| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 231 words from this article are provided below; about 361 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Constructing Floridians: Natives and Europeans in the Colonial Floridas, 1513–1783. By Daniel S. Murphree. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. x, 188 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-3024-2.)

Daniel S. Murphree is interested less in the origins of racism than the "attitudes, perceptions, and events that fostered the use of racial labels to partially justify an emerging hierarchical society" (p. 6). He also frees himself from well-worn scholarly divisions of inquiry by seeking similarities in Spanish, French, and British colonists' descriptions of native peoples from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in what he calls the colonial Floridas. When European newcomers encountered difficulties in their efforts to extract wealth from the environment or to establish profitable trade, effective missions, and political power among the native populations, they blamed the indigenous inhabitants. Citing Indians' "barbarity," physical appearances, and "paganism," European settlers as disparate as Spanish Jesuits in St. Augustine, French soldiers along the Mississippi River, and British traders in the interior of what would become Alabama, vented their frustrations. Murphree argues that because those lands changed imperial hands and because colonizers maintained only a marginal presence, the relationships between Europeans and Indians "were based on mutual limitations rather than exclusive hegemony well into the nineteenth century" (p. 2). Europeans' inability to dominate the land and its people made them racialize, or express their negative feelings about, the natives they met.

. . .

There are about 361 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.