The first century of Spanish colonization in Latin America witnessed the birth of cities that, while secondary to great metropolitan centers such as Mexico City and Lima, became important hubs for regional commerce. Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America, was one of these. A multiethnic and multicultural city from its beginning, Santiago grew into a vigorous trading center for agrarian goods such as cacao and cattle hides. With the wealth this commerce generated, Spaniards, natives, and African slaves built a city that any European of the period would have found familiar. This book provides a more complete picture of society, culture, and economy in sixteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala than has ever before been drawn. Robinson Herrera uses previously unstudied primary sources, including testaments, promissory notes, and work contracts, to recreate the lives and economic activities of the non-elite sectors of society, including natives, African slaves, economically marginal Europeans, and people of mixed descent. His focus on these groups sheds light on the functioning of the economy at the lower levels and reveals how people of different ethnic groups formed alliances to create a vibrant local and regional economy based on credit. This portrait of Santiago also increases our understanding of how secondary Spanish American cities contributed vitally to the growth of the colonies.

With rare maps, prints, and photographs, this unique volume explores the dramatic history of the Americas through the birth and development of the hemisphere's great cities. Written by award-winning author David F. Marley, Historic Cities of the Americas covers the hard-to-find information of these cities' earliest years, including the unique aspects of each region's economy and demography, such as the growth of local mining, trade, or industry. The chronological layout, aided by the numerous maps and photographs, reveals the exceptional changes, relocations, destruction, and transformations these cities endured to become the metropolises they are today. Historic Cities of the Americas provides over 70 extensively detailed entries covering the foundation and evolution of the most significant urban areas in the western hemisphere. Critically researched, this work offers a rare look into the times prior to Christopher Columbus' arrival in 1492 and explores the common difficulties overcome by these European-conquered or -founded cities as they flourished into some of the most influential locations in the world.

This anthology of foundational sixteenth-century Spanish-language texts presents the European side of the discovery and colonization of the New World. Otto Olivera has chosen representative selections from the works of eighteen authors, including Garcilaso de la Vega, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Hernán Cortés, and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Their writings present an impressive panorama of the first years of a real New World that could compete with any portrayed in European novels of chivalry or travel. To put these texts in historical context, Olivera has written an introduction that links the literature of colonization in its first century to the classical and medieval myths that helped shape Spaniards' thinking about the New World. He also provides a brief history of the discovery and conquest and a discussion of the social organization of the Spanish colonies.

The "Brief and Summary Relation of the Lords of New Spain" is one of the major contemporary accounts of the economic, political, and social impact of the conquest of Aztec Mexico. Written by Alonso de Zorita, a Spanish judge of high integrity and many years' experience in colonial administration, it provides a detailed description of Aztec life before and after the Conquest. Based on Zorita's stay in Mexico from 1556 to 1566, it reflects the anguish felt by a devoted and humane servant of the Crown, who observed the misery inflicted upon the Indians by enslavement and Spanish-imposed tribute and labor systems In his extensive introduction, Benjamin Keen provides a survey of the rise of Aztec society, conditions under post-Conquest colonial administration, and a biographical essay on Zoritas life and the reception of his work. With a new preface on recent scholarship and issues in Zorita's work, this edition remains the standard translation in English of the "Brief Relation."

Medicine and the Inquisition offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of the role played by the Roman, Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in shaping medical learning and practice in the period from 1500 to 1850. Until now, learned medicine has remained a secondary subject in scholarship on Inquisitions. This volume delves into physicians’ contributions to the inquisitorial machinery as well as the persecution of medical practitioners and the censorship of books of medicine. Although they are commonly depicted as all-pervasive systems of repression, the Inquisitions emerge from these essays as complex institutions. Authors investigate how boundaries between the medical and the religious were negotiated and transgressed in different contexts. The book sheds new light on the intellectual and social world of early modern physicians, paying particular attention to how they complied with, and at times undermined, ecclesiastical control and the hierarchies of power in which the medical profession was embedded. Contributors are Hervé Baudry, Bradford A. Bouley, Alessandra Celati, Maria Pia Donato, Martha Few, Guido M. Giglioni, Andrew Keitt, Hannah Marcus, and Timothy D. Walker. This volume includes the articles originally published in Volume XXIII, Nos. 1-2 (2018) of Brill's journal Early Science and Medicine with one additional chapter by Timothy D. Walker and an updated introduction.

Dym's analysis of Central America's early nineteenth-century politics shows nation-state formation to be a city-driven process that transformed colonial provinces into enduring states.

This book examines reconstruction and resilience of historic cities and societies from multiple disciplinary and complementary perspectives and, by doing so, it helps researchers and practitioners alike, among them reconstruction managers, urban governance and professionals. The book builds on carefully selected and updated papers accepted for the 2019 Silk Cities international conference on ‘reconstruction, recovery and resilience of historic cities and societies’, the third Silk Cities conference held in L’Aquila, Italy, 10-12 July 2019, working with University of L’Aquila and UCL. This multi-scale, and multidisciplinary book offers cross-sectoral and complimentary voices from multiple stakeholders, including academia, urban governance, NGOs and local populations. It examines post-disaster reconstruction strategies and case studies from Europe, Asia and Latin America that provide a valuable collection for anyone who would like to get a global overview on the subject matter. It thereby enables a deeper understanding of challenges, opportunities and approaches in dealing with historic cities facing disasters at various geographical scales. Additionally, it brings together historical approaches to the reconstruction of historical cities and those of more recent times. Thus, it can be used as a reference book for global understanding of the subject matter.

Six of the ten essays in this collection (Lombardi, Villamarin, Chance, Greenow, Robinson, and Cook) were originally presented at a Special Session during the 43rd International Congress of Americanists, held in Vancouver during August, 1979. Jointly organized by David J. Robinson and Juan Villamarin, the session was designed to bring together a group of individuals who had been working on the changing population of colonial Spanish America from various disciplinary perspectives, to facilitate an exchange of information and ideas, and to promote the further investigation of significant research questions. The paper of Brian Evans was presented at the same Congress, in another session, but given its purpose and content it was thought to provide an ideal complement to several papers in the present collection.

This volume features approximately 600 entries that represent the major writers, literary schools, and cultural movements in the history of Mexican literature. A collaborative effort by American, Mexican, and Hispanic scholars, the text contains bibliographical, biographical, and critical material--placing each work cited within its cultural and historical framework. Intended to enrich the English-speaking public's appreciation of the rich diversity of Mexican literature, works are selected on the basis of their contribution toward an understanding of this unique artistry. The dictionary contains entries keyed by author and works, the length of each entry determined by the relative significance of the writer or movement being discussed. Each biographical entry identifies the author's literary contribution by including facts about his or her life and works, a chronological list of works, a supplementary bibliography, and, when appropriate, critical notes. Authors are listed alphabetically and cross-referenced both within the text and the index to facilitate easy access to information. Selected bibliographical entries are also listed alphabetically by author and include both the original title and English translation, publisher, date and place of publication, and number of pages.