A pathbreaking look at Native women of the early South who defined power and defied authority   “An artful, powerful book. . . . [A] substantial contribution to our knowledge of women in the so-called ‘forgotten centuries’ of European colonialism in the southeast.�—Malinda Maynor Lowery, author of The Lumbee Indians   “A remarkable book. Alejandra Dubcovsky pursued relentless research to uncover the histories of women previously unseen, even unnamed. As Dubcovsky shows, they had names, they had families, they had lives that mattered. The historical landscape is transformed by their presence.�—Lisa Brooks, author of Our Beloved Kin   Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial South. In exploring their lives she rewrites early American history, challenging the established male-centered narrative.   Dubcovsky reconstructs the lives of Native women—Timucua, Apalachee, Chacato, and Guale—to show how they made claims to protect their livelihoods, bodies, and families. Through the stories of the Native cacica who demanded her authority be recognized; the elite Spanish woman who turned her dowry and household into a source of independent power; the Floridiana who slapped a leading Native man in the town square; and the Black woman who ran a successful business at the heart of a Spanish town, Dubcovsky reveals the formidable women who claimed and used their power, shaping the history of the early South.

Informed Power maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the colonial world came into possession of vital knowledge in a region that lacked a regular mail system or a printing press until the 1730s. Challenging the notion of early colonial America as an uninformed backwater, Alejandra Dubcovsky uncovers the ingenious ways its inhabitants acquired timely news through largely oral networks. Information circulated through the region via spies, scouts, traders, missionaries, and other ad hoc couriers-and by encounters of sheer chance with hunting parties, shipwrecked sailors, captured soldiers, or fugitive slaves. For many, content was often inseparable from the paths taken and the alliances involved in acquiring it. The different and innovative ways that Indians, Africans, and Europeans struggled to make sense of their world created communication networks that linked together peoples who otherwise shared no consensus of the physical and political boundaries shaping their lives. Exchanging information was not simply about having the most up-to-date news or the quickest messenger. It was a way of establishing and maintaining relationships, of articulating values and enforcing priorities-a process inextricably tied to the region's social and geopolitical realities. At the heart of Dubcovsky's study are important lessons about the nexus of information and power in the early American South.

There is clear overlap in interests and influences for the fields of Atlantic, environmental, and southern history, but scholarship in them has often advanced on parallel tracks. This anthology places itself at the intersection, pushing for a new confluence. Editors Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson provide a lucid introduction to this collection of essays that brings these disciplines together. With this volume, historians explore crucial insights into a self-consciously Atlantic environmental history of the American South, touching on such topics as ideas about slavery, gender, climate, "colonial ecological revolution," manipulation of the landscape, infrastructure, resources, and exploitation. By centering this project on a region, the American South-defined as the southeastern reaches of North America and the Caribbean- the authors interrogate how European colonizers, Native Americans, and Africans interacted in and with the (sub)tropics, a place foreign to Europeans. Challenging the concepts of "Atlantic" and "southern" and their intersection with "environments" is a discipline-defining strategy at the leading edge of emerging scholarship. Taken collectively, this book should encourage more readers to reimagine this region, its time periods, climate(s), and ecocultural networks.

There is clear overlap in interests and influences for the fields of Atlantic, environmental, and southern history, but scholarship in them has often advanced on parallel tracks. This anthology places itself at the intersection, pushing for a new confluence. Editors Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson provide a lucid introduction to this collection of essays that brings these disciplines together. With this volume, historians explore crucial insights into a self-consciously Atlantic environmental history of the American South, touching on such topics as ideas about slavery, gender, climate, "colonial ecological revolution," manipulation of the landscape, infrastructure, resources, and exploitation. By centering this project on a region, the American South-defined as the southeastern reaches of North America and the Caribbean- the authors interrogate how European colonizers, Native Americans, and Africans interacted in and with the (sub)tropics, a place foreign to Europeans. Challenging the concepts of "Atlantic" and "southern" and their intersection with "environments" is a discipline-defining strategy at the leading edge of emerging scholarship. Taken collectively, this book should encourage more readers to reimagine this region, its time periods, climate(s), and ecocultural networks.