Kirjahaku

This sweeping new history of Mexico spans 500 dramatic years of conquest, innovation and revolutionIt begins in 1511 with the shipwreck of two Spanish sailors in Yucatán. Only ten years later, an army of European adventurers and indigenous rebels seized the island city of Tenochtitlán, seat of one of the world’s great empires. It would become Mexico City, and marked the collision of two radically different worlds. Spaniards discovered tomatoes, chocolate and the most sophisticated city they had ever seen. For Mexicans the encounter brought horses, wheels, but also lethal germs – sparking a cataclysmic century of disease that would kill a majority of the indigenous population. Paul Gillingham’s superb history chronicles how this convulsion led to a startling recombination of cultures. He shows how the industrial mining of Mexico’s silver transformed the wealth and trade of the world, making it the centre of the first truly global economy. We then see how independence from Spain went on to bring calamitous wars with the United States and France. One of the world’s great social revolutions then remade Mexico and ushered in a one-party state that, whatever its shortcomings, brought peace throughout many of the global horrors of the twentieth century – before the country collapsed into violence in the drug wars of the 2000s. Mexico: A History uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been one of the world’s great innovators; a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs.

From acclaimed and prize-winning historian Paul Gillingham, a rich and vibrant history of one of the world's most diverse, politically ground-breaking, and influential of countriesAt the beginning of his masterful work of scholarship and narration, Paul Gillingham writes, from its outset "Mexico was more profoundly, globally hybrid than anywhere else in the prior history of the world." Over the ensuing five centuries, Mexicans have prefigured and shaped the course of human lives across the globe.Gillingham begins in 1511 with the dramatic shipwreck of two Spanish sailors in the far south of Mexico. Ten years later Hern n Cort s led an army of European adventurers and indigenous rebels to seize the legendary island city of Tenochtitl n, the center of Montezuma's empire, the largest in the Americas. The capture of the future Mexico City was, more than an extraordinary military event, the collision of two long-separated worlds, radically different in everything from biota to urban planning. Spaniards discovered tomatoes, chocolate, and a city larger and more sophisticated than anything they had ever seen. Mexicans discovered horses, wheels, and lethal germs, sparking a cataclysmic century of disease that wiped out a majority of the pre-existing population and led to a unique recombination of European and indigenous cultures. The industrial mining of Mexico's silver transformed the wealth and trade of the world. Mexico's independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821 led to a calamitous mid-century war with the United States and one of the first great social revolutions that brought peace for Mexicans throughout many of the global horrors of the 20th century, before the country itself collapsed into the violence of the cartels and a refugee crisis in the 2000s.The history of Mexico has been, Gillingham shows, one of suffering empire but also of overcoming. Through it all the country set new standards for inclusivity, for progressive social policies, for artistic expression, for adroitly balancing dictatorship and democracy. While racial divides endured, so too did indigenous peoples, who enjoyed rights unthinkable in the United States. Mexico was among the first countries to abolish slavery in 1829, and Mexicans elected North America's first Black president, Vicente Guerrero, its only indigenous president, Benito Ju rez, and its only woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum.As elegantly written as it is powerful in scope, rich in character and anecdote, Mexico uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs.

In 1949, a group of villagers and ad hoc archaeologists dug up what they believed to be the remains of the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhte?moc, in a remote village in the mountains of central Mexico. State and local leaders enthusiastically promoted this remarkable discovery and nationalist celebrations erupted throughout the country. The festivities ended abruptly when professional Mexican archaeologists denied that the body was that of Cuauhte?moc, igniting what became the greatest scandal in the cultural politics of twentieth-century Mexico. Suddenly, Cuauhte?moc's bones were at the center of debates about the politics and mechanisms of Mexican national identity.In this engaging study, Paul Gillingham uses the revelation of the forgery of Cuauhte?moc's tomb and the responses it evoked as a means of examining the set of ideas, beliefs, and dreams that bind societies to the nation-state.

An essential history of how the Mexican Revolution gave way to a unique one-party state In this book Paul Gillingham addresses how the Mexican Revolution (1910–1940) gave way to a capitalist dictatorship of exceptional resilience, where a single party ruled for seventy-one years. Yet while soldiers seized power across the rest of Latin America, in Mexico it was civilians who formed governments, moving punctiliously in and out of office through uninterrupted elections. Drawing on two decades of archival research, Gillingham uses the political and social evolution of the states of Guerrero and Veracruz as starting points to explore this unique authoritarian state that thrived not despite but because of its contradictions. Mexico during the pivotal decades of the mid-twentieth century is revealed as a place where soldiers prevented military rule, a single party lost its own rigged elections, corruption fostered legitimacy, violence was despised but decisive, and a potentially suffocating propaganda coexisted with a critical press and a disbelieving public.