A sweeping history of linguistic and colonial encounter in the early Americas, anchored by the unlikely story of how Boston's most famous Puritan came to write the first Spanish-language publication in the English New World. The Boston minister Cotton Mather was the first English colonial to refer to himself as an American. He was also the first to author a Spanish-language publication: La Fe del Christiano (The Faith of the Christian), a Protestant tract intended to evangelize readers across the Spanish Americas. Kirsten Silva Gruesz explores the conditions that produced La Fe del Christiano, from the intimate story of the "Spanish Indian" servants in Mather's household, to the fragile business of printing and bookselling, to the fraught overlaps of race, ethnicity, and language that remain foundational to ideas of Latina/o/x belonging in the United States today. Mather's Spanish project exemplifies New England's entanglement within a partially Spanish Catholic, largely Indigenous New World. British Americans viewed Spanish not only as a set of linguistic practices, but also as the hallmark of a rival empire and a nascent racial-ethnic category. Guided by Mather's tract, Gruesz explores English settlers' turbulent contacts with the people they called "Spanish Indians," as well as with Black and local native peoples. Tracing colonial encounters from Boston to Mexico, Florida, and the Caribbean, she argues that language learning was intimately tied with the formation of new peoples. Even as Spanish has become the de facto second language of the United States, the story of La Fe del Christiano remains timely and illuminating, locating the roots of latinidad in the colonial system of the early Americas. Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons reinvents our understanding of a key colonial intellectual, revealing notions about language and the construction of race that endure to this day.

The Age of the Discovery of the Americas was concurrent with the Age of Discovery in science. In The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer explores the historical relationship between the two, focusing on the connections between religion and science in the Spanish, English, and French literatures about the Americas during the early modern period. As sailors, conquerors, travelers, and missionaries were exploring "new worlds," and claiming ownership of them, early modern men of science redefined what it means to "discover" something. Bauer explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the discovery of the Americas and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. The book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Jose de Acosta, Nicolas Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.

This polished literary history argues forcefully that Latinos are not newcomers in the United States by documenting a vast network of Spanish-language cultural activity in the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing poems and essays by both powerful and peripheral writers, Kirsten Silva Gruesz proposes a major revision of the nineteenth-century U.S. canon and its historical contexts.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and building on an innovative interpretation of poetry's cultural role, "Ambassadors of Culture" brings together scattered writings from the borderlands of California and the Southwest as well as the cosmopolitan exile centers of New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. It reads these productions in light of broader patterns of relations between the U.S. and Latin America, moving from the fraternal rhetoric of the Monroe Doctrine through the expansionist crisis of 1848 to the proto-imperialist 1880s. It shows how ''ambassadors of culture'' such as Whitman, Longfellow, and Bryant propagated ideas about Latin America and Latinos through their translations, travel writings, and poems. In addition to these well-known figures and their counterparts in the work of nation-building in Cuba, Mexico, and Central and South America, this book also introduces unremembered women writers and local poets writing in both Spanish and English.

In telling the almost forgotten early history of travels and translations between U.S. and Latin American writers, Gruesz shows that Anglo and Latino traditions in the New World were, from the beginning, deeply intertwined and mutually necessary.

The Age of the Discovery of the Americas was concurrent with the Age of Discovery in science. In The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer explores the historical relationship between the two, focusing on the connections between religion and science in the Spanish, English, and French literatures about the Americas during the early modern period. As sailors, conquerors, travelers, and missionaries were exploring "new worlds," and claiming ownership of them, early modern men of science redefined what it means to "discover" something. Bauer explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the discovery of the Americas and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. The book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Jose de Acosta, Nicolas Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.

Recent debates about globalism have usefully transformed the positioning and the cultural geography of studies of the American South. Once marked by tensions between the national and the regional, southern studies is now increasingly characterized by tensions between the local and the global. This special issue of American Literature features interdisciplinary and comparative work that focuses on the U.S. South in global contexts and attempts to reconceptualize the South from various theoretical, literary, and cultural perspectives. The new southern studies promises to be less preoccupied with patriarchal whiteness and rural idyll and more concerned with understanding the U.S. South as a construction of border crossings of every sort. Featured essays examine the political, economic, and social effects of globalization on the geopolitical locale and literary productions of the region. Each seeks to redefine the geographic and epistemological boundaries of the U.S. South by linking it to other "Souths" globally. The issue opens with a collection of manifestos given at the recent conference "The U.S. South in Global Context." These unique pieces offer variant perspectives on a common theme. Touching on history, community, migration, globalizing modernization, and even Wal-Mart, these sixteen briefs remind the reader that the American South is somewhere between the modern cosmopolitan and the historical rural spheres. One contributor examines how modernization has spread unevenly throughout the region and how it has affected recent immigrants to southern hybrid culture. Another engages in a comparative exercise between the U.S. South and Latin America, addressing questions of postcolonialism. Other contributors reflect on southern distinctiveness, southern literature, and southern colonial life. Included in the issue is a collection of original and review essays focused geographically on still lower latitudes: investigations of the Deep South and certain Caribbean cultures, and comparisons of the U.S. South to the underprivileged global South.