In 1984, Joyce Rockwood Hudson accompanied her husband, anthropologist Charles Hudson, on a 4,000-mile trek across the Southeast. His objective was to retrace and verify the route taken by Hernando de Soto four and a half centuries earlier. The effort would bring into question, and ultimately supplant, much of what was earlier thought to be the course of the Spanish explorer's journey. This is the journal Joyce Hudson kept during that trip. A kind of scholar's version of Blue Highways, the book is a warmly humane and almost daily account of the people the Hudsons met, the places they saw, and the things they did as they searched for De Soto's trail beneath railroad tracks and two-lane blacktops, along riverbanks and mountain ridges. Thus it is largely a travel story about rural and small-town life in eleven states, from Florida to Texas. Descriptions of the region's everchanging terrain, vegetation, and climate fill the book--colored at times by Joyce Hudson's troubled musings about Americans' increasing disconnectedness from the land and irreverence for the past. Conveying the rewards and frustrations of lives spent in painstaking scholarly inquiry, Looking for De Soto also offers a firsthand glimpse into the daily work of anthropologists and archaeologists: the exchanges of ideas, the ventures through swamps and down deeply rutted farm roads, the endless porings over maps, charts, and notes. As if writing a detective story, the author suspensefully paces the narrative with the accrual of geographical, artifactual, and documentary evidence, punctuating it with false leads and other setbacks, as mile after mile of the trail is redrawn. The story even has its villains--"pothunters" and private collectors; the builders of canals and dams that alter the courses of rivers and inundate ancient village sites; and the owners of corporate farms, who have leveled and eradicated ceremonial mounds with their massive agricultural machinery. Finally, a sense of the headlong cultural collision between Europeans and Native Americans pervades the book. De Soto and his six hundred conquistadores were the first Europeans to explore the interior of the southeastern United States and the only ones to witness its aboriginal society at its zenith. Hudson's evocation of this encounter so central to the history of the New World may well send readers on their own excursions into the past. Looking for De Soto is a fascinating journey through today's South, illuminated by a richly informed perspective on its earlier days.

Originally published in hardcover in 1997 by The University of Georgia Press; published with additional material in 2018 by The University of Georgia Press.

From the incomparable William Steig, creator of Shrek, comes a story that proves even a fox can be out-foxed by a clever mouse in Doctor De Soto, a Newbery Honor Book. "Doctor De Soto, the dentist, did very good work." With the aid of his able assistant, Mrs. De Soto, he copes with the toothaches of animals large and small. His expertise is so great that his fortunate patients never feel any pain. Since he's a mouse, Doctor De Soto refuses to treat "dangerous" animals--that is, animals who have a taste for mice. But one day a fox shows up and begs for relief from the tooth that's killing him. How can the kindhearted De Sotos turn him away? But how can they make sure that the fox doesn't give in to his baser instincts once his tooth is fixed? Those clever De Sotos will find a way. Doctor De Soto is a 1982 New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of the Year and Outstanding Book of the Year, a 1983 Boston Globe - Horn Book Awards Honor Book for Picture Books, and a 1983 Newbery Honor Book. Made into an animated short film in 1984 by American director and animator Michael Sporn.

The Search for Mabila describes one of the most profound events in sixteenth-century North America, which was a ferocious battle between the Spanish army of Hernando de Soto and a larger force of Indian warriors under the leadership of a feared chieftain named Tascalusa.

"An admirable tour de force that will need to be consulted by future biographers of the Spanish conquerer. Impeccable scholarship and documentation"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

1993 Choice Outstanding Academic Book, sponsored by Choice Magazine. The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with North American Indians in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians the surviving De Soto chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. These documents, available here in a two volume set, are the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture that vanished in the wake of European contact.