Peru S Indian Peoples And The Challenge Of Spanish Conquest

This second edition of Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest includes Stern's 1992 reflections on the ten years of historical interpretation that have passed since the book's original publication--setting his analysis of Huamanga in a larger perspective. "This book is a monument to both scholarship and comprehension, comparable in its treatment of the indigenous peoples after the conquest only to that of Charles Gibson for the Aztecs, and perhaps the best volume read by this reviewer in several years."--Frederick P. Bowser, American Historical Review "Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest is clearly indispensable reading for Andeanists and highly recommended to ethnohistorians generally. In technical respects it is a job done right, and conceptually it stands out as a handsome example of anthropology and history woven into one tight fabric of inquiry."--Frank Salomon, Ethnohistory

The Catholic Church played a significant role in social action in colonial Latin America: a time when the Church was the most important institution next to the royal government. This collection of classic articles and modern research looks at the Church's active social and political influence.

Previous studies of the insurrection have centered on the initial stage of the movement in Cuzco and tended to misrepresent the phase in La Paz as an atavistic "race war" against whites. By focusing on La Paz, Thomson shows that a process of struggle at the local level, combined with transformations within Aymara indigenous communities over a period of decades, contributed to the overall breakdown of Spanish colonial order and shaped the dynamics of the insurgency. As peasant commoners increasingly challenged their traditional ethnic lords (caciques), they upset the established apparatus of colonial rule in the Andean countryside, and they brought about a democratization of power relations within their communities. These local struggles converged with more ambitious designs for Indian government and self-determination, as the insurgents envisioned the possibility of Indian-white equality, Indian hegemony over other peoples in the Andes, or outright elimination of the colonial enemy. This experience in the late colonial period continued to shape peasant community organization and influence national political life in the Andes into the present.

Dazzled by the sight of the vast treasure of gold and silver being unloaded at Seville’s docks in 1537, a teenaged Pedro de Cieza de León vowed to join the Spanish effort in the New World, become an explorer, and write what would become the earliest historical account of the conquest of Peru. Available for the first time in English, this history of Peru is based largely on interviews with Cieza’s conquistador compatriates, as well as with Indian informants knowledgeable of the Incan past. Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook present this recently discovered third book of a four-part chronicle that provides the most thorough and definitive record of the birth of modern Andean America. It describes with unparalleled detail the exploration of the Pacific coast of South America led by Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, the imprisonment and death of the Inca Atahualpa, the Indian resistance, and the ultimate Spanish domination. Students and scholars of Latin American history and conquest narratives will welcome the publication of this volume.

Andean visual objects inform studies of a colonial empire

"Historical demography for 16th- and 17th-century Ecuador. The book's regional framework reveals major differences in mortality rates. Calculates that depopulation in the Sierra during the 16th century was four times that of the Coast"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

Uses a multidisciplinary approach to investigate the transcultural phenomenon of the devil in early modern Peru. This work demonstrates that the interaction between the Christian and the Andean worlds was far more complex than any interpretation that posits a clear dichotomy between conversion and resistance would suggest.