map was an
instrument with which European power and values could be
reproduced along the most distant shore."  Facing the Ptolemaic
grid, abstract coordinates, and print, the Indians were at a
severe disadvantage.  It was too easy for European mapmakers to
leave native names (and therefore claims) off the maps or to
rename them, thereby reifying the myth of the empty frontier, the
vacuum domicilium so dear to the New England Puritans.(24) 
Harley made a bold productive contribution to Quincentenary
scholarship.  His scrutiny of the English mapping of New England
was arguably the high point of the 1988 interdisciplinary
conference on "The Land of Norumbega: Maine in the Age of
Exploration and Settlement," for which Susan Danforth mounted an
excellent exhibition of maps, books, prints, and instruments.(25)
     The Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries by Kenneth
Nebvenzahl is a more conventional aesthetic and positivist
tracing of the explorers' attempts to chart the newfound lands;
it ignores altogether the native Americans, who supplied many of
the details on early maps.(26)  A new project at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which sponsored Harley's exhibition, will
fill that large lacuna by treating native maps and mapping in
North America in an ambitious exhibition and catalogue.  The
effort to describe the geographical encounter of natives and
newcomers has already begun in a major way with the production of
The Exploration of North America: A Comprehensive History, edited
in three volumes by John Allen.(27)  Virtually all of the essays
in this work emphasize the indispensable role of native guides,
interpreters, and impromptu mapmakers in helping the Euro-
American explorers of every century find their way around the
continent, ultimately to the Indians' own loss.
     Literary scholars as well as cartographers and legal
historians have analyzed the European thrust for empire.  In
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, a short but
substantial book of lectures, Stephen Greenblatt perceptively
dissects the European use of kidnapped natives, acculturated go-
betweens, and a rich discourse of wonder to take possession of
the Americas.  Representations of wonder, "the central figure in
the initial European response to the New World," Greenblatt
argues, were used primarily to "supplement legally flawed
territorial claims."  Only a few Europeans such as Montaigne, who
met his Indians in Europe, recognized themselves in the Other and
reclaimed the power of wonder "for decency as well as
domination."(28)
     Judging by the titles of conferences and books, the most
popular encounters took place between cultures, a term seldom
employed with ethnological precision but useful as a kind of
historical omnium gatherum.  One good result is that the best
Encounter conferences have been multi-disciplinary, with wide
representation from North and Latin American historians,
anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, students of
literature and language, and other scientists and social
scientists of historical bent.  Perhaps the earliest conference
of this nature occurred at Ohio State University in October 1986,
under the rubric "Early European Encounters with the Americas:
Reciprocal Influences of Cultures in Contact."  A smaller and
equally stimulating conference, "Rethinking the Encounter: New
Perspectives on Conquest and Colonization, 1450-1550," was
sponsored by the Institute of Early Contact Period Studies (a
Quincentenary foundation) at the University of Florida two years
later.  Neither conference published its heterogeneous
proceedings, but thenceforward the organizers of nearly every
conference incorporated publication plans in their budgets and
took care to achieve balance of coverage and uniformity of
quality to justify the expense and risk of publication.(29)
     The most ambitious conference to date occurred in three
parts - two in Trujillo, Spain, and the third in Albany, New York
- and involved sixty scholars, mostly Latin American experts. 
Sponsored by a Spanish foundation and the State University of New
York-Albany between 1988 and 1990, "In Word and Deed: Interethnic
Encounters and Cultural Developments in the New World" will
result in three English volumes of revised proceedings.  The
first volume, Interethnic Images: Discourse and Practice in the
New World, will appear this year.(30)
     At least four other Encounter conferences will publish - or
have already published - their proceedings.  William B. Taylor
and Franklin Pease Y have edited the results of a 1989
Smithsonian-University of Maryland conference on Violence and
Resistance in the Americas: The Legacy of Conquest, which focuses
primarily on Latin America.(31)  The Center for Early Modern
History at the University of Minnesota will publish the papers
from its innovative, international conference on "Implicit
Ethnographies: Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in
the Wake of Columbus," which took place in October 1990.  And on
the weekend before Columbus Day 1992, two ambitious symposia will
generate hefty books of proceedings.  Vanderbilt University will
host a discussion of "Transatlantic Encounters: The Discovery of
the Old World and the New"; Loyola University of Chicago will set
church scholars and ethnohistorians upon the topic "Agents of
Change: Jesuits and Encounters of Two Worlds."(32)
     The geographical and generic flexibility of the encounter
theme is apparent not only in individual papers at conferences
but also in the regional and topical focus of several
conferences, exhibitions, and books.  All these venues show the
benefits of applying the larger questions of cultural contact
generated by the Spanish experience in the Caribbean and southern
America to other parts of the continent.  In July 1992 the
National Museum of American History  will open a show and publish
a substantial companion volume called American Encounters, an
invocation of the polyglot and intersecting lifeways of the
Indian, Spanish, African, and Anglo Americans in the upper Rio
Grande Valley of New Mexico.(33)  Farther afield, Russian
America: The Forgotten Frontier, the catalogue of a traveling
exhibition sponsored by the Washington State Historical Society
and the Anchorage [Alaska] Museum of History and Art, serves to
counter the southern and eastern biases of the Quincentenary. 
Consisting of over 600 artifacts, documents, and artworks from
American, Finnish, and Soviet repositories, the exhibition and
its black-and-white guide demonstrate the "Russian America offers
a variation on the colonial pattern familiar elsewhere in North
America."(34)  Like their American rivals in the sea otter trade,
employees of the early Russian companies initially exploited the
native populations and natural resources.  But particularly after
1818, when the imperial navy assumed management of the Russian-
American Company, the few hundred Russians who inhabited the
North Pacific began to encourage native languages and customs,
support widespread education and employment of natives and mtis
in responsible positions, and conserve marine resources.  At the
same time, the Orthodox church produced devout native adherents
and dedicated missionaries, including several of native parentage
- a legacy the persists in modern Alaska.
     Scholarly discoveries have come thick and fast during the
Quincentenary.  None have been more satisfying, both visually and
intellectually, than those made by Jacqueline Peterson Swagerty,
the organizer of "Sacred Encounters: Jesuit Missionaries and the
Indians of the Rock Mountains West," scheduled to open in St.
Louis in 1993.  The exhibition is based on the discovery at
Washington State University of a remarkable collection of
watercolors and pencil and ink drawings by missionary-artist
Nicholas Point that rival the works of Carl Bodmer and George
Catiln in ethnographic detail  and artistic significance; a new
collection of early maps of the trans-Mississippi West drawn by
Father Pierre Jean De Smet, fur traders, and Indians, found in
the Jesuit Missouri Province Archives; and a rare assemblage of
liturgical and ethnographic objects discovered in a trunk in a
Belgian chateau near De Smet's birthplace.  The hundreds of Point
drawings in particular vividly depict the spiritual odyssey of
the Flathead Indians who recruited the Jesuits in St. Louis,
helped them establish the St. Mary Mission in 1841, and
syncretized Christianity with their own religion to cope with the
changes in their no-longer-isolated world.  The accompanying
catalogue will feature curators' and invited experts' essays,
with lavish, full-color illustrations.  The show will use Roman
chants, European band music (which the Jesuits introduced to
America), and the sacred smells of incense, sage, and tobacco to
evoke the religious life of the mission from both native and
missionary perspectives.
