During the summer of 1792, a man wearing the rough garb of a vaquero stepped out of the night shadows of Mérida, Yucatan, and murdered the province’s top royal official, don Lucas de Gálvez. This book recounts the mystery of the Gálvez murder and its resolution, an event that captured contemporaries’ imaginations throughout the Hispanic world and caused consternation on the part of authorities in both Mexico and Madrid. In this work Lentz further provides a readable introduction to the Bourbon Reforms as well as new insights on late colonial Yucatecan society through the vast depictions of the cross-section of Yucatecan people questioned during the decade it took to uncover the assassin’s identity. These suspects and witnesses, from all walks of life, reveal the interconnected layers found in colonial Yucatecan society and the social networks of Mérida’s urban underclass as well as their unexpected ties to the creole elites and rural Mayas that have previously been unexplored.

An evocative history of colonial Mexico's 'crime of the century' and its lasting impact on the new Mexican nation in the nineteenth century.

The Black Middle is the first book-length study of the interaction of black slaves and other people of African descent with Mayas and Spaniards in the Spanish colonial province of Yucatan (southern Mexico).

This biography presents a remarkable vision of Spanish society at the beginning of the 13th century by exploring the life of Berenguela of Castile (c. 1179-1246), a queen who dominated public life for over forty years.

"Yucatan; Bourbon Reforms; creoles; underclass; trial; independence"--

General Simón Bolívar (1783-1830), called El Liberator, and sometimes the "George Washington" of Latin America, was the leading hero of the Latin American independence movement. His victories over Spain won independence for Bolivia, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. Bolívar became Columbia's first president in 1819. In 1822, he became dictator of Peru. Upper Peru became a separate state, which was named Bolivia in Bolívar's honor, in 1825. The constitution, which he drew up for Bolivia, is one of his most important political pronouncements. Today he is remembered throughout South America, and in Venezuela and Bolivia his birthday is a national holiday. Although Bolívar never prepared a systematic treatise, his essays, proclamations, and letters constitute some of the most eloquent writing not of the independence period alone, but of any period in Latin American history. His analysis of the region's fundamental problems, ideas on political organization and proposals for Latin American integration are relevant and widely read today, even among Latin Americans of all countries and of all political persuasions. The "Cartagena Letter," the "Jamaica Letter," and the "Angostura Address," are widely cited and reprinted.

Here is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which the history of the Spanish Conquest has been misread and passed down to become popular knowledge of these events. The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro. Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each myth. This vividly written and authoritative book shows, for instance, that native Americans did not take the conquistadors for gods and that small numbers of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. We discover that Columbus was correctly seen in his lifetime--and for decades after--as a briefly fortunate but unexceptional participant in efforts involving many southern Europeans. It was only much later that Columbus was portrayed as a great man who fought against the ignorance of his age to discover the new world. Another popular misconception--that the Conquistadors worked alone--is shattered by the revelation that vast numbers of black and native allies joined them in a conflict that pitted native Americans against each other. This and other factors, not the supposed superiority of the Spaniards, made conquests possible. The Conquest, Restall shows, was more complex--and more fascinating--than conventional histories have portrayed it. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest offers a richer and more nuanced account of a key event in the history of the Americas.