Introduction

After defining the scholarly and historical practice of firsting and its related processes, including seconding, lasting, and disappearance, this chapter outlines the Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese expansion into the Americas as a means of sketching out the temporal and geographical scope of this book. It then challenges conventional notions of firsting by exploring Native-American knowledge and trade networks as a means of proposing ways through which Indigenous peoples spread information about Europeans, possibly even before Columbus appeared, and certainly after 1492, converting Europeans into expected arrivals while acknowledging the agency of Indigenous peoples across these continents. This chapter also explores terminology used to describe Indigenous peoples, particularly because it varies across the world at different historical moments. Finally, this introduction concludes with a brief summary of the book’s contents, and its three thematic areas of focus: the foundations for firsting in historiography and literature; the use of modernity and unfamiliarity as firsting principles; and means through which the western world can be un-firsted from the Americas. The chapter also pauses to emphasize future directions for scholarship on the practice of firsting.