Trying to understand the conquest of the Aztec Empire entails penetrating one of the most fabulous and sad episodes of the history of mankind. It is well known that the Spaniards, led by Hernan Cortes, conquered the Aztecs; the most powerful civilization of Mesoamerica. However, there are many questions regarding the actual events. For instance: how did Hernan Cortes communicate with the Aztecs? Was Moctezuma responsible for the conquest? Was Hernan Cortes a hero or a villain? The Conquest...

Trying to understand the conquest of the Aztec Empire entails penetrating one of the most fabulous and sad episodes of the history of mankind. It is well known that the Spaniards, led by Hernan Cortes, conquered the Aztecs; the most powerful civilization of Mesoamerica. However, there are many questions regarding the actual events. For instance: how did Hernan Cortes communicate with the Aztecs? Was Moctezuma responsible for the conquest? Was Hernan Cortes a hero or a villain? The Conquest...

A twenty-eight page book with the complete forgotten history of the Rebellion against the Calles Administration 1926-1930 in which the Pope closed the Mexican churches, and the government waged modern warfare against their own people over religious differences. hundreds of thousands of people died and a half million people migrated to the U.S.

Bernal Diaz was an eyewitness to one of history's most remarkable events - the conquest of the Empire of the Aztecs, and the defeat of their Emperor Montezuma.The indomitable Diaz delivers his chronicle first-hand, vividly describing the ruthless battles, the brilliant Machiavellian strategies of Cortes, and the superstitions vacillations of Montezuma that lead to the momentous overthrow of the Aztec civilization.Despite the supremacy of their weapons and armour, the Spanis...

Mexico is in a state of siege. Since President Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs in December 2006, more than 38,000 Mexican have been murdered. During the same period, drug money has infused over $130 billion into Mexico's economy, now the country's single largest source of income. Corruption and graft infiltrate all levels of government. Entire towns have become ungovernable, and of every 100 people killed, Mexican police now only investigate approximately five.But the marke...

A travelogue and historical exploration of Mexico from one of the twentieth century's greatest travel writersDame Rebecca West travels through Mexico and explores its people, history, religion, and culture in her unfinished work Survivors in Mexico, carefully stitched together by Bernard Schweizer in this posthumously published edition. West tackles the country's broad historical legacy—the Spanish conquest and Mexican revolution, the muralist movement, rac...

Michael Hopkinson's Green Against Green is the definitive study of the Irish civil war, putting in perspective a bitter and passionate conflict, the legacy of which still divides Irish society today. Widely praised and frequently cited as the most authoritative work on the subject, it continues to hold its place as one of the finest works on modern Irish history. Unlike the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, the Irish Civil War has been largely overlooked by historians, put off by ...

The definitive book on Mexico City: a vibrant, seductive, and paradoxical metropolis-the second-biggest city in the world, and a vision of our urban future.First Stop in the New World is a street-level panorama of Mexico City, the largest metropolis in the western hemisphere and the cultural capital of the Spanish-speaking world. Journalist David Lida expertly captures the kaleidoscopic nature of life in a city defined by pleasure and danger, ecstatic joy ...

Subcommander Marcos made his debut on the world stage on January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect. At dawn, from a town-hall balcony he announced that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation had seized several towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas in rebellion against the government; by sunset Marcos was on his way to becoming the most famous guerrilla leader since Che Guevara. Subsequently, through a succession of interviews, communiqués, and public s...

In the months leading up to the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, students took to the streets, calling for greater democratization and decrying crackdowns on political resistance by the ruling PRI party. During a mass meeting held at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco neighborhood, paramilitary forces opened fire on the gathering. The death toll from the massacre remains a contested number, ranging from an official count in the dozens to estimates in the hundreds by journa...

In the 1940s chemists discovered that barbasco, a wild yam indigenous to Mexico, could be used to mass-produce synthetic steroid hormones. Barbasco spurred the development of new drugs, including cortisone and the first viable oral contraceptives, and positioned Mexico as a major player in the global pharmaceutical industry. Yet few people today are aware of Mexico’s role in achieving these advances in modern medicine. In Jungle Laboratories, Gabriela Soto Laveaga reconst...

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, as Mexico emerged out of decades of civil war and foreign invasion, a modern notion of honor—of one’s reputation and self-worth—became the keystone in the construction of public culture. Mexicans gave great symbolic, social, and material value to honor. Only honorable men could speak in the name of the public. Honor earned these men, and a few women, support and credit, and gave civilian politicians a claim to authority after an era dominated by milit...