     The publication of substantial catalogues will ensure that
the educational impact of Encounter exhibitions does not end with
the closing of their tours.  But one museum will see that the
post-Columbian story of seventeenth-century Virginia has a much
longer run.  In 1990 Jamestown Settlement (formerly Jamestown
Festival Park), a state facility, opened a 30,000-square-foot
museum built explicitly around the Encounter theme.  The first
gallery introduces visitors to England on the eve of colonization
and to the European arts and goals of discovery in the newfound
lands.  In the second gallery they meet Powhatan Indian culture
as it had evolved over hundreds of years in the distinctive
ecological niche of the tidewater.  In the third gallery they see
how the conjunction of these cultures and peoples, joined
reluctantly by African slaves after 1619, created the rural world
of great and small planters, representative institutions, two
catastrophic Indian uprisings, civil war, and the social tensions
of economic and racial divisions.  Authentic reconstructions of
early Jamestown and its fort, a Powhatan village, and the three
ships of 1607, including a new Susan Constant, lend credence to
the museum's historical message.
     One happy result of the Quincentenary is renewed attention
to the global extent of cultural encounters and to the value of
studying them comparatively.  Such comparisons are capable of
generating not only social-scientific typologies but, perhaps
more broadly useful, newly angles questions to ask of our own
familiar subjects.  We invariably gain by comparing Europe's
American encounters with each other and with colonial encounters
in other parts of the world.
     Several books exist to put us in a comparative mode. 
Anthropologist Brian Fagan provides a set of detailed case
studies in Clash of Cultures, which ranges from Aztecs and Hurons
in North America to Tahitians and Maoris in the Pacific.(35)  Urs
Bitterli studies the cultural history of contact in Cultures in
Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-European Cultures,
1492-1800.(36)  Using a typology of fleeting contacts, major
collisions, and long-term relationships, he devotes chapters to
the Portuguese in Africa and Asia, the Spanish in Hispaniola, the
French in Canada, the English in Pennsylvania, Europeans in
China, and the English and French in the South Seas.  His details
are occasionally unreliable and his generalizations sometimes
suspect, but Bitterli's effort to bring major post-Columbian
encounters into comparative focus, like Fagan's, is imaginative
and salutary.
     The benefits of having a single intelligence compare
multiple encounters are partially realized in William W.
Fitzhugh's introduction to and four-part commentary on Cultures
in Contact: The Impact of European Contacts on Native American
Cultural Institutions, A.D. 1000-1800, a collection of papers
originally presented to the Anthropological Society of Washington
by historians and archaeologists.(37)  The unifying topic was the
effects of European contact, not only on material culture and
technology but on the institutions that organized native
societies.  The papers dealt with four regions: Greenland and the
Eastern Arctic, New England and New York, the Chesapeake, and
Florida and Hispaniola.  In the Arctic, fairly uniform natural
resources, geographical features, and native life-ways, when
combined with sporadic European contacts of a mostly economic
nature, produced similar effects on the native cultures.  But in
other regions, the diversity of native cultures, geographies, and
European goals, methods and societies made for a variety of
institutional effects, within as well as between regions.  These
kinds of case studies remind us that comparative history is as
likely to find salient differences of process and outcome as it
is striking similarities and that we must work equally hard to
explain both.  Cultural contacts were and are extremely complex,
and we should avoid easy or ideologically tempting noncausal
explanations such as disease, imperialism, racism, or sexism.
     All encounters had a beginning, a flashpoint of contact
where the histories, goals, and feelings of the parties
intersected to form a new entity, which in turn refashioned their
image of their individual pasts.  The study of truly first
contacts is only beginning.  My American Historical Association
(AHA) booklet, Imagining the Other: First Contacts in North
America, looks at the process from both sides of several
encounters, from Guanahan! in 1492 to the Lower Mississippi in
the early eighteenth century. (38)  I emphasize the expectations
that each side had of the other, how they defined each other in
cosmological or ethnological terms, and how power relationships
maintained or altered their initial perceptions.  Bruce Trigger
argues from somewhat different premises that, after a short
periods of contact, Indians shifted from an idiosyncratic,
relativist, romantic, religious view of the newcomers to an
objective, naturalistic, pragmatic view based on "the rational
component inherent in the mental process of every human being." 
Trigger's strong argument for the possibility of "an objective
understanding of human behavior" shaped mainly by "calculations
of individual self-interest," and "practical reason."(39)  Yet
his bold outline of interpretive choices, however dichotomized he
makes them, should prove useful in Encounter studies.
     Theories of Behavior would not loom so large if we had
better access to the thoughts and feelings, even the facial
expressions, of the natives at first contact.  We do have a few
oral traditions, some personal testimony mediated by European
informants, a few reliable drawings and paintings, and a handful
of archaeological evidence that speaks to initial Indian
responses.  These we have to cobble together and fill in the
remaining gaps with philosophical assumptions.   We would give a
great deal for sustained and full diaries by European
participant-observers, photographs, and film footage of any
initial encounter in the Americas.
     Happily, we have the next best thing: a book and film that
describe in fascinating detail the mutual discovery of white men
and the hitherto isolated Highland peoples of Papua New Guinea,
whose cultures bear a striking resemblance to those of many
groups of American Indians.  First Contact, the book and the film
by Australian filmmakers Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, tells
the story of a pair of diary-keeping, camera-carrying, Australian
gold prospectors who stumbled on the Stone Age Highlanders in the
early 1930s.(40)  The raw evidence of their mutual encounter and
their mutual responses to it was preserved by one prospector's
unusual diaries, still and moving pictures, and the vivid
memories of interviewed tribespeople, who had regarded the
intruders as reincarnated ancestors or ghosts.  After making
allowance for cultural blind spots on both sides, we cannot come
any closer to the emotional reality of America's first encounters
than by  re-experiencing those of the Papua New Guinea Highlands.
 
     Understandable, the American encounters that claim the most
attention during the Quincentenary are those between the Spanish
and the natives of the Caribbean.  (For lack of evidence and
durable effect, we give short shrift to the Norse encounters with
the Skraelings in Newfoundland around A.D. 1000.)  As Michael
Gannon has suggested, some of the most exciting and fruitful
scholarship is coming form a union of history and archaeology,
often in the same person.(41)  American archaeologists digging in
the Caribbean - most of them currently of formerly affiliated
with the Florida Museum of Natural History and the University of
Florida - are also immersed in the Spanish historical record,
printed and manuscript.  Their findings substantiate the terrible
loss of native life caused by the Spanish incursion, but they
also establish for the first time a basis for assessing the
social meanings of those losses and the changing conditions of
Spanish incursion, but they also establish for the first time a
basis for assessing the social meanings of those losses and the
changing conditions of Spanish colonial life in the half century
after Columbus's first voyage.
