A Voyage Long and Strange
I just finished reading an ARC of Tony Horwitz's new book, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World. In it, he covers the ground discovered, conquered, and/or colonized by all those European explorers we learned about back in fifth grade. We get a few mentions of such South American conquerors as Cortez, Pizarro, and Balboa, but the majority of the focus is on the Caribbean and the present-day United States, so Horwitz is basically trying to retrace the steps of explorers like Erikson and Columbus, conquistadors like Coronado and De Soto, and colonists such as Ribaut, John Smith, and John Rolfe. There's a lot our history books didn't cover in those days, and there's a lot that they covered, but not with anything resembling facts. Bonus: Horwitz gives a prominent mention of a terrific Stephen Jay Gould essay, "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown."
If you enjoyed Confederates in the Attic or Blue Latitudes, I think you'll like this one, too. It doesn't have the power and immediacy of the former or the exotic information of the latter, but I think it points out some interesting and illuminating things about not just American history but the way we view that history.
As my old folklore professor Dan Patterson used to say about "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortes," "Folks songs don't tell us what happened. Folk songs tell us how people FELT about what happened." Or, as Horwitz puts it, "I'd sensed something else. Americans didn't so much study history as shop for it."