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Author: Matthew Restall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199839751
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403
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Book Description
Here is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which the history of the Spanish Conquest has been misread and passed down to become popular knowledge of these events. The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro. Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each myth. This vividly written and authoritative book shows, for instance, that native Americans did not take the conquistadors for gods and that small numbers of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. We discover that Columbus was correctly seen in his lifetime--and for decades after--as a briefly fortunate but unexceptional participant in efforts involving many southern Europeans. It was only much later that Columbus was portrayed as a great man who fought against the ignorance of his age to discover the new world. Another popular misconception--that the Conquistadors worked alone--is shattered by the revelation that vast numbers of black and native allies joined them in a conflict that pitted native Americans against each other. This and other factors, not the supposed superiority of the Spaniards, made conquests possible. The Conquest, Restall shows, was more complex--and more fascinating--than conventional histories have portrayed it. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest offers a richer and more nuanced account of a key event in the history of the Americas.
Author: Matthew Restall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199839751
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403
Get Book Here
Book Description
Here is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which the history of the Spanish Conquest has been misread and passed down to become popular knowledge of these events. The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro. Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each myth. This vividly written and authoritative book shows, for instance, that native Americans did not take the conquistadors for gods and that small numbers of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. We discover that Columbus was correctly seen in his lifetime--and for decades after--as a briefly fortunate but unexceptional participant in efforts involving many southern Europeans. It was only much later that Columbus was portrayed as a great man who fought against the ignorance of his age to discover the new world. Another popular misconception--that the Conquistadors worked alone--is shattered by the revelation that vast numbers of black and native allies joined them in a conflict that pitted native Americans against each other. This and other factors, not the supposed superiority of the Spaniards, made conquests possible. The Conquest, Restall shows, was more complex--and more fascinating--than conventional histories have portrayed it. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest offers a richer and more nuanced account of a key event in the history of the Americas.
Author: Donald E. Chipman
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1933337907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Book Description
Sword of Empire: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas from Columbus to Cortés, 1492–1529 is, by design, an approachable and accessible history of some of the most life-altering events in the story of man. Chipman examines the contributions of Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortes in creating the foundations of the Spanish Empire in North America. Chipman has produced a readable and accurate narrative for students and the reading public, although some information presented on Cortes cannot be found elsewhere in print and is therefore of interest to specialists in the history of Spain in America. Exclusive material from Professor France V. Scholes and the author share insights into the multi layered complexities of a man born in 1484 and named at birth Fernando Cortes. As for Columbus, born in Genoa on the Italian peninsula in 1451 and given the name Cristobal de Colon, he is a more transformative man than Cortes in bringing Western Civilization to the major Caribbean islands in the Spanish West Indies and beyond. Historians strive to present a “usable past” and the post-Columbian world is, of course, the modern world. Columbus's discoveries, those of other mariners who followed to the south in America, and still other eastward to the Asia placed the world on the path of global interdependence-both good and ill-for peoples of the world. There are no footnotes in Sword of Empire—this is narrative at its finest—but there are extensive bibliographies for each chapter that will prove useful for readers of every background.
Author: Fernando Cervantes
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101981261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
A sweeping, authoritative history of 16th-century Spain and its legendary conquistadors, whose ambitious and morally contradictory campaigns propelled a small European kingdom to become one of the formidable empires in the world “The depth of research in this book is astonishing, but even more impressive is the analytical skill Cervantes applies. . . . [He] conveys complex arguments in delightfully simple language, and most importantly knows how to tell a good story.” —The Times (London) Over the few short decades that followed Christopher Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean in 1492, Spain conquered the two most powerful civilizations of the Americas: the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru. Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and the other explorers and soldiers that took part in these expeditions dedicated their lives to seeking political and religious glory, helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. But centuries later, these conquistadors have become the stuff of nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation as men who decimated ancient civilizations and carried out horrific atrocities in their pursuit of gold and glory. In Conquistadores, acclaimed Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes—himself a descendent of one of the conquistadors—cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to help us better understand the context that gave rise to the conquistadors' actions. Drawing upon previously untapped primary sources that include diaries, letters, chronicles, and polemical treatises, Cervantes immerses us in the late-medieval, imperialist, religious world of 16th-century Spain, a world as unfamiliar to us as the Indigenous peoples of the New World were to the conquistadors themselves. His thought-provoking, illuminating account reframes the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World and the half-century that irrevocably altered the course of history.