     The People Who Discovered Columbus: An Introduction to the
Prehistory of the Bahamas by William F. Keegan is a demanding
scientific analysis of the geography, ecology, and human lifeways
of the twenty-five islands of the Bahama archipelago, where an
estimated 80,000 Lucayans lived.(42)  Unfortunately, the book's
daunting tables, graphs, and technical terminology will prevent
it from reaching a large audience.  It needs a popularization,
because it established with unmistakable authority the
sociocultural baseline of Lucayan life that was so thoroughly
destroyed within a short generation - so quickly that Columbus
was the only European to record firsthand observations of it.  In
1509 King Ferdinand ordered the wholesale deportation of Lucayan
slaves to meet Hispaniola's severe shortage of native labor. 
Amerigo Vespucci forcibly stole 232 natives when he left for
Spain in 1500.  Between 1502 and 1520, when the Lucayans were
finally exterminated, an estimated 400 caravel loads were needed
to remove some 40,000 people from the islands.
     More accessible because it relies primarily on written
documents is Samuel M. Wilson's brief narrative ethnohistory,
Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus.(43) 
Wilson describes how the perhaps one million Ta!nos of the island
were divided into cacicazgos or chiefdoms of dozens of villages,
ruled by hereditary caciques who directed the manioc-based
economy of their people and played a central role in mediating
between their subjects' physical and spiritual worlds.  When the
Spanish invaded, some caciques allied themselves with the
newcomers in order to expand or consolidate their bases of power:
others saw the handwriting on the wall more clearly and launched
armed uprisings against the usurpers.  In the end, neither tactic
was successful, and native culture was obliterated by the
combined effects of disease, oppression, and starvation.  By
1540, the Ta!nos were nearly extinct.
     For lack of anything sounder, Wilson provisionally accepts
R. A. Zambardino's estimate of one million Hispaniolans in 1492,
while noting the critiques and cautions of Carl Ortwin Sauer and
David Henige.(44)  Only an archaeological survey of native sites
in Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) will endow
population estimates, which range from 60,000 to 14.5 million,
with credibility.  As John Daniels shows,  estimates of Indian
populations in the Americas have been steadily on the rise,
especially (and not coincidentally) since the 1960s and the
deadly and unpopular Vietnam War.(45)  The escalating body count
of the war, together with a historiographical shift toward social
and quantitative history that focused on the inarticulate victims
of the past, fueled the inflation of native losses to implausible
heights.  It was as though we could not bring ourselves  to
condemn the moral enormities of the past without an accompaniment
of numerical enormities.
     The Quincentenary trend toward condemnation of the evils of
Columbian, Spanish, European, and Western imperialism, racism,
and genocide will do nothing to dampen our moral enthusiasm for
huge native numbers.  We have yet to outgrow our fondness for the
hectoring bishop of Chiapas, Las Casas, and the "Black Legend" of
exceptional Spanish cruelty that his writings helped create.  But
it is time we did so; until we do, we will not be able to get the
whole complex story straight or to render fair and impartial
judgment upon all of the participants, "winners" and well as
"losers," Spaniards as well as Ta!nos.  To do any less is to
abnegate our most important duties as historians, amateur or
professional.(46)
     The lives of ordinary Spanish settlers in the Caribbean are
also being reconstructed by historians and archaeologists.  The
first Spanish settlement was La Navidad on the northern coast of
Haiti, where the Santa Maria broke up on Christmas Eve, 1492. 
With timbers from the ship the Spanish built a fortified
enclosure, complete with moat, palisade, and probably a
watchtower, in the heart of the nearest Ta!no town.  The local
cacique, Guacanagar!, not only helped the sailors salvage their
goods but stored the goods in his own house and them gave the
house to them as the centerpiece of their fort.  When Columbus
sailed back to Spain, he left behind thirty-nine men, who were
directed to collect gold in the region.  When he returned the
following year, the men were dead, the fort had been burned to
the ground, and its supplies were scattered far and wide.
     Since 1983 a University of Florida team under the direction
of Kathleen A. Deagan had been excavating a large native/Spanish
site in northern Haiti called En Bas Saline, which was located by
Dr. William Hodges, a medical missionary and avocational
archaeologist.  In addition to vast amounts of native material,
excavations to date have uncovered the burned remains of a
substantial wooden and clay daub structure, eighteen European
artifacts dating to the Columbian era, and, in a well nearby, the
teeth of a European pig and a rat bone.  Isotopic analysis of the
teeth concluded that the pig was raised near Seville in Spain. 
Both animals probably disembarked while La Navidad was being
unintentionally founded by Columbus.(47)
     Less than a mile from En Bas Saline are the ruins of Puerto
Real, a Spanish town on the edge of cattle country occupied from
1503 to 1578.  Four hundred years after the town's population was
relocated to quash its hide smuggling with Spain's enemies,
University of Florida archaeologists began to dig there, making
it the most extensively excavated site of initial European
occupation in the Caribbean.  The town was laid out in a grid
pattern, which Spanish law eventually mandated for all colonial
towns.  The central plaza was surrounded by a cathedral,
festooned with large limestone gargoyles, and other public
buildings, some fortified.  Of the fifty-seven masonry structures
detected by survey, only the foundations of the cathedral, a
cemetery, three domestic buildings, and, down wind from most of
the town, a beef-and-hide-processing workshop have been
thoroughly exposed and studied.(48)
     In this bovine utopia, beef and pork (from fast-breeding
imported pigs rather than local species) were the faunal staples
of the colonists' diet, accounting for 95 percent of the fleshy
intake.(49)  Pond turtles and fish were the major dietary
adaptations of the Catholic settlers, whose church calendar
officially prescribed 166 meatless days.  By contrast, the faunal
diet of the natives at neighboring En Bas Saline was 68 percent
fish and only 20 percent mammal.  Fragments of Ta!no-style
ceramic griddles suggest that early in the town's history native
women baked cassava bread made from manioc.  Large amounts of
crude, unglazed "colono-ware," often made in Hispanic shapes but
from local materials and with non-Hispanic decorations, also
confirm a major hypothesis about Spanish acculturation on the
Americas - namely, that  "Spanish domestic adaptive strategy was
consistently based on the incorporation of unmodified Indian
cultural elements in kitchen activities, probably through Indian
mates.  This resulted in a genuinely new, multicultural
expression that ultimately crystallized as New World criollo
culture and stands in sharp contrast to Anglo-American
culture."(50)  When the native population was exterminated,
particularly after the islandwide smallpox epidemic of 1518-1519,
African slaves replaced local Ta!no and enslaved Lucayan women
from the Bahamas in the kitchens, a transition reflected in the
colono-wares.
