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Department of History

The Conquest of the Mainland

Lecture slides 2023-4

Lecture Archive from previous years:

Transcript, week 5; Slides, week 5; Lecture, week 5, part 1; Lecture, week 5, part 2

RD Seminar Group Slides

CC's seminar group slides

Seminar questions

  • How did indigenous people understand and make sense of the 'conquest'?
  • How did Europeans understand and make sense of the 'conquest'?
  • Can we create a single, coherent history of the 'Spanish conquest of America'?
  • What can reading these different accounts tell us about how to write history, in general?

Required Seminar Readings

At least TWO of:

Seminar activity:

Sources for Understanding the Conquest of Peru and the Inka

What might the artefacts here tell us about Inca society and the arrival of Europeans in Peru?:

https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/peru-journey-time/timeline-central-andes-south-america

What does Guaman Poma de Ayala’s account from the New Chronicle of Good Government (c.1615) tell us about the meeting of Atahualpa and Pizarro? What doesn’t it tell us? What other sources might be useful?

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/davidfrye/wp-content/uploads/sites/281/2015/07/guaman.pdf

Look at Chapter 1 of Francisco de Avila’s, Narrative of the errors, false gods and other superstitions and diabolical rites in which the Indians of the province of Huarochiri lived in ancient times. What can it tell us? What can’t it tell us?

http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/narrative-of-the-errors-false-gods-and-other-superstitions-and-diabolical-rites-in-which-the-indians-of-the-province-of-huarochiri-lived-in-ancient-times/

Read the piece in Vistas about how histories of visual culture can help us understand how indigenous communities and the Spanish made sense of the pre-Hispanic past. Watch the slide show. How does it help historians to think about sources that might be useful for understanding the conquest and the Early Colonial Period?

https://vistas.ace.fordham.edu/themes/pre-columbian-surveying/

Further Reading

  • Clendinnen, Inga, ‘ “Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico’, Representations, 33 (1991), pp.65-100. Available on-line through JSTOR.
  • Cortés, Hernán, Letters from Mexico (New Haven, 2001), pp. xxxix-lxxi; 160-281: ‘Introduction’ and ‘Third Letter’. Available on-line through ACLS Humanities e-books.
  • Elliott, John, ‘The Spanish Conquest and Settlement of America’ in Leslie Bethell, (ed), The Cambridge History of Latin America (10 vols., Cambridge, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 147-206. Available through Cambridge Histories Online.
  • Restall, Matthew, 'The New Conquest History', History Compass, vol. 10:2 (2012). [this is a useful review essay about how the historiography on the conquest has changed]
  • Williams, Caroline A. “Opening New Frontiers in Colonial Spanish American History: New Perspectives on Indigenous-Spanish Interactions on the Margins of Empire.” History Compass, vol. 6, no. 4, July 2008, pp. 1121–1139.  [this is a useful review essay about how research on the frontiers of empire has changed}
  • Williamson, Edwin, The Penguin History of Latin America (London, 2009), pp. 3-37, Ch. 1: ‘Discovery and Conquest’.
  • Bakewell, Peter, A History of Latin America (Oxford, 1997), Part II: ‘Approaches’.
  • Burkholder, Mark, and Lyman Johnson, Colonial Latin America (Oxford, 1990), Ch. 2: ‘The Age of Conquest’.
  • Chasteen, John Charles, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (New York, 2002), Ch. 2: ‘Encounter’.
  • Clendinnen, Inga, ‘ “Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico’, Representations, vol. 33 (1991), pp.65-100.
  • Crosby, Alfred, ‘Conquistador y Pestilencia: The First New World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires’, Hispanic American Historical Review,vol. 47 (1967).
  • Ganson, Barbara. The Guarani under Spanish Rule in Rio de la Plata. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
  • Gerhard, Peter, "A Black Conquistador in Mexico", The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol.58 (1978), pp.451-459
  • Hassig, Ross, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest (Harlow, 1994).
  • Lockhart, James. The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru. University of Texas Press, 1973. (e-book in the library)
  • Lockhart, James. We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. 1993.
  • Matthew, Laura, and Michel Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman, 2007).
  • Restall, Matthew, 'Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America', The Americas, vol. 57:2 (2000).
  • Schroeder, Susan, 'Looking Back at the Conquest', Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge, 1984), vol. 1.
  • Spalding, Karen. Huarochiri: an Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule. Stanford, 1984.
  • Terraciano, Kevin, 'Competing Memories of the Conquest of Mexico', Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, ed. Ilona Katzew (New Haven, 2011), pp. 55-77.
  • Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun : A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2019. (Especially Chapters 4 and 5)
  • Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin's Choices: an Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. (New Mexico, 2006).
  • Wachtel, Nathan, ‘The Indian and the Spanish Conquest’, Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge, 1984), vol. 1.
  • McClure, Julia, The Franciscan Invention of the New World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Indigenous Accounts

Additional Resources