History of the Indies

History of the Indies

by Bartolome de las Casas

translated and abridged by Andree M. Collard

This was the first english translation of Bartolome de las casas 3 volume book Historia de Las Indias;translated and edited by Andree M. Collard. This is a really important book dealing with the history of the early spanish conquest and its colonization of the indigenous people and the Americas of which has not been fully translated in its entirety.

In 1523, Las Casas joined the Dominican order and withdrew from public events for several years. His consuming task during that period was to write the History of the Indies (published posthumously), a monumental rendition of the Spanish conquest. Part history and part prophecy, Las Casas' chronicle of Spanish misdeeds was intended for future generations to be an explanation of Spain's punishment by God, which he felt certain would happen.

"Fray Bartolome de las Casas, convertiendo a una familia azteca" by Miguel Norena

The Voyage of Christopher Columbus

The Voyage of Christopher Columbus: Columbus' Own Journal of Discovery Newly Restored and Translated
edited by John Cummins

The explorer's shipboard journal details his first voyage to the New World and his fateful encounter with the natives. It exists today only in a later manuscript copy by Bartolome de Las Casas, who paraphrased extensively in the third person. By restructuring this version and supplementing it with other sources, Cummins (Spanish, Univ. of Aberdeen) claims to have restored the original in a nonliteral translation that "remodels" Columbus's cumbersome Spanish. The resulting lively and highly readable narrative will have historians arguing about the authenticity of its voice. The transcription and literal translation contained in The "Diario" of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America (Univ. of Oklahoma Pr., 1989) remains the standard scholarly English-language edition, but general readers will enjoy Cummins's work.