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Review of "La Florida: Catholics, Conquistadores, and Other American Origin Stories" by Kevin Kokomoor
Review

Review of "La Florida: Catholics, Conquistadores, and Other American Origin Stories" by Kevin Kokomoor

Erin Stone
Journal of Southern History, Vol.90(4), pp.806-807
11/2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a939504
Web of Science ID: WOS:001340042800006

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Abstract

Book Review
(Excerpt) In this extensive work, Kevin Kokomoor directly challenges the traditional English-based origins of the United States. Instead, he positions Catholic Spanish Florida at the center of America's founding stories and myths. By emphasizing Spanish Florida in America's origin stories, Kokomoor intends to present "a more complex, complete, and interesting history of important American legacies" (p. xvi). Kokomoor opens his book with one of America's most treasured myths: the "first" Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation. He argues that the 1621 English feast was of little consequence compared with the actual first Thanksgiving that took place in 1565 on St. Augustine's Day in Florida. Not only was the 1565 Spanish feast day one of the first of its kind in continental North America (at least, in the lands that would later become the [End Page 806] United States), but it also had a very different tenor than that of the later pilgrims to the north. Kokomoor makes clear that Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was celebrating not only the founding of the St. Augustine settlement and St. Matthew's Day, but also the massacre of hundreds of French Protestants at Fort Caroline. With this opening story the author makes his point clear. La Florida: Catholics, Conquistadores, and Other American Origin Stories will not be telling the typical American origin stories.

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