'How Do You Get from Jamestown to Santa Fe? A Colonial Sun Belt'

In this presentation, Juliana Barr draws a connection between two Spanish expeditions, one led by Francisco de Coronado into present-day New Mexico and another by Hernando de Soto from present-day Florida up the Mississippi River. She argues that an Amerindian slave woman who escaped from the former party was picked up by the latter explorer. In Barr’s account, then, an ill-fated woman was the first to unite, however briefly, the greater South and the Spanish borderlands. 

Barr is an associate professor of history at Duke University. Her first book, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (2007), received six awards including a Berkshire Conference of Women Historians prize for the best book in women’s history and the Southern Historical Association’s Charles S. Sydnor Award. Barr received her M.A. and Ph.D. in American women’s history from the University of Wisconsin Madison and her B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching focus on early America, American Indians and women. 

Admission is free and reservations are not required. This Artists and Speakers Series event is co-sponsored by the History Department and Alpha Xi Psi Chapter of the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society.