Both mature professionals, they fell in love with childlike glee. John and Dorothy had met briefly in New Jersey. A medical doctor from Australia, he was en route to the British Isles to further his education. Friends of Dorothy, also a doctor, had fixed them up on a blind date neither looked forward to. Yet they had fun. When she decided on a summer vacation in England, her best friend and traveling companion Helen broke her leg at the last moment, as if by fate. John happily saw Dorothy around London but thought of her only as a lady doctor from America. Then, in the hospital matron's sitting room, something happened that changed both their lives. A rushed courtship, a simple wedding in Wesley's Chapel, and the briefest of honeymoons followed. She sailed home, and John, scarcely believing he was now a married man, stayed on at St. Paul's Hospital in London. For three months, the Atlantic separated them. John wrote to Dorothy every morning and every night, never once missing a day. A self-confessed very ordinary man, he revealed much about himself and about how he coped in London during their separation, devising a hundred different ways to express his love for Dorothy. His letters convey a refreshing earnestness and honesty. Although Dorothy's half of the correspondence has not survived, her mysterious cable, "Come at once " assured John's arrival in East Orange by Christmas. This tenderhearted story, based on the love letters John wrote to Dorothy from London in 1933 and including numerous excerpts, is told by their son for those of us who have experienced or imagined the love of a lifetime. Born in New Jersey and raised in California, John Kessell did not set out to be a professional historian. His work in the 1960s, however, at Tumacacori National Monument in New Mexico, site of a Spanish colonial mission, alerted him to the possibility. Returning to graduate school with new purpose, he earned his doctorate at the University of New Mexico, survived a decade as historian-for-hire, and joined the UNM Department of History. His major historical editing project with colleagues Rick Hendricks, Meredith D. Dodge, and Larry D. Miller resulted in the six-volume "Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1691 - 1704." Kessell is also author of "Kiva, Cross and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540 - 1840"; "The Missions of New Mexico Since 1776"; and "Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico."

Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco (1713-1785) is remembered today not only as colonial New Mexico's preeminent religious artist, but also as the cartographer who drew some of the most important early maps of the American West. His "Plano Geographico" of the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin, revised by his hand in 1778, influenced other mapmakers for almost a century. This book places the man and the map in historical context, reminding readers of the enduring significance of Miera y Pacheco. Later Spanish cartographers, as well as Baron Alexander von Humboldt, Captain Zebulon Montgomery Pike, and Henry Schenck Tanner, projected or expanded upon the Santa Fe cartographer's imagery. By so doing, they perpetuated Miera y Pacheco's most notable hydrographic misinterpretations. Not until almost seventy years after Miera did John Charles Fremont take the field and see for himself whither the waters ran and whither they didn't.

John L. Kessell's "Spain in the Southwest" presents a fast-paced, abundantly illustrated history of the Spanish colonies that became the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. With an eye for human interest, Kessell tells the story of New Spain's vast frontier--today's American Southwest and Mexican North--which for two centuries served as a dynamic yet disjoined periphery of the Spanish empire.

Chronicling the period of Hispanic activity from the time of Columbus to Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821, Kessell traces the three great swells of Hispanic exploration, encounter, and influence that rolled north from Mexico across the coasts and high deserts of the western borderlands. Throughout this sprawling historical landscape, Kessell treats grand themes through the lives of individuals. He explains the frequent cultural clashes and accommodations in remarkably balanced terms. Stereotypes, the author writes, are of no help. Indians could be arrogant and brutal, Spaniards caring, and vice versa. If we select the facts to fit preconceived notions, we can make the story come out the way we want, but if the peoples of the colonial Southwest are seen as they really were--more alike than diverse, sharing similar inconstant natures--then we need have no favorites.

