The Tragedy of French Florida: Cosmography, Colonization, and the Origins of America

FAIN: FEL-272749-21

Owen Stanwood
Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3800)

Research and writing leading to a book about failed French settlements in Florida during the 16th century.

During the 1560s three separate French expeditions attempted to colonize the American Southeast. These efforts have attracted little attention from historians, but represent a powerful origin story for a new, colonial North America. My book will offer a contextualized history of French Florida, beginning with its conception by merchants, politicians, mariners and cosmographers, and continuing through the would-be colonizers fraught encounters with both Timucuan Indians and Spanish rivals. The mostly Protestant colonizers believed that they could create a new, perfect society in America, one that turned humble Frenchmen into heroes and that bound colonizers and natives together with bonds of love and commerce. These dreams soon foundered due to internal divisions and external assaults, but represented a key vision of an America that could heal all of Europe's problems.