Book launch: 'El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America

Carrie Gibson discusses her latest book, which examines the long Hispanic past of the USA. While the Pilgrim myth may linger in US popular memory, her book explains how the story of European colonialism started much earlier, with the Spanish in the 15th century and their incursions into Florida and South Carolina. The islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico were crucial to both this early history and the subsequent development of the United States, and this talk will focus on how these islands fit into this larger story and how their inclusion forces a reconsideration of what a ‘borderland’ can be, connecting the Caribbean to events in Mexico and California. About the Speaker Carrie Gibson Dr Carrie Gibson received her PhD from Cambridge in 2011 where her thesis focussed on the impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Spanish Caribbean. She has been working as an independent historian, publishing El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (Grove Atlantic, 2019) and Empire's Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day (Pan Macmillan, 2014). She can be found on Twitter at @carrieegibson or Instagram @carrieg76