A chronological timeline of early European exploration and development in Texas spanning from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Had history taken a different turn, the United States easily could have been a part of the great Spanish or French overseas empires. Its present inhabitants might speak Spanish and form one nation with Mexico, or speak French and be...

The first Europeans to arrive in North America -- at least the first for whom there is solid evidence -- were Norse, traveling west from Greenland, where Erik the Red had founded a settlement around the year 985. In 1001 his son Leif is...

An English translation of Cabeza De Vaca's first-hand account of his journey and quest to claim territory from Florida to Mexico for Spain.