This dissertation explores the empirical description and representation of nature as a cornerstone of historiographical authority and the treatment of social conflict in a broad selection of texts produced in Spanish-dominated regions of the New World during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Beginning with the work of authors positioned within the relatively privileged military, bureaucratic, and ecclesiastical strata of early colonial society, it studies how the trope of American nature was soon appropriated, adapted, and exploited by those writing from increasingly marginalized or problematic sociopolitical positions throughout roughly the first century following the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlán.

Chapter 1 studies the ways in which Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernardino de Sahagún, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo used the prologues to their respective histories to challenge the authority of classical authors and claim their personal experience of American nature as the foundation of their historiographical projects. Chapters 2 and 3 study accounts of politically volatile explorations of the Paraguay and Orinoco river regions in the work of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's scribe Pero Hernández and Sir Walter Raleigh, respectively. Each of these authors appropriates the empirical techniques employed by the authors studied in Chapter 1 to create deeply subjective representations of American nature in which the condition of the land directly reflects the moral authority of those controlling it. Chapter 4 considers Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's fusion of European and Nahua historiographical conventions to portray nature as a protagonist in a centuries-long struggle for power of the Nahuatl-speaking territories of Mesoamerica.

While these experientially-grounded accounts of American nature contributed to the rise of empiricism in European thought and letters, they also provided the foundation of narratives ultimately aimed at legitimizing their authors' views regarding the political composition of the colonial world. By studying the nature trope in such a heterogenous body of texts, this dissertation demonstrates that authors of diverse social and ethnic backgrounds were participants in a single, far-reaching dispute concerning not only the writing of history and the nature of the New World, but the nature of knowledge and the organization of early modern societies.