     A second, increasingly confirmed hypothesis about the
"Spanish colonial pattern" is that, although first Indian and
later African cultural elements were readily incorporated in
socially nonvisible, infrastructural areas such as diet and food
preparation, which were the province of women, visible symbols of
social identification such as architecture, tableware, and
personal adornment remained characteristically Spanish because
they were dominated by men.  The presence of rectangular Iberian-
style buildings (Ta!no bohios were circular), metal lacing tips
and buckles for Spanish-style clothing, ornate brass and enamel
book clasps, traditional majolica vessels with owner's stamps,
and delicate glass goblets lend strong support to this useful
observation, which had its origins in Deagan's extensive study of
Spanish St. Augustine.(51)
     The Spanish were not the only Europeans to leave their
cultural mark on the Caribbean.  In Caribbean Encounters: The
Meeting of European and Island  Carib Cultures, 1492-1763, Philip
Boucher describes English and French contacts and conflicts with
the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, believed by Columbus and all
but the most recent scholarship to be fierce cannibals.(52) 
Boucher puts the lie to this belief and explains why the Caribs
sided with the French in the colonial wars beginning in 1666. 
Through missionaries and coureurs des iles - fishermen, hunters,
trappers, and traders - who spoke the Carib language and
appreciated Carib war tactics, the French wove a strong web of
contact with the natives, which the English could never
duplicate.  And when English freebooters and vigilantes provoked
the Caribs into conflict, the more centralized French colonial
administration kept its colonists in line and conflicts to a
minimum.  The sad irony is that the land hunger of both French
and English led to the brutal removal of the Caribs from most of
the islands by the eighteenth century, just as European
philosophers were beginning to romanticize them.
     Another important growth industry of the Quincentenary is
the study of the Spanish borderlands, once made famous by Herbert
Bolton and his legions of graduate students and now enjoying a
renaissance, particularly in the understudied southeast.(53) 
What is emerging from the new scholarship is the crucial
importance of the sixteenth century in North American history for
both colonists and natives.  That formative century was filled
with Spanish activity - coastal explorations, entradas, mission
foundations, failed and enduring colonies, town building,
defensive wars with European competitors, and long series of
cultural engagements with native peoples, sometimes as sovereign
allies or enemies, more often as tributaries and subjects.  In
the process, native societies were radically reshaped by warfare,
enslavement, resettlement, disease, Christian proselytizing,
material novelties, intermarriage, and a host of other
acculturative forces.  The French and English colonizers who
followed later in the century found their tasks lightened or
burdened by the conditions - geopolitical, demographic, and
emotional - created by previous Spanish-Indian encounters.  If
the Spanish had magically disappeared from North America in 1599,
that legacy alone would make the history of the borderlands a
major key to the history of colonial America.
     So much scholarship has been produced since the publication
of John Francis Bannon's ethnocentric and (for the date)
curiously old-fashioned The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513-
1821 (1970) that a new synthesis has been needed.  David J. Weber
has produced a brilliant one in The Spanish Frontier in North
America, 1513-1821, which makes the Indians as central to the
plot as the Spanish.(54)  For the eastern borderlands Paul E.
Hoffman has written a detailed, archivally based synthesis
entitled A New Andaluc!a and a Way to the Orient: The American
Southeast during the Sixteenth Century.  He emphasized the
motivational role of Lucas V zquez de Ayll"n's tale of Chicora, a
promised land of abundance and wealth somewhere in the present-
day southeast, and Giovanni da Verrazano's tale of an eastern
isthmus leading to the Pacific.  "All the explorations and the
attempts at colonization by the Spanish, French, and English" in
the sixteenth century, he argues, "were linked by the belief of
their leaders and promoters in these two legends from the 1520s
as they had been altered over the decades."  Hoffman also
explains in often painful detail "how men's hopes and wishes for
North America were contradicted by the difficult reality of the
coastal zone of the southeast."(55)
     For the general reader, Jerald T. Milanich and Susan
Milbrath have edited a sumptuously illustrated set of thirteen
essays on First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean
and the United States, 1492-1570, partly to accompany a traveling
exhibition prepared by the Florida Museum of Natural History.(56) 
Nine essays are devoted to greater La Florida: Hernando de Soto's
entrada in 1539-1543, the Trist n de Luna expedition of 1559-
1561, the founding of St. Augustine by Pedro Mendez in 1565, and
the effects of these and other incursions upon the natives.  Ten
essays were written by historical archaeologists, who not only
broaden but often rewrite the histories of encounter from
subterranean evidence.
     Hernando de Soto's wandering route through the southeast is
a case in point.  In 1939 the U.S. De Soto Expedition Commission,
chaired by John R. Swanton, published its final report on the
route taken by the Spaniards from Tampa Bay through the southern
interior to the Mississippi.(57)  Once Swanton's line of march
left Florida, however, it proved to be almost all wrong.  The
commission lacked three crucial types of evidence that have
matured only in the last few decades: historical geography (the
landscape has been substantially altered by human use since the
sixteenth century), documentation from other sixteenth-century
Spanish expeditions that revisited native towns on de Soto's
route, and archaeology of native sites just before and after
contact.
     By combining these sources with contemporary accounts of the
expedition and modern topographical maps, Charles Hudson and a
number of colleagues have totally reconstructed de Soto's route,
piece by piece.  Hudson and Milanich have collaborated on a
readable and ingenious narrative of Hernando De Soto and the
Indians of Florida, and Hudson, Chester B. DePratter, and Marvin
T. Smith have summarized their reconstruction of the whole route
in First Encounters.(58)  In addition to giving us historical
accuracy, their reconstruction enables us to assess the entrada's
full impact on the native southeast because de Soto and his
comrades were the first Europeans to encounter the impressive
Indian chiefdoms in the interior and virtually the last to see
them at the apex of their development and power.  In the
following decades, the social disorder and depopulation unleashed
by imported disease and the military ruthlessness of the entrada
sent these hierarchical chiefdoms into decline and eventual
collapse.(59)
     As an offshoot of his de Soto research, Hudson has also
written the ethnohistory of The Juan Pardo Expeditions:
Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568, with
Hoffman's editions and translations of four known and three
primary documents.(60)  These narratives have value as windows on
Spanish-Indian relations; they are also important because Pardo
visited at least five of the towns visited by de Soto.  For
archaeologists the documents are useful for the detailed lists of
trade goods that the Spaniard gave to the townspeople along their
routes.  These goods help archaeologists date the occupation of
native sites in order to measure cultural change accurately.  Two
useful collections of scholarly essays by historians and
archaeologists also put the sixteenth century on the
historiographical map.  The Forgotten Centuries: European and
Indians in the American South, 1513-1704, edited by Hudson and
Carmen McClendon, is the result of an NEH Summer Institute for
College Teachers held at the University of Georgia in 1989.(61) 
More ambitious in scope and content are three volumes edited by
David Hurst Thomas under the general title Columbian
Consequences.  Volume one is devoted to interdisciplinary
perspectives on the Spanish borderlands west, from Baja
California to East Texas.  Two Indian scholars discuss the
survival strategies employed by their ancestors in coping with
the European invaders.  In the second volume, forty-five scholars
dissect the southeastern borderlands in three sections: the de
Soto entrada, the impact of Spanish colonization in the southeast
and the Caribbean, and the Spanish missions of La Florida. 
