Books like Encounters in the New World by Jill Lepore

A compelling overview of American history through the eyes and experiences of its women, workers, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working poor.

Jill Lepore’s sweeping single‑volume history charts how the United States has wrestled with the ideals of equality, natural rights, and sovereignty from 1492 to today, weaving together politics, law, journalism and technology.

A young Taino boy confronts the arrival of Christopher Columbus on San Salvador, warning his people about the newcomers’ obsession with gold and deception.

Jill Lepore uncovers how Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, pioneered data‑driven political and consumer targeting—serving Kennedy’s campaign, the New York Times, and the Department of Defense—laying groundwork for today’s digital manipulation tools.

In New Worlds for All, Calloway explores the unique and vibrant new cultures that Indians and Europeans forged together in early America. The process, Calloway writes, lasted longer than the United States has existed as a nation. During that time, most of America was still "Indian country," and even in areas of European settlement, Indians and Europeans remained a part of each other's daily lives: living, working, worshiping, traveling, and trading together - as well as fearing, avoiding, despising, and killing one another. Ranging across the continent and over 300 years, New Worlds for All describes encounters between Spanish conquistadors and Zuni warriors, Huron shamans and French Jesuit missionaries, English merchants and Montagnais traders. Calloway's discussion of conflict and cooperation includes the use of natural resources and shared knowledge about trail networks, herbal medicines, metal tools, and weapons. He depicts the European emulation of Indian military tactics, the varied responses of Indian societies to Christianity, attempts made on all sides to learn the languages and customs of the other, and the intermingling of peoples at the fringes of competing cultures - through captivity and adoption, attempts to escape one's own society and embrace another, or intermarriage. The New World, Calloway concludes, brought new identities for all, as Indian and European cultures combined to create a uniquely American identity.

ix, 430 pages : 23 cm

Kathleen DuVal places indigenous peoples at the center of early North American history, showing how Indians—not Europeans—shaped the relations along the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers during the colonial era.

This study examines the ways in which Europeans of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, in particular the New World. In a series of readings of travel narratives, judicial documents and official documents, Greenblatt shows that "the experience of the marvellous", central to both art and philosophy, was yoked by Columbus and others to service of colonial appropriation. He argues that the traditional symbolic actions and legal rituals through which European sovereignty was asserted were strained to breaking point by the unprecedented nature of the discovery of the New World. But the book also shows that "the experience of the marvellous" is not necessarily an agent of empire: in writers as different as Herodotus, Jean de Lery and Montaigne - and notably in "Mandeville's Travels"--Wonder is the sign of a recognition of cultural difference. Greenblatt reaches back to the ancient Greeks and forward to the present to ask how it is possible, in a time of disorientation, hatred of the other and possesiveness, to keep the capacity for wonder from being poisoned.

"In 1519 Hernan Cortes and a small band of Spanish conquistadors overthrew the mighty Mexican empire of the Aztecs. Using excerpts primarily drawn from Bernal Diaz's 1632 account of the Spanish victory and testimonies - many recently uncovered - of indigenous Nahua survivors, Victors and Vanquished clearly demonstrates how personal interests, class and ethnic biases, and political considerations influenced the interpretation of these momentous events."--BOOK JACKET.