Books published by publisher Smithsonian Institution Soundprints

Describes the prehistory, history, and cultures of the aboriginal people of North America who lived in the Subarctic culture area, defined as extending from the coast of Labrador on the Atlantic Ocean to Cook Inlet and beyond on the Pacific. Contains copyrighted material.This volume is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of North American Indians series, the ultimate resource for Native American history across various regions of North America. The set is intended to give an encyclopedic summary of what is know about the prehistory, history, and cultures of the aboriginal peoples of North America north of the urban civilizations of central Mexico.

This book is dedicated to Michael Gannon and explicitly updates his 1965 The Cross in the Sand but views the subject from a different perspective: Where Gannon focused on the mission effort from the missionaries' point of view, Jerald T. Milanich is interested in the way Florida missions affected and were affected by the southeastern Indians they attempted to convert. In eight chapters he outlines the problem of the "lost" missions and the archaeology that has rediscovered them; describes the indigenous peoples of Florida at the time of contact with Europeans; recounts the major events of Spanish exploration; describes early Jesuit missions that failed; introduces the Franciscan missions that succeeded; provides detailed descriptions of Indian life in the mission settlements; traces significant Indian resistance to colonization and missionization; and finally recounts the collapse of the mission system under the inexorable onslaught of English attacks.

Born of the linguistic fascination of a noted paleontologist, Composition of Scientific Words includes a brief introduction to the history and elementary structure of English, Greek, and Latin, followed by a guide for the formulation of technical terms. The main selection, the lexicon, is an alphabetical list of key words. It gives their synonyms and cognates in English, Latin, and Greek, as well as occasional additions from among thirty-eight other languages. This section is a storehouse of fact and lore on the derivation of both everyday and technical terms. Numerous cross-references make the book fully accessible.