Published Date

May 1, 2004

This resource was developed in 2004 as part of “The Conquest of Mexico” by Nancy Fitch.

Many students hate history and find it boring. But for the Mexicas alive when the Spaniards arrived in year one—Reed in the Mexica calendar—preserving their version of the past became an all-consuming passion. The Spaniards found it easier to conquer the Mexicas’s land than their minds, so we still have some of their accounts of what happened. All of the documents found on this website were a product of a fight to control subsequent generations’ understandings of the past. There are few “facts” in these documents. They were put together to show you how “messy” history is, that what seems like “facts” in textbooks were produced by interpreting documents which disagree. To help you work your way through the project, I have put together some guides for you to use. Before anything else, you should read my introduction to these primary sources.

 

Using the Web and Citing Sources Found on the Web

Before Getting Started

Glossary: Who’s Who? What’s What?

Step 1:  Find Out What the Secondary Sources Say

Step 2:  Understand the Primary Sources

Step 3:  Analyze the Primary Sources

Step 4:  Identify Preliminary Questions

Step 5:  Write the Essay

If Curious: Who Designed This Project?