Twenty-five years ago, I began to study Nahuatl, the language once spoken by the Aztecs—and still spoken today by more than a million Indigenous people in Mexico. This has opened up to me a world of great excitement. After the Spanish conquest, many Aztecs learned the Roman alphabet. During the day, they used it to study the texts presented to them by the Franciscan friars. But in the evenings, they used it to transcribe old histories recited for them by their parents and grandparents. Today we are beginning to use those writings to learn more about the Aztecs than we ever could before we studied their language.
Reading this book, we have a front row seat at one of the most important moments of world history.
Over the course of his conquest of Mexico, Hernando wrote five letters to the King of Spain. He was often full of BS—but that doesn’t make his writings any less interesting! Cortés always had an eye on the main chance, so he wrote what he thought would impress.
Here, for instance, we find the story—impossible to believe—that as soon as Cortés arrived in the Aztec capital, he placed Montezuma, emperor of millions, under house arrest. Cortés had a translator upon whom he depended for everything—and he referred to her only a handful of times. Most of the time, he seems to communicate by magic. It is downright funny!
Hernan Cortes's Cartas de Relacion, written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain, provide an extraordinary narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the coastal town of Veracruz until Cortes's journey to Honduras in 1525.
I am a translator specializing in Chinese historical novels, and also an academic researching marginalized groups in Chinese history—ethnic minorities, the disabled, people with mental health issues, and so on. The treatment of marginalized people tells you a lot about what is going on within mainstream society. I’ve always been interested in stories about people from distant times and places, and I have a particular love of long sagas, something that you can really get your teeth into. Kingdoms in Peril covers five hundred years of history: I translated this for my own enjoyment and was surprised when I realized that I’d managed to write 850,000 words for fun!
Four times the sun has died and been reborn, and now we are living in the world of the fifth sun.
In this wonderful imaginative rendering of Aztec history, we move between mythological and real time, following the Mexica people as they gain power and establish a great kingdom, and then suffer the disaster of Spanish attack. The voices of many different people speak through this story, men and women, telling us of the price that they paid each step of the way in the struggle to survive in a beautiful but brutal world.
In November 1519, Hernando Cortes walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story-and the story of what happened afterwards-has been told many times, but always following the narrative offered by the Spaniards. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were intrigued by the Roman alphabet and, unbeknownst to the newcomers, they used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl. Until recently, these sources remained obscure, only partially translated, and rarely consulted by…
I’ve always been attracted to strange things. When I was a kid, I loved to picnic in graveyards and make up stories about the people buried there. I think I gravitate toward the strange because it’s an escape from the gray every day. The best horror writing fills readers with wonder, opens the door to that magical question, ‘what if?’ But being truly engaged depends on caring about what happens to the characters in a book. That’s why I chose Horror with A Heart as my theme. I like horror with well-developed characters, people that matter to me. People who I could imagine as my friends.
Just when I thought I was done with vampires, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’sCertain Dark Things came along.
I was burned out on the genre. Most of the characters in vampire stories are rich, privileged, and frankly, not that interesting. Atl, the main character in Certain Dark Things, is the exception.
A descendant of Aztec blood drinkers, she finds herself caught between the rival vampire clans that dominate Mexico City. When she develops an unexpected attachment to a street kid named Domingo, her life gets even more complicated.
Domingo could have been nothing but a Renfield, a plaything for her vampire lead. But Moreno-Garcia explores the tender bond that develops between them, a connection that puts both in jeopardy. An engrossing new spin on the vampire tale.
Welcome to Mexico City, an oasis in a sea of vampires. Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is just trying to survive its heavily policed streets when a jaded vampire on the run swoops into his life. Atl, the descendant of Aztec blood-drinkers, is smart and beautiful - and very dangerous. Domingo is mesmerised.
Atl needs to escape the city quickly, to get far away from the rival narco-vampire clan relentlessly pursuing her. Her plan doesn't include Domingo, but little by little, she finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his undeniable charm. As the trail of…
I fell in love with historical novels as a kid somewhere between reading Johnny Tremain and Ben and Me (from the point of view of a mouse living in Ben Franklin’s hat) in elementary school and Mika Waltari’s The Roman and The Egyptian and Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur in junior high. And that love led me to write After the Lost War, a historical novel in verse based on the life of the poet Sidney Lanier, who served in the confederate army in the civil war, survived to start a family and died from tuberculous he contracted as a prisoner of war.