Volume three places the borderlands in pan-American perspective,
assesses recent breakthroughs in the demography of contact, and
takes a sobering look at previous Columbian observances.  All
three volumes make a bow to the general reader by heading each
section with a substantial overview designed to make the
succeeding specialized chapters accessible.(62)
     Discoveries of new documents and improved translations of
known ones are also extending our understanding of the
borderlands.  James E. Kelley, Jr., one of the editor-translators
of Columbus's diario, retranslated Herrera's unique narrative of
Juan Ponce de Leon's Discovery of Florida to inform Douglas
Peck's re-creation of the voyage in June 1990.  The new text is
augmented by critical essays by David Henige, Oliver Dunn, Donald
McGuirk, and Peck himself.(63)  The University of Alabama Press
will soon publish new translations of three of the four known
accounts of the de Soto entrada and a fragment of a fifth
recently found in Seville by Eugene Lyons, along with an
excellent older translation of the fourth.(64)  Finally, Ignacio
Avellaneda has patiently assembled and collated the known facts
about 257 of the 300-plus survivors of the de Soto entrada who
sailed to New Spain in 1543.  Partly from a recently discovered
list of 700 volunteers who left Spain with de Soto in 1538,
Avellaneda concludes that the typical conquistador with de Soto
was
 
     a male Spaniard born either in Extremadura or Castilla, 24
     years old at the beginning of the expedition, and literate
     or at least knew how to sign his name.  He was most likely a
     commoner by birth and, in a few cases, an hidalgo.  Not
     being a military leader or an administrator, his chances of
     survival were reduced to roughly fifty percent.  From 
     Florida he went to the port of P nuco in New Spain, and 
     most likely he arrived in the great city of Tenochtitlan 
     which was subsequently renamed Mexico City.  He remained in
     Mexico or proceeded to Peru, married a daughter of a known 
     conqueror and settled down.(65)
 
     We can expect many more documentary discoveries after 1992
because of two major efforts to collect and make accessible in
the United States copies of relevant records in Spanish archives. 
With multiple sponsors in Spain and the United States, the
Institute of Early Contact Period Studies has undertaken a
massive job of copying on laser disk the complete archives of
noble Spanish families that had a role in the colonization of the
Americas.  The first archive copied was that of the condes of
Revillagigedo, the family that founded Florida in 1565 and
provided the most important viceroys of Mexico.  Next in line are
the papers of the duques of Infantado, among which Martin de
Navarrete discovered Las Casas's abridged copy of Columbus's
diario in 1715 and Eugene Lyon recently found a previously
unknown Columbus (Col"n) genealogy.  To make archival collections
such as these more accessible to scholars, the Library of
Congress, the AHA, and the NEH sponsored a conference of
librarians, archivists, scholarly users, and technical experts to
plan a survey of reproduced documents from Spanish and Latin
America archives already in United States libraries.  That survey
is now underway at the Library of Congress.
 
     The multiplication of texts and documents, official and
unofficial, raises two general questions about the colonial
history of the Americas: whose history is it, and how is it to be
written?  Historians could well profit during the Quincentenary
and beyond from the work of literary scholars who study "colonial
discourse."  The new study of colonial discourse is perhaps only
ten or fifteen years old, but its intellectual roots lie in the
anticolonial, ngritude writers of the 1930s and 1940s and its
crystallization in Edward W. Said's Orientalism (1978).(66)  With
more recent borrowings from Continental post-structuralism,
students of colonial discourse hold that the dichotomies between
Europe/Third World and self/other, like civilized/savage before
them, are not ontologically given by nature but historically
constituted by the colonizing West.  "Minorities" are the
creations of power politics; they are cultural, not simply
numerical, inferiors.  Colonial powers define the world according
to their best interests, not lights; their canonical judgements
of literature, humanity, and civilization are grounded in
dominance, not in superior morality or knowledge.  Colonial
writing, therefore, is an instrument of the colonizing process,
not objective, disinterested reportage.  In such circumstances,
the history of the colonization and conquest of the Americas
remains a hegemonic monologue, incomplete, self-serving and
suspect.(67)
     To remedy these deficiencies, students of colonial discourse
would advise all of us who use colonial texts and documents to
make several changes in our assumptions and procedures.  First,
we should realize that "the native - colonized or indomitable -
stands always at the heart of colonial writings, even when not
explicitly mentioned," for it was the native's land, life, and
labor that were at issue.(68)  Second, to rewrite the history of
the Americas, "to find the buried roots of its culture," we must
retrace the lost steps, listen to other voices that could have
related the history of a truly new world, not of the specious
discovery of the invaders' own dreams, desires, and errors.  For
Hispanic America particularly, where the conquest was so total
and sudden, we must strive to resurrect the submerged sound of
resistance: "the lying captives, the false guides and informants,
the tireless weavers of fables, myths, and lies."(69)
     To recapture America's reality, we need to conceive of
colonial literary culture "not as a series on monuments but as a
web of negotiations taking place in a living society."  The
notion of canonical literature should give way to that of
discourse, polyvocal and interactive.(70)  As Aim Csaire put
it, "no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on
strength/ and there is room for everyone at the convocation of
conquest."(71)  We must also pay close attention to the "locus of
enunciation" from which observers - and we ourselves as
historians - understand and articulate the colonial situation,
for no one born of a particular culture and time has a completely
innocent eye.(72)  Finally, in opening our ears to the voice of
the Other, we should suspend traditional literary categories and
genres and aesthetic criteria to admit native forms of discourse
that do not necessarily fit Western paradigms.(73)  Most natives
were speakers, not writers, and oral discourse has rules and
measures different from those of literacy.  Several native
cultures had sophisticated nonalphabetic writing systems, while
others employed simpler pictographs to the same end.  Failing to
understand the natives in their own terms, the colonists
simultaneously lost part of their own identity in "the
irreducible challenge of the Other."(74)  After five centuries,
we should not continue to run the same risk.
 
     No whirlwind tour of Quincentenary scholarship would be
complete without reference to work on the impact of the Americas
upon Europe and the rest of the world - the closing of the
Columbian circle.  With few exceptions, the best work on the
influence of the New World predated the Quincentenary.  In 1970
J. H. Elliott published his brilliant Wiles Lectures at Queen's
University, Belfast, on the "uncertain impact" of Hispanic
America on Europe before 1650.  "In material terms," he argued,
the Old World "had gained much from America; in spiritual and
intellectual terms it had gained less....Europeans had discovered
something about the world around them, and a good deal more about
themselves.  Ironically, the impact of this discovery was blunted
by the very extent and completeness of their successes overseas"
because they "ministered to the vanity of Europe," which was
"unlikely to show itself unduly receptive to new impressions and
experiences."  Only another, dissident Europe would continue to
turn to America as a source of inspiration and hope.  "For if
America nurtured Europe's ambitions, it also kept its dreams
alive."(75)
     In 1975, as if to expand Elliott's measured conclusion,
Gern n Arcinieg 's panoramic America in Europe: A History of the
New World in Reverse appeared in Spanish.  Translated in 1986 for
the English-speaking Quincentenary audience, it makes the
unabashed claim that "with America, the modern world begins. 
