Black Society in Spanish Florida (Blacks in the New World)
"Lander's well-written book is the first extensive study of the African American community in Florida during the long period of Spanish colonial rule (1565-1763 and1784-1821). The author's skillful research in archives in Spain, Florida, and the Caribbean reveals an African America community in early Florida that was remarkably different from contemporary Anglo America... Highly recommended." -Choice "The interlocked world of triracial Florida was temporarily destroyed by American invasion and conquest in the early nineteenth century. But as Florida once again becomes more like the neighboring Afro-Hispanic world of the Caribbean, readers are fortunate to have Jane Landers's excellent new book telling them of an earlier Floridian version of that world." - T. Stephen Whitman, The North CarolinaHistorical Review "Sophisticated, meticulously researched, and highly informative monograph... The factual information recovered by this study is of inordinate importance to the history of both the United States and the Caribbean... This book illustrates splendidly that what was lost should not be forgotten." -- Franklin W. Knight, Journal of Interdisciplinary History "Landers' work should interest a wide variety of historians, including students of the Spanish borderlands, the antebellum South, the Atlantic slave trade, as well as historians specializing in either colonial Latin America or the colonial United States." -- Stephen I. Schwab, Southern Historian "A fully realized book, clearly written, deeply researched in archival sources, and engaged with relevant historiography. Spanish Florida will never be the same." -- David J. Weber, American Historical Review\ "Clearly the best book yet to appear in English on Africans in Spanish Florida." -- Daniel C. Littlefield, William and Mary Quarterly "Fine study... This book is not only beautifully conceived and well executed, it intrigues with its stories of the many people who played out their lives in a frontier society about which we have known so very little... Landers expertly mines a wealth of previously unused primary documentation in order to fully portray the complex and detailed society within which people of African descent took advantage of law, custom, and frontier conditions to create community and opportunity." -- Virginia Gould, Florida Historical Quarterly ADVANCE PRAISE "A truly original, beautifully and skillfully researched, conceived, and written work which will have a major impact upon how colonial United States and Caribbean history will be understood in the future."-Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century