A dramatic rethinking of the encounter between Montezuma and Hernando Cort s that completely overturns what we know about the Spanish conquest of the Americas

On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cort s first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction--the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas--has long been the symbol of Cort s's bold and brilliant military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere.

But is this really what happened? In a departure from traditional tellings, When Montezuma Met Cort s uses the Meeting--as Restall dubs their first encounter--as the entry point into a comprehensive reevaluation of both Cort s and Montezuma. Drawing on rare primary sources and overlooked accounts by conquistadors and Aztecs alike, Restall explores Cort s's and Montezuma's posthumous reputations, their achievements and failures, and the worlds in which they lived--leading, step by step, to a dramatic inversion of the old story. As Restall takes us through this sweeping, revisionist account of a pivotal moment in modern civilization, he calls into question our view of the history of the Americas, and, indeed, of history itself.

With the Maya historically subdivided and misunderstood in so many ways, the pursuit of what made them the Maya is all the more important. In this Very Short Introduction, Restall and Solari explore the themes of Maya identity, city-state political culture, art and architecture, the Maya concept of the cosmos, and the Maya experience of contact with -- including invasion by -- outsiders. Despite its brevity, this book is unique for its treatment of all periods of Maya civilization, from its origins to the present.

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest reveals how the Spanish invasions in the Americas have been conceived and presented, misrepresented and misunderstood, in the five centuries since Columbus first crossed the Atlantic.

This book is a unique and provocative synthesis of ideas and themes that were for generations debated or perpetuated without question in academic and popular circles. The 2003 edition became the foundation stone of a scholarly turn since called The New Conquest History. Each of the book's seven chapters describes one myth, or one aspect of the Conquest that has been distorted or misrepresented, examines its roots, and explodes its fallacies and misconceptions. Using a wide array of primary and secondary sources, written in a scholarly but readable style, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest explains why Columbus did not set out to prove the world was round, the conquistadors were not soldiers, the native Americans did not take them for gods, Cortés did not have a unique vision of conquest procedure, and handfuls of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. Conquest realities were more complex--and far more fascinating--than conventional histories have related, and they featured a more diverse cast of protagonists-Spanish, Native American, and African. This updated edition of a key event in the history of the Americas critically examines the book's arguments, how they have held up, and why they prompted the rise of a New Conquest History.

For generations, scholars used (and misused) the Account as the sole eyewitness insight into an ancient civilization. It is credited to the sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan, monastic inquisitor, and bishop Diego de Landa, whose legacy is complex and contested. His extensive writings on Maya culture and history were lost in the seventeenth century, save for the fragment that is the Account, discovered in the nineteenth century, and accorded near-biblical status in the twentieth as the first ethnography of the Maya. However, the Account is not authored by Landa alone; it is a compilation of excerpts, many from writings by other Spaniards-a significant revelation made here for the first time.

This new translation accurately reflects the style and vocabulary of the original manuscript. It is augmented by a monograph-comprising an introductory chapter, seven essays, and hundreds of notes-that describes, explains, and analyzes the life and times of Diego de Landa, the Account, and the role it has played in the development of modern Maya studies. The Friar and the Maya is an innovative presentation on an important and previously misunderstood primary source.

By 1976, Elton John was the best-selling recording artist and the highest-grossing touring act in the world. With seven #1 albums in a row and a reputation as a riveting piano-pounding performer, the former Reggie Dwight had gone with dazzling speed from the London suburbs to the pinnacles of rock stardom, his songs never leaving the charts, his sold-out shows packed with adoring fans. Then he released Blue Moves, and it all came crashing down.

Was the commercially disappointing and poorly reviewed double album to blame? Can one album shoot down a star? No, argues Matthew Restall; Blue Moves is a four-sided masterpiece, as fantastic as Captain Fantastic, as colorful as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, a showcase for the three elements--piano-playing troubadour, full orchestra, rock band--with which Elton John and his collaborators redirected the evolution of popular music. Instead, both album and career were derailed by a perfect storm of circumstances: Elton's decisions to stop touring and start his own label; the turbulent shiftings of popular culture in the punk era; the minefield of attitudes toward celebrity and sexuality. The closer we get to Blue Moves, the better we understand the world into which it was born--and vice versa. Might that be true of all albums?

Beyond Black and Red is the first book to deal primarily and specifically with relations between Africans and native peoples in colonial Latin America. Matthew Restall has collected nine essays that represent contributions to the larger fields of colonial Latin American history, African diaspora studies, and ethnohistory. Among the subjects addressed are marriage and miscegenation, identity and nomenclature, cultural exchanges, labor, and cooperation in resisting colonialism versus collaboration.

