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New information from Inquisition documents shows how African slaves in Mexico adapted to the constraints of the Church and the Spanish crown in order to survive in their communities.
In Europe and North and South America during the early modern period, people believed that their dreams might be, variously, messages from God, the machinations of demons, visits from the dead, or visions of the future. Interpreting their dreams in much the same ways as their ancient and medieval forebears had done—and often using the dream-guides their predecessors had written—dreamers rejoiced in heralds of good fortune and consulted physicians, clerics, or practitioners of magic when their visions waxed ominous. Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions traces the role of dreams and related visionary experiences in the cultures within the Atlantic world from the late thirteenth to early seventeen...
Sailing the tide of a tumultuous era of Atlantic revolutions, a remarkable group of African-born and African-descended individuals transformed themselves from slaves into active agents of their lives and times. Big Prince Whitten, the black Seminole Abraham, and General Georges Biassou were “Atlantic creoles,” Africans who found their way to freedom by actively engaging in the most important political events of their day. These men and women of diverse ethnic backgrounds, who were fluent in multiple languages and familiar with African, American, and European cultures, migrated across the new world’s imperial boundaries in search of freedom and a safe haven. Yet, until now, their extrao...
In Mulatto · Outlaw · Pilgrim · Priest, John K. Moore, Jr. presents the first in-depth study, critical edition, and scholarly translation of His Majesty’s Representative v. José Soller, Mulatto Pilgrim, for Impersonating a Priest and Other Crimes. This legal case dates to the waning days of the Hapsburg Spanish empire and illuminates the discrimination those of black-African ancestry could face—that Soller did face while attempting to pass freely on his pilgrimage from Lisbon to Santiago de Compostela and beyond. This bilingual edition and study of the criminal trial against Soller is important for reconstructing his journey and for revealing at least in part the de facto and de jure treatment of mulattos in the early-modern Iberian Atlantic World.
With limited resources to contextualize masculinity in colonial Mexico, film, literature, and social history perpetuate the stereotype associating Mexican men with machismo—defined as excessive virility that is accompanied by bravado and explosions of violence. While scholars studying men’s gender identities in the colonial period have used Inquisition documents to explore their subject, these documents are inherently limiting given that the men described in them were considered to be criminals or otherwise marginal. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century resources, too, provide a limited perspective on machismo in the colonial period. The Origins of Macho addresses this deficiency by basing its study of colonial Mexican masculinity on the experiences of mainstream men. Lipsett-Rivera traces the genesis of the Mexican macho by looking at daily interactions between Mexican men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In doing so she establishes an important foundation for gender studies in Mexico and Latin America and makes a significant contribution to the larger field of masculinity studies.
When the Spanish colonized the Americas, they brought many cultural beliefs and practices with them, not the least of which involved death and dying. The essays in this volume explore the resulting intersections of cultures through recent scholarship related to death and dying in colonial Spanish America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The authors address such important questions as: What were the relationships between the worlds of the living and the dead? How were these relationships sustained not just through religious dogma and rituals but also through everyday practices? How was unnatural death defined within different population strata? How did demographic and cultural ...
Through a thoughtful consideration of the complexity of the religious landscape of the Atlantic basin, the collection provides an enriching portrayal of the intriguing interplay between religion, gender, ethnicity, and authority in the early modern Atlantic world.
Christianity took root in the Americas during the early modern period when a historically unprecedented migration brought European clergy, religious seekers, and explorers to the New World. Protestant and Catholic settlers undertook the arduous journey for a variety of motivations. Some fled corrupt theocracies and sought to reclaim ancient principles and Christian ideals in a remote unsettled territory. Others intended to glorify their home nations and churches by bringing new lands and subjects under the rule of their kings. Many imagined the indigenous peoples they encountered as "savages" awaiting the salvific force of Christ. Whether by overtly challenging European religious authority a...
In the 1960s and 1970s, El Salvador's reigning military regime instituted a series of reforms that sought to modernize the country and undermine ideological radicalism, the most ambitious of which was an education initiative. It was multifaceted, but its most controversial component was the use of televisions in classrooms. Launched in 1968 and lasting until the eve of civil war in the late 1970s, the reform resulted in students receiving instruction through programs broadcast from the capital city of San Salvador. The Salvadoran teachers' union opposed the content and the method of the reform and launched two massive strikes. The military regime answered with repressive violence, further al...
Chocolate and sugar, alcohol and tobacco, peyote and hallucinogenic mushrooms—these seductive substances have been a nexus of desire for both pleasure and profit in Mesoamerica since colonial times. But how did these substances seduce? And when and how did they come to be desired and then demanded, even by those who had never encountered them before? The contributors to this volume explore these questions across a range of times, places, and peoples to discover how the individual pleasures of consumption were shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political forces. Focusing on ingestible substances as a group, which has not been done before in the scholarly literature, the chapters in S...