Remembered today as an early cartographer and prolific religious artist, don Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco (1713-1785) engaged during his lifetime in a surprising array of other pursuits: engineer and militia captain on Indian campaigns, district officer, merchant, debt collector, metallurgist, luckless silver miner, presidial soldier, dam builder, and rancher. This long-overdue, richly illustrated biography recounts Miera's complex life in cinematic detail, from his birth in Cantabria, Spain, to his sudden and unexplained appearance at Janos, Chihuahua, and his death in Santa Fe at age seventy-one. In Miera y Pacheco, John L. Kessell explores each aspect of this Renaissance man's life in the colony. Beginning with his marriage to the young descendant of a once-prominent New Mexican family, we see Miera transformed by his varied experiences into the quintessential Hispanic New Mexican. As he traveled to every corner of the colony and beyond, Miera gathered not only geographical, social, and political data but also invaluable information about the Southwest's indigenous peoples. At the same time, Miera the artist was carving and painting statues and panels of the saints for the altar screens of the colony. Miera's most ambitious surviving map resulted from his five-month ordeal as cartographer on the Dominguez-Escalante expedition to the Great Basin in 1776. Two years later, with the arrival of famed Juan Bautista de Anza as governor of New Mexico, Miera became a trusted member of Anza's inner circle, advising him on civil, military, and Indian affairs. Miera's maps and his religious art, represented here, have long been considered essential to the cultural history of colonial New Mexico. Now Kessell's biography tells the rest of the story. Anyone with an interest in southwestern history, colonial New Mexico, or New Spain will welcome this study of Miera y Pacheco's eventful life and times.

Both mature professionals, they fell in love with childlike glee. John and Dorothy had met briefly in New Jersey. A medical doctor from Australia, he was en route to the British Isles to further his education. Friends of Dorothy, also a doctor, had fixed them up on a blind date neither looked forward to. Yet they had fun. When she decided on a summer vacation in England, her best friend and traveling companion Helen broke her leg at the last moment, as if by fate. John happily saw Dorothy around London but thought of her only as a lady doctor from America. Then, in the hospital matron's sitting room, something happened that changed both their lives. A rushed courtship, a simple wedding in Wesley's Chapel, and the briefest of honeymoons followed. She sailed home, and John, scarcely believing he was now a married man, stayed on at St. Paul's Hospital in London. For three months, the Atlantic separated them. John wrote to Dorothy every morning and every night, never once missing a day. A self-confessed very ordinary man, he revealed much about himself and about how he coped in London during their separation, devising a hundred different ways to express his love for Dorothy. His letters convey a refreshing earnestness and honesty. Although Dorothy's half of the correspondence has not survived, her mysterious cable, "Come at once " assured John's arrival in East Orange by Christmas. This tenderhearted story, based on the love letters John wrote to Dorothy from London in 1933 and including numerous excerpts, is told by their son for those of us who have experienced or imagined the love of a lifetime. Born in New Jersey and raised in California, John Kessell did not set out to be a professional historian. His work in the 1960s, however, at Tumacacori National Monument in New Mexico, site of a Spanish colonial mission, alerted him to the possibility. Returning to graduate school with new purpose, he earned his doctorate at the University of New Mexico, survived a decade as historian-for-hire, and joined the UNM Department of History. His major historical editing project with colleagues Rick Hendricks, Meredith D. Dodge, and Larry D. Miller resulted in the six-volume "Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1691 - 1704." Kessell is also author of "Kiva, Cross and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540 - 1840"; "The Missions of New Mexico Since 1776"; and "Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico."

