The Other Colonial America

I'm a granny and a student at the University of North Florida, majoring in history and Spanish. My area is Spanish colonial America, that part known as "La Florida," which at the start of the Spanish enterprise encompassed just about the entire southeast.

I have received a grant to do a study of the family structure and interrelationships of St. Augustine, Florida, 1783-1820, and the effect of those relationships on the events of that period.

I have a reading list a mile long for this project, including Joseph B. Lockey – East Florida 1783-1785: A File of Documents Assembled and
Many of Them Translated by Joseph Byrne Lockey, James G. Cusick – The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida, and other page-turners.

When I was teaching at ʻAtenisi University in Tonga, in the 1980s, our library received some Spanish language historical works, published in Spain, not in Spanish America, and mostly on "La Florida". Our director was serving as the consul of Spain -- not a very strenuous job in Tonga -- and the books came through the Spanish Embassy in Canberra.
Although we werenʻt a U.S. university, the emphasis was on the area that became part of the U.S. Southeast. So I suppose we became one of the few libraries in the Pacific to have these works. But I think they would be in large libraries on the U.S. Mainland.
I donʻt have much knowledge of colonial history of any kind, not even the U.S. colonial era; (but for your title I might have forgotten there was "another Colonial America"!

>1 waxtadpole:
You weren't exactly asking for more references, but if it's not already on your list I would suggest Jane Landers' Black Society in Spanish Florida. I suspect it's on point and may be of use in thinking about were to go for primary sources.

Interesting area of study, Waxtadpole, and not one were there seems to have been a great deal of research.

Because my own family settled in Florida in the Tampa area circa 1850s so I'll be interested in reading how your studies go.

(sidenote: I've done no real family study, but I did tracked down a record of oldest one I know about. Maximilian -- as in Maximo Point and Maximo Moorings. He was from Spain (or was at least Spanish). The funny thing about the record is that they said he was born in Hawaii. Makes me wonder about those records ;))

This has less to do with what is now Florida and more to do with the Carolinas and Tennessee (but still part of La Florida), but Charles Hudson has published a good book on the Juan Pardo expedition, The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Explorations of the Carolinas and Tennessee. As far as I know, it's the only book on Pardo. I'm looking at possibly working at the Ft. San Juan site this summer; I did my research paper for high school sr. project on the history and archaeology of the fort, as my overall project is on the colonial archaeology of Piedmont North Carolina.

Don’t forget the Seminoles! You have probably already been directed to J. Leitch Wright’s Creeks and Seminoles, which is a good synthesis. But be skeptical of his theory of ethnic strife among the Creek and Seminole people; it has not caught on with other scholars. I suspect that Wright found it hard to imagine that there could be cohesion among a “nation” that spoke so many different languages.

I have studied Spanish West Florida pretty intensely, but East Florida is much less familiar (even though I used to live in it). As you read Spanish and are close to Gainesville, you really should find time to explore the archives of the P.K. Yonge Library at the University of Florida. It has manuscripts that might well be useful. I think their selection copied from the Archivo General de Indias (the Spanish colonial archive in Seville) is the best in North America.

Jane Landers (already mentioned) is the social historian of East Florida. There hasn’t yet been anyone like her, AFAIK, for West Florida (which in 1783 extended from the east bank of the Mississippi, in Louisiana, to the Appalachicola River in Florida — but by summer 1813 the U.S. had chipped away everything but the present-day Florida panhandle).