Mixtli, an elderly Aztec lord captured by the Spanish, is reluctantly questioned by a Catholic bishop charged with reporting to the king of Spain about the customs and mores of his new unwilling subjects. The bishop is repulsed and appalled by the violent history and, to his mind, sexual looseness of the Aztecs while blind to the violent depredations of the conquistadors who protect him. But the story that outrages the bishop is for the reader a spectacular tragic saga of the end of the Aztec empire from the point of view of the conquered and a telling of what was lost.
Gary Jennings's Aztec is the extraordinary story of the last and greatest native civilization of North America.
Told in the words of one of the most robust and memorable characters in modern fiction, Mixtli-Dark Cloud, Aztec reveals the very depths of Aztec civilization from the peak and feather-banner splendor of the Aztec Capital of Tenochtitlan to the arrival of Hernán Cortás and his conquistadores, and their destruction of the Aztec empire. The story of Mixtli is the story of the Aztecs themselves---a compelling, epic tale of heroic dignity and a colossal civilization's rise and fall.
I’m a historian of early modern Europe. I have a particular interest in the history of violence and social relations and how and why ordinary people came into conflict with each other and how they made peace, that’s the subject of my most recent book Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe, which compares the entanglement of everyday animosities and how these were resolved in Italy, Germany, France and England. I’m also passionate about understanding Europe’s contribution to world history. As editor of The Cambridge World History of Violence, I explored the dark side of this. But my next book, The Invention of Civil Society, will demonstrate Europe’s more positive achievements.
I love this book because on the one hand it tells an incredible story of adventurous derring-do – how a few hundred men conquered a vast empire – and other hand is a testimony to the brutality and savagery that accompanied European colonization.
Diaz is crucial to understanding our present condition. I admire it because it helps us to understand why Europe emerged as the most important region in world history and reminds us of the terrible consequences that conquest had for indigenous people.
2020 Reprint of the 1963 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Díaz took part in the campaigns against the Mexica, later called the Aztec Empire. He was a highly experienced member of Hernán Cortés's expedition. During this campaign, Díaz spoke frequently with his fellow soldiers about their experiences. These accounts, and especially Díaz's own experiences, served as the basis for the recollections that Díaz later told with great drama to visitors and, eventually, in a book entitled Conquest of New Spain. Therein Díaz describes many of the 119 battles in which he…
Twenty-five years ago, I began to study Nahuatl, the language once spoken by the Aztecs—and still spoken today by more than a million Indigenous people in Mexico. This has opened up to me a world of great excitement. After the Spanish conquest, many Aztecs learned the Roman alphabet. During the day, they used it to study the texts presented to them by the Franciscan friars. But in the evenings, they used it to transcribe old histories recited for them by their parents and grandparents. Today we are beginning to use those writings to learn more about the Aztecs than we ever could before we studied their language.
Many Aztecs studied with Franciscan friars. Later, they helped the friars write books about Christianity and compose plays for their people to present on holidays.
They took European ideas and reinterpreted them for a Native audience. For instance, Hephaistos, a Greek god who was a bit of a loser, is given the name Tizoc, a former Aztec emperor who was also a bit of a loser. It is fascinating to watch people digesting a whole new way of thinking.
Best of all, some of the plays were meant to be funny!
Nahuatl drama, one of the most surprising results of the Catholic presence in colonial Mexico, merges medieval European religious theater with the language and performance traditions of the Aztec (Nahua) people of central Mexico. Franciscan missionaries, seeking effective tools for evangelization, fostered this new form of theater after observing the Nahuas' enthusiasm for elaborate performances. The plays became a controversial component of native Christianity, allowing Nahua performers to present Christian discourse in ways that sometimes effected subtle changes in meaning. The Indians' enthusiastic embrace of alphabetic writing enabled the use of scripts, but the genre was so unorthodox that Spanish…
I spent a good part of my childhood in Spain and Venezuela while being educated in England, and early on I developed a fascination with the Spanish and Native American worlds. After traveling as a young man in Mexico and in Central America, I was hooked for life. With history degrees from Oxford and UCLA, for thirty years now I have been studying and writing books about the Aztecs and Mayas, Spanish conquistadors, and Afro-Mexicans—fascinating subjects from whom I continue to learn.