Scientific progress begins, philosophy thrives.  By means of
America, Europe acquires a new dimension and emerges from its
shadows."(76)  Similarly, the same year, William Brandon argued
that "the New World insidiously engraved upon the Old World -
especially via seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France -
changes as profound in some respects as those suffered by the
New" and that "garbled influences from the New World are in fact
ascendant in certain noteworthy areas of social thought in our
present world."(77)
     The most comprehensive treatment of the question is still
First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old,
edited by the late Fredi Chiappelli and published in 1976 in two
volumes.(78)  This work presents fifty-five papers from an
important conference at the University of California, Los
Angeles, covering perceptions, governance of the new lands,
international politics, the arts, books, language, geography,
movements of people, and science and trade.  Its collective
contribution will not soon be superseded.  Our understanding of
the intellectual consequences of discovery was greatly enhanced
by a five-day conference on "America in European  Consciousness,
1493-1750," at the John Carter Brown Library (JCBL) in June 1991. 
Geoffrey V. Scammell's claim that the "experiences of empire, in
which the Americas loomed so large, intensified or exacerbated a
number of ominous traits long present in European civilization,
most notably absolutism, racism, and tolerance," serves as a
useful check on Arciniegas's and Brandon's assertions of
America's unique force for good in the world.  David Cressy also
pricks the New World bubble by arguing that "English appreciation
of America in the colonial period ranged from ignorance to
indifference, from misapprehension to benign (and not so benign)
neglect...Generations of colonial development did little to
enhance understanding or appreciation of America in the minds of
the majority of Englishmen."(79)
     That the divination of America's impact of Europe was far
from finished became obvious with the publication of European
Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe
Relating to the Americas, 1493-1776 by the JCBL.(80)  If they do
nothing else, the guide's 32,000 entries will stand as a
challenge to scholars who like their research neat and narrow and
their generalizations high and wide.  Dennis Channing Landis,
editor of the collection, provides an inviting glimpse of it in
The Literature of the Encounter: A Selection of Books from
European Americana, the catalogue of an exhibition mounted for
the JCBL conference in 1991.  The printed and pictorial contents
of sixty-one titles receive substantial and first-class
treatment.(81)
 
     It comes as a pleasant surprise that the quality as well as
the quantity of Quincentenary scholarship is very high.  With few
exceptions, scholars, publishers, and museums have resisted the
temptation to capitalize on the bullish Columbian market with
junk.  Colleges and universities have done almost as well.  The
task now is to ensure that the benefits accrued during the five-
hundredth anniversary of Columbus's landing continue to pay
educational and cultural dividends long after the event.  What
should we do beyond 1992 to maintain and augment our
Quincentenary gains?  My survey of the Columbian Encounter fields
suggests the following prescriptions:
     (1) We should focus on Columbus as a man of extraordinary
vision, perseverance, skill, and luck but a man nonetheless -
flawed and imperfect like all men.  Rather than caricaturing him
as an oversized hero or villain, we should see him in full
perspective, pre- and post-1492, and measure him primarily
against the men, ideas, and mores of his own time.
     (2) We should pay more attention to Europe on the eve of
colonization as the locus of experience, goals, and methods for
the American incursions.
     (3) We should pay much more attention to precontact America:
its complexity, variety, demography, and deep reservoirs of human
experience.  We should make greater efforts to really hear native
voices from the past and in the present, not only for Clio's sake
but to advance our own necessary and liberating education in
otherness.(82)
     (4) In our writing and teaching of colonial history, we
should rescue the sixteenth century from undeserved neglect. 
Without it, we have no hope of making sense of its more familiar
sequel.(83)
     (5) We must learn to do justice to Hispanic America, first
by ridding ourselves of the Black Legend and then by pursuing its
history beyond the short conquest phase into the less sanguinary
settlement period of city building, imperial bureaucracy, sugar
plantations, cattle ranches, and widespread acculturation.(84) 
We should also do a better job of integrating the Spanish
borderlands with the histories of North America and the United
States.
     (6) By the same token, we should incorporate the history of
the Caribbean, where Europe often fought its intercolonial wars
before landing on North American soil, because the sugar islands
were so valuable to the mother countries.(85)
     (7) We should continue to pay attention to the role of
diseased and biological imperialism in the conquest and
depopulation of the Americas.  But we should refine our estimates
of mortality to accord with the best available evidence and with
common sense.(86)
     (8) While well-publicized historical anniversaries
invariably provide occasions for them, we should curb the
temptation to make premature, or worse, predetermined moral
judgements on the past.  There will be time enough after we have
done our homework thoroughly.(87)
     (9) Whenever possible, we should resort to the insights and
viewpoints of other disciplines, such as anthropology,
archaeology, ethnohistory, cartography, historical geography, and
colonial discourse.  Even the historical fiction of Latin
American novelists such as Abel Posse, Alejo Carpentier, and
Antonio Ben!tez-Rojo stretches the imaginative limits of our
understanding of the Spanish and Indian heritages of that first,
vast, other America.(88)
     (10) On a similar tack, we should employ whenever possible a
comparative perspective on the American Encounter - comparing
French, Spanish, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, and Russian
efforts with each other and American efforts with colonial
efforts in other parts of the world - in order to separate the
unique from the typical.
     (11) The well-modulated public and scholarly success of the
Quincentenary should inspire us to design future historical
anniversaries as opportunities less for celebration than for
cerebration.  We must also be very careful about who is included
in, and who feels excluded from, "We the People."  Ethnic,
gender, and racial sensitivities are likely to grow; parity of
treatment and attention - and, perhaps as important, the
appearance of parity - must be extended to all citizens, past and
present.  We can start by rethinking our historical vocabulary:
Old and New World, discover, discovery, Indian, Amerindian,
America, American, Latin America and the West are factually,
morally, or culturally problematic.
     (12) Finally, we should all study to become better citizens
of the "global village" we now inhabit, the foundations of which
Columbus laid in 1492.  If we do not learn to protect, respect,
and sustain its people and to conserve and renew its resources,
it will be much poorer when the Columbian sexcentenary occurs. 
Perhaps some of the lessons we draw from our study of the first
Encounter will prevent such a fate.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                            ENDNOTES
     James Axtell is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the College
of William and Mary and chairman of the American Historical
Association's Columbus Quincentenary Committee.
 
     1. Lemisch, "Bicentennial Schlock". New Republic, CLXXV
(Nov. 6, 1976), 21-23.
     2. Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-
Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of
History and Literature (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 75,99; A
Survey of College Seniors: Knowledge of History and Literature,
conducted for the National Endowment for the Humanities
(Princeton, N.J.: The Gallup Organization, 1989).
     3. Kenneth J. Cooper, "Test Suggests Students Lack Grasp of
Civics," Washington Post, Apr. 3, 1990, A5; Ravitch and Finn,
What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? 265.
     4. First off the press was 1992: A Columbus Newsletter,
edited by Foster Provost for the John Carter Brown Library.  1992
specialized in scholarly news: conferences, learned society
meetings, reviews of foreign and domestic books about Columbus. 
