The Southern Methodist University Press publication is the first annotated, dual-language edition of what for 60 years has been the canon of primary source documents relating to the Coronado expedition. It also adds to that familiar suite 14 other documents that have never been available before in print, in their original language, in English translation, or in both. These "new" documents have been selected because they focus on individuals, groups, or topics little discussed in the documents of the canon and are particularly rich sources of data about the expedition. The combination of new documents and retranslation and retranscription of familiar ones lends an entirely new cast to our understanding of the Coronado entrada of 1539-1542.

In preparing Documents of the Coronado Expedition, the Flints have taken particular pains to provide information useful in assessing the reliability and trustworthiness of the documentary sources. Although this is a critical task of historians, as it must be for representatives of modern news media, it is often not made explicit in historical writing and, more often than one would wish, is slighted or ignored by historians themselves.

In their Clements Center lecture on September 21 the Flints will focus on specific factors affecting the reliability and trustworthiness of the documentary sources, including the intended purpose and audience of a document; the relation of author to audience; the presence of obvious partisan, sectarian, social, or cultural biases; the identity of the source or sources of reports made in a document, if not the author; and the proximity (in both time and space) of the reporter to the events described. They will highlight cause for historical skepticism in the writings of some of the principal sources of information about the expedition, including fray Marcos de Niza, Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, and Juan Jaramillo. The Flints will also point to methods of cross checking and collating that can give more confidence about the "factualness" of statements made in the primary source documents.