"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...

Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history. Yet Columbus made three more voyages within the span of only a decade, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, and ambiguous,...

"With his Letter of 1493 to the court of Spain, Christopher Columbus heralded his first voyage to the present-day Americas, creating visions that seduced the European imagination and birthing a fascination with those 'new' lands and their inhabitants that continues today. Columbus's epistolary announcement travelled from country to country in a late-medieval media event--and the rest, as has been observed, is history. The Letter has long been the...

"This book debunks one of the greatest myths ever told in Caribbean history: that the indigenous peoples who encountered a very lost Christopher Columbus are "extinct." Through the uncovering of recent ethnographical data, the author reveals extensive narratives of Jbaro Indian resistance and cultural continuity on the island of Borikn (Puerto Rico). Since the epistemological boundaries of the early history and literature had been written through...