Then came the more comprehensive quarterly Encuentro, published
in English by the Latin American Institute at the University of
New Mexico until the winter of 1988, when a glossier, less-
focused magazine called Encounter took its place with new support
from the Spain '92 Foundation.  Encuentro was quickly joined by
an even more inclusive Spanish-English newsletter sponsored by
the Organization of American States and Ohio State University,
Quincentennial of the Discovery of America: Encounter of Two
Worlds (Quinto Centenario del Descubrimiento de America:
Encuentro de Dos Mundos), which has appeared up to six times a
year.  Appropriately, it covers many activities in Latin America
- some scholarly, most official - that the other newsletters
underreport.
     5. Raymond D. Fogelson, "The Red Man in the White City," in
David Hurst Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, vol. 3: The
Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), chap. 4; Ricardo
Gonzalez Leandri, "Cr"nica de un desencuentro," 92 America,
Revista del Quinto Centenario, No. 6 (Oct.-Dec. 1990), 85-88;
Report of the United States Commission to the Columbian
Historical Exposition at Madrid, 1892-93 (Washington, D.C.,
1895).
     6. "500 Years: Preliminary Results of a Quincentenary
Survey," Northeast Indian Quarterly, VII (Fall 1990), 21-22.
     7. George P. Horse Capture, "An American Indian
Perspective," in Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, eds.,
Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration (Washington D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 186-207; NEIQ, VII (Fall
1990), 37-46.
     8. NEIQ, VI (Winter, 1987), V (Spring 1988)-VI
(Spring/Summer 1989).
     9. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., "Native Americans and United
States History," in William H. Cartwright and Richard L. Watson,
Jr., eds., The Reinterpretation of American History and Culture
(Washington, D.C.: National Council for the Social Studies,
1973), 37-52.
     10. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas
Transformed the World (New York: Crown, 1988); Native Roots, How
the Indians Enriched America (New York: Crown, 1991).
     11. (New York: Facts on File, 1986).
     12. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1986).
     13. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). The Newberry Library
also sponsored an exhibition, lecture series, and teachers'
workshops in conjunction with the publication of the book.
     14. (New York: Facts on File. 1990).
     15. (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991).
     16 "Museums and Politics: The Spirit Sings and the Lubicon
Boycott," Muse (Autumn 1988), 12-16.
     17. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart for the Glenbow Museum.
1987), 7.
     18. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988).
     19. (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 
The Mesoamerican volume is being edited by R.E.W. Adams and Murdo
J. MacLeod; Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz are supervising
the South American volume.
     20. Viola and Margolis, eds., Seeds of Change.
     21. (Forthcoming).
     22. For other Quincentenary projects in Indian history
supported by the NEH see Malcolm Richardson, "1992 Opportunities
for Indian History," History News, XLV, No. 3 (May-June 1990) 10-
11.
     23. (Edmonton, Can.: University of Alberta Press, 1989);
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 325.  See also
Patricia Seed, "Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing
the Authority of Overseas Empires," William and Mary Quarterly,
3d Ser., XLIX (April 1992).
     24. Harley, Maps and the Columbian Encounter: An
Interpretive Guide to the Travelling Exhibition (Milwaukee, Wis.:
Golda Meir Library, University of Wisconsin, 1990) xii, 56;
Harley, "Deconstructing the Map," Cartographica, XXVI (Summer
1989), 1-20.
     25. The catalogue of the same title was published in
Portland by the Maine Humanities Council in 1988.
     26. (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1990).
     27. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming).
     28. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14, ix,
25.
     29. Bruce G. Trigger had published his thought-provoking
paper from the Florida conference, "Early Native North American
Responses to European Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic
Interpretations," Journal of American History, LXXVII (1991),
1195-1215.
     30. Edited by Gary H. Gossen and J. Jorge Klor de Alva
(Albany, N.Y., and Austin, Tex.: Institute of Mesoamerican
Studies and University of Texan Press, 1992).
     31. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
forthcoming).
     32. An exception to the rule is the National Museum of
American History's April 1989 symposium, "After Columbus:
Encounters in North America," whose papers were, however useful, 
apparently too eclectic to publish.
     33. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
forthcoming).
     34. Barbara Sweetland Smith and Redmond J. Barnett, eds.
(Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 1990), 9.  A more
sumptuous but less historical catalogue Soft Gold: The Fur Trade
& Cultural Exchange on the Northwest Coast of America by Thomas
Vaughan and Bill Holm (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1982,
1990), accompanied a joint Oregon Historical Society-Peabody
Museum (Harvard) exhibition in 1982 and was revised in 1990 to
contribute to the Quincentenary.
     35. (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1982).
     36. Ritchie Robertson, trans. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1989).
     37. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).
     38. Essays on the Columbian Encounter (Washington, D.C.:
American Historical Association, 1991).  See also my After
Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chaps. 8,9.
     39. Trigger, "Early Native North American Responses to
European Contact," 1210 (emphasis added), 1197, 1195.
     40. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987).  Edward L. Schieffelin
and Robert Crittenden's Like People You See in a Dream: First
Contact in Six Papuan Societies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1991) is a similar reconstruction of a 1935
expedition's first encounter.
     41. Gannon, "The New Alliance of History and Archaeology in
the Eastern Spanish Borderlands," WMQ, 3d Ser., XLIX (April
1992).
     42. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992). 
Keegan has also edited Earliest Hispanic/Native American
Interactions in the Caribbean (New York: Garland, 1992), number
13 of a 27-volume set of article reprints, Spanish Borderlands
Sourcebooks, ed. David Hurst Thomas.
     43. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990).
     44. Henige, "On the Contact Population of Hispaniola:
History as Higher Mathematics," Hispanic American Historical
Review, LVIII (1978), 217-237; Zambardino, "Critique of David
Henige's 'On the Contact Population of Hispaniola: History as
Higher Mathematics,'" ibid., 700-708; "David Henige's Reply,"
ibid., 709-712; Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1966), 198-204.
     45. Daniels, "The Indian Population of North America in
1492," WMQ, 3d Ser., XLIX (April 1992).
     46. Axtell, "Moral Reflections on the Columbian Legacy,"
Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
     47. Deagan, "The Search for La Navidad, Columbus's 1492
Settlement," in Jerald T. Milanich and Susan Milbrath, eds.,
First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the
United States, 1492-1570 (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 1989), 41-54; Deagan, "Initial Encounters: Arawak
Responses to European Contact at the En Bas Saline Site, Haiti,"
in Donald Y. Gerace, comp., Columbus and His World: Proceedings /
First San Salvador Conference, held October 30-November 3, 1986,
at the College Center of the Finger Lakes, Bahamian Field
Station, San Salvador Island, Bahamas (Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.: The
Station, 1987), 341-359.
     48. Deagan, "The Archaeology of the Spanish Contact Period
in the Caribbean," Journal of World Prehistory, II (1988), 211-
216; Charles R. Ewen, "The Rise and Fall of Puerto Real," in
Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, vol. 2: Archaeological and
Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 261-268;
Ewen and Maurice W. Williams, "Puerto Real: Archaeology of an
Early Spanish Town," in Milanich and Milbrath, eds., First
Encounters, 66-76; Deagan, ed., Puerto Real: The Archaeology of a
Sixteenth-Century Spanish Town in Hispaniola (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992).
