Bøker av Matthew Restall

Three music-obsessed, suburban London teenagers set out to make their own kind of pop music: Kate Bush became an overnight star, while success came to David Sylvian (and Japan), and to Mark Hollis (and Talk Talk) after years of struggle. But when their unique talents brought them international acclaim, they turned their backs on stardom.

The Friar and the Maya offers a full study and new translation of the Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (Account of the Things of Yucatan) by a unique set of eminent scholars, created by them over more than a decade from the original manuscript held by the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid. This critical and careful reading of the Account is long overdue in Maya studies and will forever change how this seminal text is understood and used. For generations, scholars used (and misused) the Account as the sole eyewitness insight into an ancient civilization. It is credited to the sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan, monastic inquisitor, and bishop Diego de Landa, whose legacy is complex and contested. His extensive writings on Maya culture and history were lost in the seventeenth century, save for the fragment that is the Account, discovered in the nineteenth century, and accorded near-biblical status in the twentieth as the first "ethnography" of the Maya. However, the Account is not authored by Landa alone; it is a compilation of excerpts, many from writings by other Spaniards--a significant revelation made here for the first time. This new translation accurately reflects the style and vocabulary of the original manuscript. It is augmented by a monograph--comprising an introductory chapter, seven essays, and hundreds of notes--that describes, explains, and analyzes the life and times of Diego de Landa, the Account, and the role it has played in the development of modern Maya studies. The Friar and the Maya is an innovative presentation on an important and previously misunderstood primary source.

Driven by a clear and compelling argument, this engaging book traces apocalyptic thinking in two civilizations-Western and Maya. Looking both back and forward, Matthew Restall and Amara Solari build on their previous study, 2012 and the End of the World, to explore the persistence of our civilization's end-of-times anxiety and anticipation.

The Black Middle is the first book-length study of the interaction of black slaves and other people of African descent with Mayas and Spaniards in the Spanish colonial province of Yucatan (southern Mexico).

Few milestones in human history are as dramatic and momentous as the meeting of three great civilizations on American soil in the sixteenth century. Latin America in Colonial Times presents that story in an engaging but scholarly new package, revealing how a new civilization - Latin America - emerged from that encounter. The authors give equal attention to the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and settlers, to the African slaves they brought across the Atlantic and to the indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded. From the dawn of empires in the fifteenth century, through the conquest age of the sixteenth, to the end of empire in the nineteenth, Latin America in Colonial Times combines broad brush strokes with the anecdotal details that bring the era to life.

After invading highland Guatemala in 1524, Spaniards claimed to have smashed the Kaqchikel and K'iche' Maya kingdoms and to have forged a new colony - with their leader, Pedro de Alvarado, as Guatemala's conquistador. This volume shows that the real story of the Spanish invasion was very different.

This work is a social and cultural history of the Maya peoples of the province of Yucatan in colonial Mexico, spanning the period from shortly after the Spanish conquest of the region to its incorporation as part of an independent Mexico.