"In November 1782, Vicente Gonzales de Santianes, the governor of Nuevo Leon, received a sheaf of documents from a protracted legal dispute in the Indian town of San Miguel de Aguayo. At first glance, the case seems so utterly commonplace as to be beneath the notice of the region's chief magistrate. One of San Miguel's Tlaxcalan stoneworkers had been accused of an adulterous liaison with a townswoman"--Provided by publisher.

In an age of revolution, Mexico's creole leaders held aloft the Virgin of Guadalupe and brandished an Aztec eagle perched upon a European tricolor. Their new constitution proclaimed 'the Mexican nation is forever free and independent'. Yet the genealogy of this new nation is not easy to trace. Colonial Mexico was a patchwork state whose new-world vassals served the crown, extended the empire's frontiers and lived out their civic lives in parallel Spanish and Indian republics. Theirs was a world of complex intercultural alliances, interlocking corporate structures and shared spiritual and temporal ambitions. Sean F. McEnroe describes this history at the greatest and smallest geographical scales, reconsidering what it meant to be an Indian vassal, nobleman, soldier or citizen over three centuries in northeastern Mexico. He argues that the Mexican municipality, state and citizen were not so much the sudden creations of a revolutionary age as the progeny of a mature multiethnic empire.

In this engaging book, Eric Van Young traces the political, economic, and social development of Mexico through the crucial one hundred years of its remarkable transition from a relatively prosperous Spanish colony to a violently unstable republic marked by economic stagnation, political confrontation, and burgeoning efforts at modernization. Featuring primary sources from figures of the period, Van Young discusses the political instability of the period—internal warfare, military uprisings, intermittent dictatorships, sharp conflicts among political groupings—and attributes them to a belief by political actors in the fundamental lack of legitimacy in central government institutions after the sweeping away of the Bourbon imperial structure and its replacement first with a very short-lived Mexican empire followed by a series of increasingly authoritarian aspirational republican constitutions.

"An examination of the development of the Olympic movement in Puerto Rico in the context of national and political identity"--

A Troubled Marriage describes the lives of native leaders whose resilience and creativity allowed them to survive and prosper in the traumatic era of European conquest and colonial rule. They served as soldiers, scholars, artists, artisans, and missionaries within early transatlantic empires and later nation-states. These Indian and mestizo men and women wove together cultures, shaping the new traditions and institutions of the colonial Americas. In a comparative study that spans more than three centuries and much of the Western Hemisphere, McEnroe challenges common assumptions about the relationships among victors, vanquished, and their shared progeny.

• A New Republic Best Book of the Year • The Globalist Top Books of the Year • Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction Particularly relevant in understanding who voted for who during presidential elections, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven “nations” that continue to shape North America According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps of any hotly contested election in our history.

This book explores colonial indigenous historical accounts to offer a new interpretation of the origins of Mexico's neo-Aztec patriotic identity.