The authors examine core areas such as Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Brazil, and peripheral ones such as Florida, Colombia, and the Orinoco basin. The contributors find that relations between black and native peoples were sometimes harmonious, sometimes hostile, depending on local dynamics and individual agendas. Native and black soldiers fought sometimes as comrades, sometimes as adversaries, and couples in mixed marriages might identify as Indian or as black depending on where the advantage lay in a given society.

This pathbreaking work is a social and cultural history of the Maya peoples of the province of Yucatan in colonial Mexico, spanning the period from shortly after the Spanish conquest of the region to its incorporation as part of an independent Mexico.

Instead of depending on the Spanish sources and perspectives that have formed the basis of previous scholarship on colonial Yucatan, the author aims to give a voice to the Maya themselves, basing his analysis entirely on his translations of hundreds of Yucatec Maya notarial documents--from libraries and archives in Mexico, Spain, and the United States--most of which have never before received scholarly attention.

These documents allow the author to reconstruct the social and cultural world of the Maya municipality, or cah, the self-governing community where most Mayas lived and which was the focus of Maya social and political identity. The first two parts of the book examine the ways in which Mayas were organized and differentiated from each other within the community, and the discussion covers such topics as individual and group identities, sociopolitical organization, political factionalism, career patterns, class structures, household and family patterns, inheritance, gender roles, sexuality, and religion.

The third part explores the material environment of the cah, emphasizing the role played by the use and exchange of land, while the fourth part describes in detail the nature and significance of the source documentation, its genres and its language. Throughout the book, the author pays attention to the comparative contexts of changes over time and the similarities or differences between Maya patterns and those of other colonial-era Mesoamericans, notably the Nahuas of central Mexico.

Winner of the Conference on Latin American History's 2010 Mexican History Book Prize.

The Black Middle is the first full-length study of black African slaves and other people of African descent in the Spanish colonial province of Yucatan. Matthew Restall makes expert use of Spanish and Maya language documents from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, found in a dozen different archives. His goal is to discover what life was like for a people hitherto ignored by historians. He explores such topics as slavery and freedom, militia service and family life, bigamy and witchcraft, and the ways in which Afro-Yucatecans (as he dubs them) interacted with Mayas and Spaniards. Restall concludes that, in numerous ways, Afro-Yucatecans lived and worked in a middle space between--but closely connected to--Mayas and Spaniards. The book's black middle thesis has profound implications for the study of Africans throughout the Americas.

Winner of the Conference on Latin American History's 2010 Mexican History Book Prize.

The Black Middle is the first full-length study of black African slaves and other people of African descent in the Spanish colonial province of Yucatan. Matthew Restall makes expert use of Spanish and Maya language documents from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, found in a dozen different archives. His goal is to discover what life was like for a people hitherto ignored by historians. He explores such topics as slavery and freedom, militia service and family life, bigamy and witchcraft, and the ways in which Afro-Yucatecans (as he dubs them) interacted with Mayas and Spaniards. Restall concludes that, in numerous ways, Afro-Yucatecans lived and worked in a middle space between--but closely connected to--Mayas and Spaniards. The book's black middle thesis has profound implications for the study of Africans throughout the Americas.

After invading highland Guatemala in 1524, Spaniards claimed to have smashed the Kaqchikel and K'iche' Maya kingdoms and to have forged a new colony--with their leader, Pedro de Alvarado, as Guatemala's conquistador. This volume shows that the real story of the Spanish invasion was very different. Designed to be an accessible introduction to the topic as well as a significant contribution to conquest scholarship, the volume presents for the first time English translations of firsthand accounts by Spaniards, Nahuas, and Mayas.

Alvarado's letters to Cort s, published here in English for the first time in almost a century, are supplemented with accounts by one of his cousins, by his brother Jorge, and by Bernal D az and Bartolom de Las Casas. Nahua perspectives are presented in the form of pictorial evidence, along with written testimony by Tlaxcalan and Aztec veterans who fought as invading allies of the Spaniards; their claim to have done most of the fighting emerges as a powerful argument. The views of the invaded are represented by Kaqchikel and Tz'utujil accounts. Together, these sources reveal a fascinating multiplicity of perspectives and show how the conquest wars of the 1520s were a profoundly brutal moment in the history of the Americas.

Driven by a clear and compelling argument, this engaging book traces apocalyptic thinking in two civilizations--Western and Maya. Looking both backward and forward, Matthew Restall and Amara Solari build on their previous study, 2012 and the End of the World, to explore the persistence of our civilization's end-of-times anxiety and anticipation.

Driven by a clear and compelling argument, this engaging book traces apocalyptic thinking in two civilizations--Western and Maya. Looking both backward and forward, Matthew Restall and Amara Solari build on their previous study, 2012 and the End of the World, to explore the persistence of our civilization's end-of-times anxiety and anticipation.