The Conquest of New Spain
1568 · 412 pages
Fifty years on, writing in Guatemala, one of Cortés's foot soldiers set down the conquest of Mexico as the ranks saw it. He never got over his first sight of Tenochtitlan.
★ 7.3
The Books canon
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Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
1491
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
2005 · 560 pages
The hemisphere Columbus reached held cities larger than Paris, an Amazon farmed into orchard, and forests burned into pasture on purpose. What later settlers took for wilderness was a continent emptied by epidemics.
★ 6.7
The Conquest of the Incas
1970 · 672 pages
Fewer than two hundred Spaniards seized the Inca emperor at Cajamarca in 1532, and Hemming traces the forty years of rebellion and reprisal that followed, giving Andean witnesses equal weight with Spanish ones.
★ 5.9
History of the Conquest of Mexico
1843 · 1005 pages
Cortés lands with six hundred men and topples an empire of millions. Prescott, half-blind and never in Mexico or Spain, told it so vividly historians still pry the conquest from his version.
★ 5.8