Carrie Gibson

A sweeping saga of the Spanish history and influence in North America over five centuries, from the acclaimed author of Empire's Crossroads

The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America

El Norte

Days that Changed the World

Traces the story of the coveted area from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba, exploring its history from the arrival of Columbus through colonialism to the present, offering a panoramic view of this complex region.

A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day

Empire's Crossroads

«Esto es Historia en forma de diálogo, que prescinde de la autoridad doliente de los archivos y adopta la forma de una larga conversación, desde la premisa de que se puede alcanzar la verdad mediante una larga peregrinación, un viaje a través de la violencia, la discriminación, el racismo, la explotación y el infierno creado por la ocupación». THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. Durante mucho tiempo, los Estados Unidos se han preciado de su herencia anglosajona por encima de todas las demás. No obstante, tal como Carrie Gibson explica en El Norte con gran profundidad y nitidez, la nación tiene unas raíces hispanas mucho más antiguas, las cuales han permanecido largo tiempo ignoradas y marginalizadas. Su pasado hispánico precede en más de un siglo a la llegada del Mayflower, y es de todo punto igual de importante a la hora de dar forma a la nación tal como existe hoy en día. El Norte es una crónica de la extensa y dramática historia de la Norteamérica hispana, desde el desembarco inicial de Ponce de León en Florida en 1513, pasando por la toma de control del vasto territorio de la Luisiana por parte de España en 1762 o la guerra mexicano-estadounidense de 1846, hasta llegar a la reciente tragedia de Puerto Rico tras el huracán María, o la persistente tensión fronteriza con México. Entretejidos en esta emotiva narración se encuentran los dilemas culturales que han estado presentes desde el principio y que aún siguen sin resolverse: idioma, pertenencia, raza y nacionalidad. Contemplar la evolución de estas cuestiones a lo largo de los siglos proporciona una perspectiva vital en un tiempo en que esta resulta sumamente necesaria. «Una importante corrección a siglos de historia estadounidense». THE GUARDIAN.

La epopeya olvidada de la Norteamérica hispana

Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire’s Crossroads, historian Carrie Gibson offers a vivid, panoramic view of this complex region and its rich, important history. That fateful landing in 1492 soon launched a savage competition for West Indian territory that would last centuries. Gibson compellingly traces the ups and downs of European imperial expansion--including the first cash crops, failed settlements, and pirating on the open seas--but she also brilliantly describes daily life on the islands. Creole societies complicated traditional ideas about class and race, and by the end of the eighteenth century, plantation slaves in Saint-Domingue had launched the Haitian Revolution, the world’s only successful slave revolt. As European control of the Caribbean loosened over the next 150 years, America was on the rise, ushering in a new era of foreign influence and the birth of the tourism industry that still thrives today. Incredibly multi-faceted and approachably written, Empire’s Crossroads encompasses the narratives of more than twenty islands and reinterprets five centuries of history have been underappreciated for far too long.

In Empire's Crossroads, Carrie Gibson offers readers a vivid, authoritative and action-packed history of the Caribbean. For Gibson, everything was created in the West Indies: the Europe of today, its financial foundations built with sugar money: the factories and mills built as a result of the work of slaves thousands of miles away; the idea of true equality as espoused in Saint Domingue in the 1790s; the slow progress to independence; and even globalization and migration, with the ships passing to and fro taking people and goods in all possible directions, hundreds of years before the term 'globalization' was coined. From Cuba to Haiti, from Dominica to Martinique, from Jamaica to Trinidad, the story of the Caribbean is not simply the story of slaves and masters - but of fortune-seekers and pirates, scientists and servants, travellers and tourists. It is not only a story of imperial expansion - European and American - but of global connections, and also of life as it is lived in the islands, both in the past and today.

The Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day

A “wide-ranging, vivid” narrative history of one of the most coveted and complex regions of the world: the Caribbean (The Observer). Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire’s Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson offers a panoramic view of the region from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba and its rich, important history. After that fateful landing in 1492, the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and even the Swedes, Scots, and Germans sought their fortunes in the islands for the next two centuries. These fraught years gave way to a booming age of sugar, horrendous slavery, and extravagant wealth, as well as the Haitian Revolution and the long struggles for independence that ushered in the modern era. Gibson tells not only of imperial expansion—European and American—but also of life as it is lived in the islands, from before Columbus through the tumultuous twentieth century. Told “in fluid, colorful prose peppered with telling anecdotes,” Empire’s Crossroads provides an essential account of five centuries of history (Foreign Affairs). “Judicious, readable and extremely well-informed . . . Too many people know the Caribbean only as a tourist destination; [Gibson] takes us, instead, into its fascinating, complex and often tragic past. No vacation there will ever feel quite the same again.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost

Carrie Gibson

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