Author: Matthew Restall
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271027584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
The invasions of Guatemala -- Pedro de Alvarado's letters to Hernando Cortes, 1524 -- Other Spanish accounts -- Nahua accounts -- Maya accounts
Author: Kenneth Mills
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742574075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492
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Book Description
Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History is a sourcebook of primary texts and images intended for students and teachers as well as for scholars and general readers. The book centers upon people-people from different parts of the world who came together to form societies by chance and by design in the years after 1492. This text is designed to encourage a detailed exploration of the cultural development of colonial Latin America through a wide variety of documents and visual materials, most of which have been translated and presented originally for this collection. Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History is a revision of SR Books' popular Colonial Spanish America. The new edition welcomes a third co-editor and, most significantly, embraces Portuguese and Brazilian materials. Other fundamental changes include new documents from Spanish South America, the addition of some key color images, plus six reference maps, and a decision to concentrate entirely upon primary sources. The book is meant to enrich, not repeat, the work of existing texts on this period, and its use of primary sources to focus upon people makes it stand out from other books that have concentrated on the political and economic aspects. The book's illustrations and documents are accompanied by introductions which provide context and invite discussion. These sources feature social changes, puzzling developments, and the experience of living in Spanish and Portuguese American colonial societies. Religion and society are the integral themes of Colonial Latin America. Religion becomes the nexus for much of what has been treated as political, social, economic, and cultural history during this period. Society is just as inclusive, allowing students to meet a variety of individuals-not faceless social groups. While some familiar names and voices are included-conquerors, chroniclers, sculptors, and preachers-other, far less familiar points of view complement and complicate the better-known narratives of this history. In treating Iberia and America, before as well as after their meeting, apparent contradictions emerge as opportunities for understanding; different perspectives become prompts for wider discussion. Other themes include exploration and contact; religious and cultural change; slavery and society, miscegenation, and the formation, consolidation, reform, and collapse of colonial institutions of government and the Church, as well as accompanying changes in economies and labor. This sourcebook allows students and teachers to consider the thoughts and actions of a wide range of people who were making choices and decisions, pursuing ideals, misperceiving each other, experiencing disenchantment, absorbing new pressures, breaking rules as well as following them, and employing strategies of survival which might involve both reconciliation and opposition. Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History has been assembled with teaching and class discussion in mind. The book will be an excellent tool for Latin American history survey courses and for seminars on the colonial period.
Author: Edward H. Spicer
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816532923
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624
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Book Description
After more than fifty years, Cycles of Conquest is still one of the best syntheses of more than four centuries of conquest, colonization, and resistance ever published. It explores how ten major Native groups in northern Mexico and what is now the United States responded to political incorporation, linguistic hegemony, community reorganization, religious conversion, and economic integration. Thomas E. Sheridan writes in the new foreword commissioned for this special edition that the book is “monumental in scope and magisterial in presentation.” Cycles of Conquest remains a seminal work, deeply influencing how we have come to view the greater Southwest and its peoples.
