James Lockhart (born April 8, 1933 - January 17, 2014) [1] [2] [3] was a U.S. historian of colonial Spanish America, especially the Nahua people and Nahuatl language.
Born in Huntington, West Virginia, Lockhart attended West Virginia University (BA, 1956) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (MA, 1962; PhD, 1967). [4] Late in life, Lockhart wrote a short, candid memoir. [5] He joined the US Army and was posted to Germany, working in "a low-level intelligence agency," translating letters from East Germany. [6] Returning to the US, he entered the graduate program at University of Wisconsin, where he pursued his doctorate in the social history of conquest-era Peru.
His dissertation, published in 1968 as Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: A Social History was a path breaking approach to this early period. Less interested in the complicated political events of the era, he focused on the formation of Spanish colonial society in the midst of Spanish war with the indigenous and internecine struggles between factions of conquerors. With separate chapters on different social groups, including Africans and indigenous brought into the Spanish sphere, and an important chapter on women of the conquest era, his work shifted the understanding of that era. His main source for the people and processes of this early period were notarial documents, often property transfers and other types of legal agreements, which gave insight into the formation and function of Spanish colonial society. The work is now a classic and was published in a second, revised edition in 1994.
While researching Spanish Peru, he compiled information on the Spaniards who received a share of the ransom of the Inca Atahualpa, extracted at Cajamarca. The Men of Cajamarca has both individual biographies of those who shared in the treasure, as well as a thorough analysis of the general social patterns of those conquerors. Both Spanish Peru and The Men of Cajamarca have been published in Spanish translation.
He began to do research on colonial Mexico while at University of Texas, looking both at the socioeconomic patterns there and began learning Nahuatl. Fruits of these new interests were the publication of the anthology Provinces of Early Mexico: Variants of Spanish American Regional Evolution (edited with Ida Altman) and Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period (with linguist Frances Karttunen).
He moved to University of California, Los Angeles, where he spent the bulk of his teaching career 1972–1994, retiring early and continuing to collaborate with colleagues on research projects and mentor graduate students working on historical sources in the Nahuatl language and the colonial-era Nahua people.
Among his many graduate students in colonial Spanish American social history and the philology of Mesoamerican indigenous languages, who earned doctorates under his mentorship are S.L.(Sarah) Cline, Kimberly Gauderman, Robert Haskett, Rebecca Horn, John E. Kicza, Leslie K. Lewis, Doris Namala, Leslie Offutt, Matthew Restall, Susan Schroeder, Lisa Sousa, Kevin Terraciano, John Tutino, John Super, and Stephanie Wood.
He was a major contributor to a field of ethnohistory built on the study of indigenous-language sources from colonial Mexico, which he called New Philology. He collaborated with colonial Brazilianist Stuart B. Schwartz in writing Early Spanish America (1983), which is a foundational text for graduate students studying colonial Latin America. He was the series editor for the Nahuatl Studies Series, initially based at the UCLA Latin American Center and then jointly with Stanford University Press. Lockhart was honored by the Conference on Latin American History Distinguished Service Award in 2004. [7]
He died on 17 January 2014 at the age of 80. [8]
Marina[maˈɾina] or Malintzin, more popularly known as La Malinche[lamaˈlintʃe], a Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast, became known for contributing to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–1521), by acting as an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary for the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. She was one of 20 enslaved women given to the Spaniards in 1519 by the natives of Tabasco. Cortés chose her as a consort, and she later gave birth to his first son, Martín – one of the first Mestizos in New Spain.
The Nahuas are a group of the indigenous people of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. They comprise the largest indigenous group in Mexico and second largest in El Salvador. The Mexica (Aztecs) were of Nahua ethnicity, and the Toltecs are often thought to have been as well, though in the pre-Columbian period Nahuas were subdivided into many groups that did not necessarily share a common identity.
Miguel León-Portilla was a Mexican anthropologist and historian, specializing in Aztec culture and literature of the pre-Columbian and colonial eras. Many of his works were translated to English and he was a well-recognized scholar internationally. In 2013, the Library of Congress of the United States bestowed on him the Living Legend Award.
