Beyond Columbus: Andrew Rowen on History, Primary Sources & the Taíno
History is often presented as though there is one version of what happened.
One person did something.
An event occurred.
A historical figure became famous.
And eventually, that version becomes the story we remember.
But what happens when we look again?
What happens when we ask whose perspective shaped the record, and whose voice may have been left out?
That's one of the questions at the heart of my conversation with Andrew Rowen, author of Isabel, Anacaona & Columbus's Demise: 1498–1502 Retold.
A Different Way of Looking at Columbus
Most of us encounter Christopher Columbus's story through a familiar framework.
His voyages.
His arrival in the Caribbean.
The Spanish conquest.
The consequences for Indigenous peoples.
But the history of the Caribbean during this period was not simply a story about Columbus.
It was also the story of the Taíno people who already lived there, the leaders who resisted European expansion, the Spanish officials and settlers who disagreed with one another, and the political decisions being made thousands of miles away in Spain.
Rowen's work attempts to bring those perspectives together.
His latest novel focuses on 1498–1502, a period that he describes as one of the less studied portions of Española's conquest. The story places Taíno chieftain Anacaona and Spain's Queen Isabel alongside Columbus and other figures whose actions shaped the future of the Caribbean.
That approach immediately raises a question that I think is important for anyone interested in historical research:
How do we know what we think we know?
The Problem With the Historical Record
Historical records are invaluable.
But they aren't neutral windows into the past.
The people who created records had their own perspectives, priorities, beliefs, and reasons for documenting (or not documenting) something.
And when we're researching people who lived hundreds of years ago, we're often working with records created by people who had very different relationships to the events we're trying to understand.
That makes primary sources incredibly important.
It also makes them complicated.
In our conversation, Andrew talks about the importance of looking at history from multiple perspectives rather than relying on a single narrative.
His books draw on primary sources as well as anthropological research and archaeological evidence, including research at places connected to the people and events he writes about.
That combination is particularly interesting to me because it's very similar to the questions I find myself asking when researching genealogy.
A record can tell us what happened.
But sometimes we need to look beyond that record to understand why it happened.
Anacaona, Queen Isabel, and Two Very Different Worlds
One of the things that makes Isabel, Anacaona & Columbus's Demise particularly interesting is the way it places two women, Anacaona and Isabel, at the center of the story.
They occupied radically different positions in the world.
Anacaona was a Taíno leader working to protect her people and her chiefdom as Spanish expansion continued.
Isabel was the queen of Castile, participating in decisions that shaped Spain's expanding empire.
Their stories don't exist separately from the larger history of conquest.
And neither does Columbus's.
Rowen's approach allows these people to exist within the same historical world rather than treating Columbus as the only figure whose perspective matters.
The result is a story that asks us to look at the conquest not simply as something one historical figure did, but as a collision between people, cultures, political systems, religions, and competing ideas about power and sovereignty.
What Can We Actually Know?
This is perhaps my favorite part of historical research.
There are always limits.
Sometimes the evidence is strong.
Sometimes several records point in the same direction.
Sometimes we're left with conflicting accounts.
And sometimes we simply don't know.
That doesn't mean we stop researching.
It means we become more careful about the difference between what the evidence tells us, what we can reasonably infer, and what we can never know for certain.
That distinction matters whether you're researching a famous historical figure or trying to understand your own ancestor.
Listen to the Conversation
In this episode of Legacy Lore, Andrew and I talk about:
The history of the Taíno people and Anacaona
Columbus and the final years of his governorship of Española
Queen Isabel and her role in the Spanish conquest
The importance—and limitations—of primary sources
How historical narratives can change when we look for missing perspectives
Anthropology and archaeology as tools for understanding the past
The challenges of writing about people whose lives were recorded largely by others
What we can, and cannot, know about the past
Listen to the episode:
And if you're interested in Andrew's work, Isabel, Anacaona & Columbus's Demise: 1498–1502 Retold is available now.
