People And Issues in Latin American History: The Colonial Experience: Sources and Interpretations (v. 1)

Within these pages students will meet Bartolome de Las Casas, the stout defender of the Indians in sixteenth-century Spanish America, and Antonio Vieira, his seventeenth-century counterpart in Brazil. They will critically examine Columbus's role in the Iberian conquest of America, and encounter Isabel Moctezuma, a "pioneer of mestizaje"; Juan Garrido, a black conquistador; Francisco de Toledo, Viceroy of Peru; Johan Maurits, the humanist Dutch governor of Recife; Sor Juana de la Cruz, "supreme poet" of the seventeenth-century Spanish world; Tupac Amaru, the leader of the last Inca rebellion in Peru; and the German savant and scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Finally, they will read about the nameless men and women—Spanish, Portuguese, Indian, and African—whose collective stories make the history of three hundred years ago more comprehensible to our contemporary mentalities.