You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance uncovers from history the fascinating and strange story of Spanish explorer Francisco Noguerol de Ulloa. in 1556, accompanied by his second wife, Francisco returned to his home in Spain after a profitable twenty-year sojourn in the new world of Peru. However, unlike most other rich conquistadores who returned to the land of their birth, Francisco was not allowed to settle into a life of leisure. Instead, he was charged with bigamy and illegal shipment of silver, was arrested and imprisoned. Francisco's first wife (thought long dead) had filed suit in Spain against her renegade husband. So begins the labyrinthine legal tale and engrossing drama of an explorer...
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.
The practical application of micro-historical approaches in 'Women in Port' helps to re-frame our understanding of women's possibilities in the Atlantic world.
At the Heart of the Borderlands is the first book-length study of Africans and Afro-descendants in the frontiers of Spanish America. While people of African descent have formed part of most borderlands histories, this study recognizes and explains their critical contribution to the formation of frontier spaces. Lack of imperial control coupled with Spain's desperation for settlers and soldiers in frontier areas facilitated the social mobility of Afro-descendants. This need allowed African descendants to become not just members of borderland societies but leaders of it as well. They were essential actors in helping to shape the limits of the Spanish empire. Africans and Afro-descendants built, opposed, and shaped Spanish hegemony in the borderlands, taking on roles that would have been impossible or difficult in colonial centers due to the socio-racial hierarchy of imperial policies and practices.
This work is the first English translation of the entire text of part one of sixteenth-century Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara’s General History of the Indies. Including substantial critical annotations and providing access to various readings and passages added to or removed from the successive editions of the 1550s, this translation expands the archive of texts available to English speakers reconsidering the various aspects of the European invasion of America. General History of the Indies was the first universal history of the recent discoveries and conquests of the New World made available to the Old World audience. At publication it consisted of two parts: the first a ge...
This collection of essays is the first book published in English to provide a thorough survey of the practices of science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires from 1500 to 1800. Authored by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the United States, Latin America, and Europe, the book consists of fifteen original essays, as well as an introduction and an afterword by renowned scholars in the field. The topics discussed include navigation, exploration, cartography, natural sciences, technology, and medicine. This volume is aimed at both specialists and non-specialists, and is designed to be useful for teaching. It will be a major resource for anyone interested in colonial Latin America.
In sixteenth-century Peru and Spain, even as migration, race mixture, and transculturation took place, family members fulfilled obligations by adapting custom to a changing world. This book studies non-elite families of indigenous, Spanish, and mixed ancestry with a focus on Lima and Arequipa and those with connections to Seville.
Accompanying Columbus on his second voyage to the New World in 1494 was a young Spanish friar named Ramón Pané. The friar’s assignment was to live among the “Indians” whom Columbus had “discovered” on the island of Hispaniola (today the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic), to learn their language, and to write a record of their lives and beliefs. While the culture of these indigenous people—who came to be known as the Taíno—is now extinct, the written record completed by Pané around 1498 has survived. This volume makes Pané’s landmark Account—the first book written in a European language on American soil—available in an annotated English edition. Edite...
Spirit, Symbols, and Change is more than a "how to" manual--it is a celebration of how to relate to people with a vastly different culture, language, and set of values. It is an adventure that takes the reader into an Andean world very different from our own. As a missionary among the Aymara of Peru, Salazar initially tried to convince them to become strongly committed Catholics. However, the Aymara did not show much promise of accepting his mission, nor had they changed their way of life for the last five hundred years. As the author tried to get beyond this impasse, he became friends with Marcelino, a blind shaman, and through him entered a totally unfamiliar world--the mind and the spiritual history of the Aymara. From these insights, the author developed an understanding of their values and assisted them in making the needed changes that broke their isolation and exclusion from mainstream society in Peru.
Sometimes referred to as the first published manual of guerrilla warfare, Bernardo de Vargas Machuca’s Indian Militia and Description of the Indies is actually the first known manual of counterinsurgency, or anti-guerrilla warfare. Published in Madrid in 1599 by a Spanish-born soldier of fortune with long experience in the Americas, the book is a training manual for conquistadors. The Aztec and Inca Empires had long since fallen by 1599, but Vargas Machuca argued that many more Native American peoples remained to be conquered and converted to Roman Catholicism. What makes his often shrill and self-righteous treatise surprising is his consistent praise of indigenous resistance techniques an...