We live, as we are so often told, in the information age: deeply connected to global networks by smartphones, tablets, and computers that not only offer unparalleled access to news (both real and fake) but also shape our social, political, and economic activities. News was no less important to the people of the early South, whose information depended on Indian-run networks and oral communication. Carefully piecing together fragmented evidence from Indian-, Spanish-, English-, and French-language sources, material culture, maps, and oral traditions, Alejandra Dubcovsky offers a remarkable social history of networks that carefully analyzes how Indians, Africans, and Europeans sought to inform and empower themselves from the sixteenth century through the 1730s, particularly in Florida and South Carolina.
Dubcovsky’s study focuses on three major questions: what kind of information the diverse people of the early South sought, who acquired and spread information, and how they constructed, modified, and reformulated their...
