True History of The Conquest of New Spain

Janet Burke is Associate Dean in Barrett, the Honors College, and Lincoln Fellow for Ethics and Latin American Intellectual History in the Lincoln Center for Ethics, at Arizona State University.Ted Humphrey is President's Professor, Barrett Professor, and Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Latin American Intellectual History at Arizona State University.

Bernal Diaz's True History of the Conquest of New Spain, the chronicle of an 'ordinary' soldier in Hernando Cortes's army, is the only complete account (other than Cortes's own) that we have of the Spanish conquest of ancient Mexico. Although it is neither so 'true' nor so unassumingly direct as its author would have us believe, it is unmistakably the voice of the often unruly, undisciplined body of untrained freebooters who, in less than three years, succeeded against all apparent odds, in bringing down the once mighty ‘Aztec Empire.’ It makes for consistently fascinating reading, and Ted Humphrey and Janet Burke have provided the best, and the most engaging, translation ever to have appeared in English. --Anthony Pagden, UCLA