By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Matthew Restall’s When Montezuma met Cortés delivers a blow to the basic structure of all current histories of the conquest of Mexico. Absolutely all accounts, from Cortés’ second letter to Charles V in 1520 to Inga Clendinnen’s masterful 1991 article “’Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty,’”[1] assume that the conquest of Mexico was led by […]
Slaves and Englishmen, by Michael Guasco (2014)
Historians have been puzzled by the rapid development of slavery in English America in the last three quarters of the seventeenth century: Scott Irish indentured laborers, Algonquian prisoners of war, and captured Africans were pressed into slavery.
Notes from the field: Retracing Sixteenth-Century Steps in Seville
Sitting in the archive, thumbing through delicate sixteenth-century documents and trying to decipher centuries old paleography, it is easy to forget that the city outside breathes history too.
“Oh this learning, what a thing it is!”: The New Archive (No. 16)
Has any single author had as massive an impact on history as William Shakespeare? For over four centuries, the works of the Bard have been read, analyzed, and performed all around the world. Keeping track of that massive history, let alone the history of Elizabethan/Jacobian England, is a monumental ambition. Luckily, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has taken up the task. And even better: they’ve digitized their collection for the world to see.