     49. Ewen, From Spaniard to Creole: The Archaeology of
Cultural Formation at Puerto Real, Haiti (Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press, 1991), 4.
     50. Deagan, "Accommodation and Resistance: The Process and
Impact of Spanish Colonization in the Southeast," in Thomas, ed.,
Columbian Consequences, II, 309.
     51. Ewen, From Spaniard to Creole, 46, 73, 79, 82-83;
Deagan, Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial
Creole Community (New York: Academic Press, 1983).  See also
Deagan, Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the
Caribbean, 1500-1800, vol 1: Ceramics, Glassware, and Beads
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987).
     52. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
forthcoming).
     53. David J. Weber, Myth and the History of the Hispanic
Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988),
chaps. 3,4.
     54. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
     55. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990),
x,xi.
     56. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1989).
     57. Swanton, Final Report of the United States De Soto
Expedition Commission, 76th Cong., 1st sess., House Doc. 71,
(Washington, D.C., 1939).  In 1985 the Smithsonian Institution
Press issued a reprint with an update of de Soto studies by
Jeffrey Brian.
     58. (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida,
forthcoming); "Hernando de Soto's Expedition through the Southern
United States," in Milanich and Milbrath, eds., First Encounters,
chap. 6; see also ibid., chaps. 7,8,10, for related aspects of
the entrada, such as the damage inflicted by Spanish swords and
the diagnostic value of the trade goods left along the route.
     59. Marvin T. Smith, Archaeology of Aboriginal Culture
Change in the Interior Southeast: Depopulation during the Early
Historic Period (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1987);
Robert L. Blakely, ed., The King Site: Continuity and Contact in
Sixteenth-Century Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1988).
     60. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).
     61. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, forthcoming).
     62. Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, vol. 1:
Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish
Borderlands West (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1989).  Thomas has also published museum reports on and a
popular summary of his own discovery and excavation of the
Spanish mission of Santa Catalina de Guale on St. Catherines
Island off the Georgia coast.  The summary and a film produced by
the Georgia Endowment for the Humanities are both entitled St.
Catherines: An Island in Time (Atlanta, Ga., 1988).
     63. (forthcoming).
     64. Lawrence A. Clayton and  Vernon J. Knight, eds., The De
Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to the United
States, 1539-1543, 2 vols. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, forthcoming).
     65. Los Sobrevivientes de la Florida: The Survivors of The
De Soto Expedition, ed. Bruce S. Chappell, Research Publications
of the P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, No. 2
(Gainesville: University of Florida Libraries, 1990), 74.
     66. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 
Peter Hulme, "Subversive Archipelagos: Colonial Discourse and the
Break-up of Continental Theory," Dispositio, XIV, Nos. 36-38
(1989), 1-23.
     67. Hulme, "Subversive Archaeology"; Said, "Representing the
Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors," Critical Inquiry, XV
(1989), 205-225; Benita Parry, (1987), 27-58; Beatriz Pastor,
"Silence and Writing: The History of the Conquest," in Ren Jara
and Nicholas Spandaccini, eds., 1492-1992: Re/Discovering
Colonial Writings, Hispanic Issues, IV (1989), 121-163; Abdul
JanMohamed and David Lloyd, "Introduction: Toward a Theory of
Minority Discourse," Cultural Critique, VI (Spring 1987), 5-12.
     68. Rolena Adorno, "New Perspectives in Colonial Spanish
American Library Studies," Journal of the Southwest, XXXII
(1990), 173-191, quotation on 181.
     69. Pastor, "Silence and Writing," 147.
     70. Adorno, "New Perspectives," 173.
     71. Aim Csaire, The Collected Poetry, trans, Clayton
Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1983), 77.
     72. Walter D. Mignolo, "Afterword," to "Colonial Discourse,"
ed. Adorno and Mignolo, Dispositio, XIV, Nos. 36-38 (1989), 335;
Said, "Representing the Colonized," 211-214.
     73. Adorno, "New Perspectives," 184; Hulme, Colonial
Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London:
Methuen, 1986), xiii, 9-10.  The practice of students of colonial
discourse is even more impressive than their preaching.  On their
recovery of native voices see, for example, Adorno, Guaman Poma:
Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1986), Adorno, ed., From Oral to Written Expression:
Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period, Foreign
and Comparative Studies/Latin American Series No. 4, Maxwell
School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University
(Syracuse, N.Y., 1982), Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste, The
Huarochiri Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean
Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), and Bruce
Mannheim, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).  See also a review
essay by Seed, "Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse," Latin
American Research Review, XXVI (1991), 181-200.
     74. Pastor, "Silence and Writing," 153.
     75. J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 103-104.
     76. Trans. Gabriela Arciniegas and R. Victoria Arana (San
Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 2.
     77. New Worlds for Old: Reports from the New World and Their
Effect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe, 1500-1800
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), ix, 3-4.
     78. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1976).
     79. Scammell, "The Other Side of the Coin: The Discovery of
the Americas and the Spread of Intolerance, Absolutism, and
Racism in Early Modern Europe"; Cressy, "The Limits of English
Enthusiasm for America."
     80. 6 vols. (New York and New Canaan, Conn.: Readex Books,
1980-1992), ed. John Alden and Dennis Channing Landis.
     81. (Providence, R. I.: John Carter Brown Library, 1991),
ed. Landis.
     82. Tzventan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Questions
of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row,
1984); Luis Villoro, Sahag#n or the Limits of the Discovery of
the Other, 1992 Lecture Series, Working Papers No. 2, Dept. of
Spanish and Portuguese, University of Maryland, College Park,
1989.
     83. Joseph Judge, "Exploring Our Forgotten Century,"
National Geographic, CLXXIII (1988), 330-363; Axtell, review of
David B. Quinn et al., eds., New American World, in WMQ, ed Ser.,
XXXVII (1980), 497-499.
     84. Axtell, "Europeans, Indians, and the Age of Discovery in
American History Textbooks." American Historical Review, XCII
(1987), 625-626, 630.
     85. Jack P. Greene, "Society and Economy in the British
Caribbean during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," AHR,
LXXIX (1974), 1499-1517; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard,
The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985), chap. 7.
     86. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange:
Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1972); Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The
Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), chap 9; Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number
Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern
North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983);
Russell Thorton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A
Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1987); Ann F. Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death: The
Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1987)' Daniel T. Reff, Disease, Depopulation, and
Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518-1764 (Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press, 1991); Douglas H. Ubelaker and
John W. Verano, eds., Disease and Demography in the Americas:
Changing Patterns Before and After 1492 (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, forthcoming).
     87. Axtell, "Moral Reflections on the Columbian Legacy," in
Beyond 1492, chap. 10.
     88. Posse, The Dogs of Paradise, trans. Margaret Sayers
Peden (New York: Atheneum, 1989); Carpentier, The Harp and the
Shadow, trans. Thomas Christensen and Carol C. Christensen (San
Francisco: Mercury House, 1990); Ben!tez-Rojo, Sea of Lentils,
trans. James Maramiss (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1990).