Joseph Ward, Dean of the USU College of Humanities and Social Sciences, is the editor of a new book titled “European Empires in the American South: Colonial and Environmental Encounters,” which examines the process of European expansion into a region that has come to be known as the American South. After Europeans began to cross the Atlantic with confidence, they interacted for three hundred years with one another, with the native people of the region, and with enslaved Africans in ways that made the South a significant arena of imperial ambition. As such, it was one of several similarly contested regions around the Atlantic basin.