Camilla Townsend's stunning new book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing how similar seventeenth century Native Americans were--in the way they saw, understood, and struggled to control their world---not only to the invading British but to ourselves.
Neither naive nor innocent, Indians like Pocahontas and her father, the powerful king Powhatan, confronted the vast might of the English with sophistication, diplomacy, and violence. Indeed, Pocahontas's life is a testament to the subtle intelligence that Native...
Camilla Townsend's stunning new book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing ...
Malintzin was the indigenous woman who translated for Hernando Cortes in his dealings with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in the days of 1519 to 1521. "Malintzin," at least, was what the Indians called her. The Spanish called her dona Marina, and she has become known to posterity as La Malinche. As Malinche, she has long been regarded as a traitor to her people, a dangerously sexy, scheming woman who gave Cortes whatever he wanted out of her own self-interest.
The life of the real woman, however, was much more complicated. She was sold into slavery as a child, and eventually given away to...
Malintzin was the indigenous woman who translated for Hernando Cortes in his dealings with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in the days of 1519 to 1521....
Indigenous breadsellers riot over a Spanish monopoly scheme; Spanish authorities plan to remove native people from the city; indigenous people struggle to construct a splendid church; the city's inhabitants fight over elections and witness hangings, epidemics, and eclipses. All this and more a Native American writer of Puebla, Mexico, reported in the late seventeenth century in a set of annals in his own language, Nahuatl, telling his people's local history from the coming of the Christian faith down to his own day. These records were part of a corpus of such annals produced in the...
Indigenous breadsellers riot over a Spanish monopoly scheme; Spanish authorities plan to remove native people from the city; indigenous people struggl...
With a common heritage as former colonies of Europe, why did the United States so outstrip Latin America in terms of economic development in the nineteenth century? In this innovative study, Camilla Townsend challenges the traditional view that North Americans succeeded because of better attitudes toward work--the Protestant work ethic--and argues instead that they prospered because of differences in attitudes towards workers that evolved in the colonial era.
Townsend builds her study around workers' lives in two very similar port cities in the 1820s and 1830s. Through the eyes of...
With a common heritage as former colonies of Europe, why did the United States so outstrip Latin America in terms of economic development in the ni...
For many generations, the Nahuas of Mexico maintained their tradition of the xiuhpohualli. or "year counts," telling and performing their history around communal firesides so that the memory of it would not be lost. When the Spaniards came, young Nahuas took the Roman letters taught to them by the friars and used the new alphabet to record historical performances by elders. Between them, they wrote hundreds of pages, which circulated widely within their communities. Over the next century and a half, their descendants copied and recopied these texts, sometimes embellishing, sometimes...
For many generations, the Nahuas of Mexico maintained their tradition of the xiuhpohualli. or "year counts," telling and performing their history arou...
