Content area
Full Text
WASHINGTON - Hernando Cortez conquered the Aztecs almost 500 years ago. The event, by now, has achieved legendary status. We know how the Aztecs mistook the conquistadors for gods; the Spanish attacked and laid waste to the Valley of Mexico; and Native cultures were crushed in a tragedy ever after known to history as the "Conquest."
What a shame, as Matthew Restall wrote in "Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest" (Oxford University Press), that much of that history has been distorted, knowingly or not, and in a way that makes Native people seem invisible or powerless in the wake of their European invaders.
Restall argued that we have been taught cliches about the Conquest, not facts - and the facts, so far as we know them, are much more interesting. As always, the cliches fit with common misconceptions about Native people that have lingered for half a millennia in spite of good historical evidence to the contrary.
A professor at Pennsylvania State University, the author debunks one tired myth after another. The conquistadors weren't royal soldiers, he pointed out, but freebooting tradesmen who often barely knew how to read. Many so-called...