Classical Nahuatl is any of the variants of Nahuatl spoken in the Valley of Mexico and central Mexico as a lingua franca at the time of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. During the subsequent centuries, it was largely displaced by Spanish and evolved into some of the modern Nahuan languages in use today. Although classified as an extinct language, Classical Nahuatl has survived through a multitude of written sources transcribed by Nahua peoples and Spaniards in the Latin script.
The Anales de Tlatelolco is a codex manuscript written in Nahuatl, using Latin characters, by anonymous Aztec authors. The text has no pictorial content. Although there is an assertion that the text was a copy of one written in 1528 in Tlatelolco, only seven years after the fall of the Aztec Empire, James Lockhart argues that there is no evidence for this early date of composition, based on internal evidence of the text. However, he supports the contention that this is an authentic conquest account, arguing that it was composed about 20 years after the conquest in the 1540s, and contemporaneous with the Cuernavaca censuses. Unlike the Florentine Codex and its account of the conquest of the Aztec Empire, the Annals of Tlatelolco remained in Nahua hands, providing authentic insight into the thoughts and outlook of the newly conquered Nahuas.
The altepetl was the local, ethnically-based political entity, usually translated into English as "city-state," of pre-Columbian Nahuatl-speaking societies in the Americas. The altepetl was constituted of smaller units known as calpolli and was typically led by a single dynastic ruler known as a tlatoani, although examples of shared rule between up to five rulers are known. Each altepetl had its own jurisdiction, origin story, and served as the center of Indigenous identity. Residents referred to themselves by the name of their altepetl rather than, for instance, as "Mexicas." "Altepetl" was a polyvalent term rooting the social and political order in the creative powers of a sacred mountain that contained the ancestors, seeds and life-giving forces of the community. The word is a combination of the Nahuatl words ātl and tepētl. A characteristic Nahua mode was to imagine the totality of the people of a region or of the world as a collection of altepetl units and to speak of them on those terms. The concept is comparable to Maya cah and Mixtec ñuu. Altepeme formed a vast complex network which predated and outlasted larger empires, such as the Aztec and Tarascan state.
The traditions of indigenous Mesoamerican literature extend back to the oldest-attested forms of early writing in the Mesoamerican region, which date from around the mid-1st millennium BCE. Many of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica are known to have been literate societies, who produced a number of Mesoamerican writing systems of varying degrees of complexity and completeness. Mesoamerican writing systems arose independently from other writing systems in the world, and their development represents one of the very few such origins in the history of writing.
Alonso de Molina was a Franciscan priest and grammarian, who wrote a well-known dictionary of the Nahuatl language published in 1571 and still used by scholars working on Nahuatl texts in the tradition of the New Philology. He also wrote a bilingual confessional manual for priests who served in Nahuatl-speaking communities.
Arthur James Outram Anderson was an American anthropologist specializing in Aztec culture and translator of the Nahuatl language.
The Mexica were a Nahuatl-speaking people of the Valley of Mexico who were the rulers of the Mexica Empire. The Mexica established Tenochtitlan, a settlement on an island in Lake Texcoco, in 1325. A dissident group in Tenochtitlan separated and founded the settlement of Tlatelolco with its own dynastic lineage. In 1521, they were conquered by an alliance of Spanish conquistadors and indigenous people including the Tlaxcaltecs led by Hernán Cortés.
Antonio Valeriano was a colonial Mexican, Nahua scholar and politician. He was a collaborator with fray Bernardino de Sahagún in the creation of the twelve-volume General History of the Things of New Spain, the Florentine Codex, He served as judge-governor of both his home, Azcapotzalco, and of Tenochtitlan, in Spanish colonial New Spain.
