Postmodernist historiography finally is bearing fruit for parts of the Southeast. Hernando de Soto is being revisited but, this time, his epic entrada and its subsequent narratives are being viewed as they came to be: couched firmly in their own social and literary matrices. This new work, edited by Patricia Galloway, was conceived as a “historiographical prolegomenon to the study of the expedition and especially of the people whose lives it touched” (p. x). The former objective has been achieved admirably; the latter depends on interpretation. Taken together, the analyses offered here by nineteen scholars and writers should constitute the preface to any serious consideration of the Soto narratives as historical documents; I agree with the editor’s conclusion that these narratives “tell us as much or more about their authors and the contexts in which they were written as they do about actual expedition events” (p. xiii). Neither history nor...

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