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To Settle Is To Conquer: Spaniards, Native Americans, And The Colonization Of Santa Elena In Sixteenth-Century Florida, Karen Lynn Paar

Faculty & Staff Publications

Sixteenth-century Spaniards believed that “to settle is to conquer,” and they brought this tradition established during the Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors to their conquest and colonization of the Americas. The Spaniards’ multi-faceted approach to settlement proved remarkably enduring as shown by the mid-1560s effort of Pedro Menendez de Aviles to claim La Florida, which then included much of the present-day southeastern United States. Within this territory Santa Elena, now known as Parris Island, South Carolina, came into the focus of French and Spanish monarchs as the political and religious battles raging in Europe in the mid-sixteenth …