HISTORY / Europe / Spain & Portugal

In Women in the Peninsular War, Esdaile looks beyond the iconography. While a handful of Spanish and Portuguese women became Agustina-like heroines, a multitude became victims, and here both of these groups receive their due. But Esdaile reveals a much more complicated picture in which women are discovered to have experienced, responded to, and participated in the conflict in various ways.

In July 1536, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (c. 1490–1559) and three other survivors walked 2,500 miles from Texas, across northern Mexico, to Sonora and ultimately to Mexico City. Cabeza de Vaca’s account of this astonishing journey is now recognized as one of the great travel stories of all time. Robin Varnum’s biography, the first single-volume cradle-to-grave account of the explorer’s life in eighty years, tells the rest of the story.

This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands separating what are now Mexico and the United States. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting.
 

The Mixtec peoples were among the major original developers of Mesoamerican civilization.  Centuries before the Spanish Conquest, they formed literate urban states and maintained a uniquely innovative technology and a flourishing economy.  Today, thousands of Mixtecs still live in Oaxaca, in present-day southern Mexico, and thousands more have migrated to locations throughout Mexico, the United States, and Canada. In this comprehensive survey, Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky—both preeminent scholars of Mixtec civilization—synthesize a wealth of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data to trace the emergence and evolution of Mixtec civilization from the time of earliest human occupation to the present.

In Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary, Beebe and Senkewicz focus on Serra’s religious identity and his relations with Native peoples. They intersperse their narrative with new and accessible translations of many of Serra’s letters and sermons, which allows his voice to be heard in a more direct and engaging fashion.

In their efforts to convert indigenous peoples, Franciscan friars brought the Spanish Inquisition to early-sixteenth-century Mexico. Patricia Lopes Don now investigates these trials to offer an inside look at this brief but consequential episode of Spanish methods of colonization, providing a fresh interpretation of an early period that has remained too long understudied.

Doña Teresa Confronts the Spanish Inquisition uncovers issues that resonate today: conflicts between religious and secular authority; the weight of evidence versus hearsay in court. Doña Teresa’s voice—set in the context of the history of the Inquisition—is a powerful addition to the memory of that time.

Esdaile’s study is a significant contribution to the new field sometimes known as occupation studies, which focuses on the ways a victorious army attempts to reconcile a conquered populace to the new political order. Combining military history with political and social history, Outpost of Empire delineates what we now call the cultural terrain of war. This is history that moves from battles between armies to battles for hearts and minds.

In Transcending Conquest, Stephanie Wood uses Nahuatl writings and illustrations to reveal Nahua perspectives on Spanish colonial occupations of the Western Hemisphere. Drawing on Mesoamerican peoples’ strong tradition of pictorial record keeping, Wood examines multiple examples of pictorial imagery to explore how native manuscripts depicted the European invader and colonizer.