Author: John Pemberton
Publisher: Canary Press eBooks
ISBN: 1907795960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
In the sixteenth century the King of Spain issued his soldiers with a three-pronged mission: to find gold, spread the word of Christianity and claim new territories for Spain. The Conquistadors, as they became known, set off into the world to do just that, and nothing was to stand in their way. Some say that the discovery of the New World is the greatest event in history. Others, that it amounted to the bloodiest massacre of all time. Conquistadors follows the Spanish explorers as they unleash their terrifying religious wrath upon the Inca and Aztec empires and explains how the conquest of the New World transformed the Old World forever. Contents The World of the Conquistadors The People of the New World, Warfare: Steel versus Stone,The Conquests of Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro's Expeditions to Peru, Pizarro and the Incas, El Dorado: The Golden Man, The Real Life Don Quixote, Going Native, The Unconquerable Maya, New World Meets Old
Author: Amber Brian
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271072040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 127
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Book Description
For many years, scholars of the conquest worked to shift focus away from the Spanish perspective and bring attention to the often-ignored voices and viewpoints of the Indians. But recent work that highlights the “Indian conquistadors” has forced scholars to reexamine the simple categories of conqueror and subject and to acknowledge the seemingly contradictory roles assumed by native peoples who chose to fight alongside the Spaniards against other native groups. The Native Conquistador—a translation of the “Thirteenth Relation,” written by don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl in the early seventeenth century—narrates the conquest of Mexico from Hernando Cortés’s arrival in 1519 through his expedition into Central America in 1524. The protagonist of the story, however, is not the Spanish conquistador but Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s great-great-grandfather, the native prince Ixtlilxochitl of Tetzcoco. This account reveals the complex political dynamics that motivated Ixtlilxochitl’s decisive alliance with Cortés. Moreover, the dynamic plotline, propelled by the feats of Prince Ixtlilxochitl, has made this a compelling story for centuries—and one that will captivate students and scholars today.
Author: Kevin H. Siepel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780978646622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Conquistador Voices, a two-volume work by Kevin H. Siepel, is intended for the general reader. The book presents the history of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas principally through the voices of those who participated in that signal event. Its goal is to make this story engaging by substantial use of first-person narrative--much of it newly translated from Spanish and Italian sources.The overall story is told in five parts, each part featuring a principal Conquest actor--an explorer or conquistador. Volume I is devoted to the four voyages of Christopher Columbus, and to the subsequent conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortes.Volume I opens with a scene-setting narrative and introduction to Columbus, a man with an unshakable belief in an idea and a dogged determination to carry out that idea. Columbus's landing and initial encounter with the peoples of the Americas is covered, as is his worsening relationship with the colonists, his arrest and removal to Spain, his rehabilitation, and his subsequent year-long, mutiny-ridden isolation on a Jamaican beach. Equally well covered are the many aspects of his complex personality.The second part of volume I covers the conquest of Mexico and the Aztecs by Hernan Cortes. We are taken on the early exploratory voyages to the Mexican coast, eventually to land there with Cortes and his not-totally-loyal troops. We see Cortes take charge of his men, gather initially-hostile Indian warriors to his cause, and move this large force inexorably toward the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. We witness Cortes's bold seizure of the Aztec king Montezuma, the Spaniards' flight from the capital on the noche triste, Cortes's determination to hold this land against attacking Spaniards, and his final razing of the city with the slaughter of most of its inhabitants.An effort has been made throughout Conquistador Voices to avoid moralizing on these events, but to report them--with all due filtering of wheat from chaff--as we have been told that they occurred. Nine maps accompany the text, along with index, copious footnotes, and brief bibliography.
Author: Pedro de Cieza de Leon
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822382504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 522
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Book Description
Dazzled by the sight of the vast treasure of gold and silver being unloaded at Seville’s docks in 1537, a teenaged Pedro de Cieza de León vowed to join the Spanish effort in the New World, become an explorer, and write what would become the earliest historical account of the conquest of Peru. Available for the first time in English, this history of Peru is based largely on interviews with Cieza’s conquistador compatriates, as well as with Indian informants knowledgeable of the Incan past. Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook present this recently discovered third book of a four-part chronicle that provides the most thorough and definitive record of the birth of modern Andean America. It describes with unparalleled detail the exploration of the Pacific coast of South America led by Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, the imprisonment and death of the Inca Atahualpa, the Indian resistance, and the ultimate Spanish domination. Students and scholars of Latin American history and conquest narratives will welcome the publication of this volume.