I love Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series (I have co-authored two books in the series, on The Conquistadors and on The Maya), and this is one of my favorite volumes in the series. It is a book I often use in the classroom and as a reference. Carrasco writes with clarity and wit, managing both to introduce readers to the Aztecs as well as to take us more deeply into various aspects of their history and culture. He has written a great deal on the Aztecs, particularly on their religion, and his depth of knowledge shows—but is not showy. His interpretation of Aztec culture is different from Townsend’s (and, to some extent, mine), but not confusingly so; in other words, you could read both this book and her Fifth Sun, get a sense of how scholars grapple with the tricky evidence that has survived, with both authors helping…
This Very Short Introduction employs the disciplines of history, religious studies, and anthropology as it illuminates the complexities of Aztec life. Readers meet a people highly skilled in sculpture, astronomy, city planning, poetry, and philosophy, who were also profoundly committed to cosmic regeneration through the thrust of the ceremonial knife and through warfare. David Carrasco looks beyond Spanish accounts that have colored much of the Western narrative to let Aztec voices speak about their origin stories, the cosmic significance of their capital city, their methods of child rearing, and the contributions women made to daily life and the empire. Carrasco…
I've been writing and drawing children’s books and comic books for kids for over 23 years. I've always loved the comic book format and visual storytelling. Reading pictures is actually very stimulating for kids and adults alike. I’m also a parent to three daughters and teach art at an elementary school locally, so I work with children and see what captures their imaginations and inspires them. As someone who’s written and illustrated numerous graphic novels for kids, moderates a children’s book review group, and reads so many of the newest books available, I selected these graphic novels as some of the best I’ve read in the different genres that have been released recently.
Mexica is an Aztec Princess faced with her greatest challenge. She must pass her initiation test to be crowned the ruler of her people.
Set in the time of the Aztecs in what is now Mexico City, Mexica sets off to solve the three riddles with her (huge) cat, Elote, when unbeknownst to her the enemy of her people, the Tlaxcala, have launched an attack. Quickly they team up with a helpful Axolotl salamander who helps them find food and confuse the enemy… though not on purpose and make great strides in the initiation.
The twists and turns in this really wonderful story are quite a ride for the reader. The art is excellent and adds to the story and the atmosphere and is easy to follow for the young audience. What I particularly like about this book and this whole series, is that it features a princess character from…
Mexica's princess initiation has begun. She's given three riddles by the Royal Council and must return with the respective prizes in order to be crowned.
Mexica ventures out of Aztlán with her pet ocelot, Elote, to find the prizes. Unbeknownst to her, the neighboring tribe, the Tlaxcala, is on the warpath. Mexica innocently thinks they're apart of the princess initiation and foils their plans amongst every turn; unknowingly saving the kingdom and ultimately returning as Aztlán's crowned princess.
Twenty-five years ago, I began to study Nahuatl, the language once spoken by the Aztecs—and still spoken today by more than a million Indigenous people in Mexico. This has opened up to me a world of great excitement. After the Spanish conquest, many Aztecs learned the Roman alphabet. During the day, they used it to study the texts presented to them by the Franciscan friars. But in the evenings, they used it to transcribe old histories recited for them by their parents and grandparents. Today we are beginning to use those writings to learn more about the Aztecs than we ever could before we studied their language.
Many people don’t realize that there were Indigenous people who chose to side with the Spaniards.
If they had reasons of their own to support the powerful outsiders, they sometimes did so. One such man had a great-great-grandson who became a writer in colonial Mexico. He took the family stories and did some research of his own, and then wrote this compelling account of the decisions his ancestor made and the actions he took.
I love his pride! (Warning: you have to like battle scenes to like this one.)
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 Cortes's arrival in 1519…
I am fascinated by the things people do and the reasons they give for doing them. That people also do things in culturally specific ways and that their culturally specific ways of doing things are related to their culturally specific ideas about what makes sense and what does not inspires in me a sense of awe. As a professor and historian, thinking anthropologically has always been an important tool, because it helps me look for the hidden, cultural logics that guided the behavior of people in history. It helps me ask different questions. And it sharpens my sense of humility for the fundamental unknowability of this world we call home.
A lot of Inga Clendinnen’s work dealt with what happens when two very different cultures and ways of making sense of things come into contact. In the subtitle of her book Aztecs: An Interpretation, she boldly asserted her method for approaching history. It is not merely a recitation of facts, it is an elucidation of those facts by an expert steeped in the knowledge of a particular past. Having written about the Maya and the Aztecs, Reading the Holocaust was a departure, topically, geographically, historically. What I found so extraordinary about the book was precisely Clendinnen’s decision to look anthropologically at staggering events historians had often written about in “functional” terms (who did what, when, and where). In so doing, she tried to offer insight into something unthinkable (what the perpetrators thought they were doing) and something unimaginable (what the victims experienced).
More than fifty years after their occurrence, the events of the Holocaust remain for some of their most dedicated students as morally and intellectually baffling, as 'unthinkable', as they were at their first rumouring. Reading the Holocaust, first published in 2002, challenges that bafflement, and the demoralization that attends it. Exploring the experience of the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view, as it appears in histories and memoirs, films and poems, Inga Clendinnen seeks to dispel what she calls the 'Gorgon effect': the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will that…