The Bicentennial of the United States in 1976 gave rise to myriad projects. In New Mexico-still a borderlands possession of Spain in 1776-an unusually keen Franciscan observer, Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, painted an extraordinarily detailed and often unflattering word picture of the colony. "The Missions of New Mexico, 1776," impeccably translated and edited by distinguished historians Eleanor B. Adams and Fray Angelico Chavez, is a single source like no other that reveals life in raw and remote, late-eighteenth-century New Mexico. Dispatched from Mexico City as canonical inspector of the missions of New Mexico, the meticulous Father Dominguez stepped off the measurements of the churches, counted the number of ceiling beams, and described the physical layout and contents of the missions, all to the delight of subsequent architectural and art historians. Given such detailed descriptions of the missions' fabric in 1776, a simple question arose. What has become of these mud-and-stone-built structures in the past two hundred years? Historian John L. Kessell's "The Missions of New Mexico Since 1776" addresses that question. "Two hundred years after Dominguez," Kessell concludes, "the survival count is nothing to brag about. Of the thirty-two churches or chapels he recorded in 1776, twelve persist on more or less the same foundations in more or less the same form-San Miguel in Santa Fe, Santa Cruz de la Canada, Picuris, Las Trampas, Tome, Cochiti, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Zia, Laguna, Acoma, and Isleta." And none of these has fallen since 1980. Most, in fact, are being lovingly cared for. Played out differently at each location, all of Dominguez's churches underwent the same progression. First came neglect as Spain's American empire crumbled and Mexico tried to rule. Next Anglos peddling modernization offered tin roofs for dirt or, better still, new structures for old. By then, however, nostalgic folks had begun experiencing the charm of the outdated, and the Pueblo-Mission style of architecture was born. Simultaneously, just in time toward the end of the nineteenth century, dawned the continuing era of historic preservation. New Mexico's surviving missions had become monuments. The new editions of "Missions" and "Missions Since" from Sunstone Press make readily available these two complementary fixtures of New Mexico cultural studies. Born in New Jersey and raised in California, JOHN L. KESSELL did not set out to be a professional historian. His work in the 1960s, however, at Tumacacori National Monument, site of a Spanish colonial mission, alerted him to the possibility. Returning to graduate school with new purpose, he earned his doctorate at the University of New Mexico, survived a precarious decade as historian-for-hire, and joined the UNM Department of History. His major historical editing project with colleagues Rick Hendricks, Meredith D. Dodge, and Larry D. Miller resulted in the six-volume Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1691-1704. Kessell is also author of "Kiva, Cross and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540-1840," "Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico," and "East Orange by Christmas," the latter also from Sunstone Press."

For more than four hundred years in New Mexico, Pueblo Indians and Spaniards have lived "together yet apart." Now the preeminent historian of that region's colonial past offers a fresh, balanced look at the origins of a precarious relationship.

John L. Kessell has written the first narrative history devoted to the tumultuous seventeenth century in New Mexico. Setting aside stereotypes of a Native American Eden and the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty, he paints an evenhanded picture of a tense but interwoven coexistence. Beginning with the first permanent Spanish settlement among the Pueblos of the Rio Grande in 1598, he proposes a set of relations more complicated than previous accounts envisioned and then reinterprets the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Spanish reconquest in the 1690s. Kessell clearly describes the Pueblo world encountered by Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate and portrays important but lesser-known Indian partisans, all while weaving analysis and interpretation into the flow of life in seventeenth-century New Mexico.

Brimming with new insights embedded in an engaging narrative, Kessell's work presents a clearer picture than ever before of events leading to the Pueblo Revolt. "Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico" is the definitive account of a volatile era.

On 4 October 1693 don Diego de Vargas left El Paso with eight hundred settlers and soldiers to reoccupy New Mexico. His account of organizing the colonizing expedition, leading the march up the Rio Grande valley, and eventually conquering Santa Fe is presented in this volume, the third of six drawn from his reports.

Vargas's journal gives immediacy to the themes of reoccupation and pacification. Many of those he led into New Mexico were survivors of the Pueblo Revolt, and all, he noted, were now reduced to "abject poverty and nakedness." To organize the expedition, Vargas spent eight months in northern Mexico recruiting settlers and attempting to secure financing from the royal treasury.

When no funds were forthcoming, Vargas and the settlers nevertheless departed for Santa Fe before winter arrived. On their march north they survived by trading livestock for foodstuffs, and by the end of December they successfully reached the colonial capital and defeated the Pueblo Indians occupying it.

This documentary history in English translation is a key resource on New Mexico's cultural and political history. Its extensive annotation will be useful to genealogists as well.