The Cantares Mexicanos is the name given to a manuscript collection of Nahuatl songs or poems recorded in the 16th century. The 91 songs of the Cantares form the largest Nahuatl song collection, containing over half of all known traditional Nahuatl songs. It is currently located in the National Library of Mexico in Mexico City. A description is found in the census of prose manuscripts in the native tradition in the Handbook of Middle American Indians.
New Philology generally refers to a branch of Mexican ethnohistory and philology that uses colonial-era native language texts written by Indians to construct history from the indigenous point of view. The name New Philology was coined by James Lockhart to describe work that he and his doctoral students and scholarly collaborators in history, anthropology, and linguistics had pursued since the mid-1970s. Lockhart published a great many essays elaborating on the concept and content of the New Philology and Matthew Restall published a description of it in the Latin American Research Review.
Matthew Restall is a historian of Colonial Latin America. He is an ethnohistorian, a Mayanist, a scholar of the conquest, colonization, and the African diaspora in the Americas, and an historian of popular music. Restall has areas of specialization in Yucatán and Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. He is a member of the New Philology school of colonial Mexican history and the founder of a related school, the New Conquest History. He is currently Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and Anthropology, and Director of Latin American Studies, at the Pennsylvania State University. He is a former president of the American Society for Ethnohistory (2017–18), a former editor of Ethnohistory journal (2007–17), a former senior editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (2017–22), editor of the book series Latin American Originals, and co-editor of the Cambridge Latin American Studies book series. He also writes books on the history of popular music.
Charles Gibson was an American ethnohistorian who wrote foundational works on the Nahua peoples of colonial Mexico and was elected President of the American Historical Association in 1977.
Lisa Sousa is an American academic historian active in the field of Latin American studies. A specialist in the colonial-era history of Latin America and of Colonial Mexico in particular, Sousa is noted for her research, commentary, and translations of colonial Mesoamerican literature and Nahuatl-language historical texts. She has also published research on historical and contemporary indigenous peoples in Mexico, the roles of women in indigenous societies and cultural definitions of gender. Sousa is a full professor in the History Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.
Frances Esther Karttunen, also known as Frances Ruley Karttunen, is an American academic linguist, historian and author.
Nahuatl, Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about 1.7 million Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller populations in the United States.
The historiography of Spanish America in multiple languages is vast and has a long history. It dates back to the early sixteenth century with multiple competing accounts of the conquest, Spaniards’ eighteenth-century attempts to discover how to reverse the decline of its empire, and people of Spanish descent born in the Americas (criollos) search for an identity other than Spanish, and the creation of creole patriotism. Following independence in some parts of Spanish America, some politically engaged citizens of the new sovereign nations sought to shape national identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-Spanish American historians began writing chronicles important events, such as the conquests of the Aztec Empire and the Inca Empire, dispassionate histories of the Spanish imperial project after its almost complete demise in the hemisphere, and histories of the southwest borderlands, areas of the United States that had previously been part of the Spanish Empire, led by Herbert Eugene Bolton. At the turn of the twentieth century, scholarly research on Spanish America saw the creation of college courses dealing with the region, the systematic training of professional historians in the field, and the founding of the first specialized journal, Hispanic American Historical Review. For most of the twentieth century, historians of colonial Spanish America read and were familiar with a large canon of work. With the expansion of the field in the late twentieth century, there has been the establishment of new subfields, the founding of new journals, and the proliferation of monographs, anthologies, and articles for increasingly specialized practitioners and readerships. The Conference on Latin American History, the organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association, awards a number of prizes for publications, with works on early Latin American history well represented. The Latin American Studies Association has a section devoted to scholarship on the colonial era.
Susan Schroeder is an American historian, specializing in the ethnohistory of Aztec people of Mexico and in the translation of colonial documents written in Nahuatl - especially the chronicles of Chimalpahin. She received her PhD in 1984 from UCLA where she studied Nahuatl and Latin American Colonial History with James Lockhart. She is professor emerita at Tulane University, where she taught from 1999 to 2009, after teaching at Loyola University at Chicago from 1985 to 1999. She received the lifetime achievement award of the American Society for Ethnohistory in 2017.