Bartolomé de Las Casas – 1474-1566

A Dominican friar, Las Casas was for 12 years part of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, but was outraged by the conquistadors’ inhumanity and wrote several gripping accounts of atrocities and other abuses committed against native peoples in the Caribbean and in North and South America. He was thus both an eyewitness-historian of early American exploration and settlement and a pioneering crusader for human rights.