Black Community and Culture in the Southeastern Borderlands

Abstract

In 1992 David J. Weber published a masterful synthesis called The Spanish Frontier in North America which reminded readers that despite a national historiography that tends toward the Anglocentric, Spanish claims on North America date to 1513 and its governance of communities scattered across the entire southern rim of what is today the United States lasted well over two centuries. Weber's sweeping book chronicles the complex history of Spanish conquests and settlement in North America while also noting the essential and common elements of Spanish culture across time and space.1 The Spanish explorations and initial settlements in what is today the United States had earlier attracted the attention of Herbert Eugene Bolton, who expanded on his mentor Frederick Jackson Turner's vision of frontier. Although Bolton produced three studies of the Southeast, where Spaniards made their first settlements, his primary interest was the institutional and diplomatic history of the Spanish Southwest. Along with Hubert Howe Bancroft who researched Spanish California, Bolton was among the first American scholars to appreciate that much of the history of our modem nation could be uncovered in the rich Spanish archives of Mexico. Using these long-neglected sources, Bolton created a new Borderlands school of American history, which was further developed by