Fifth sun - Camilla Townsend

Camilla Townsend is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of numerous books, including Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, and The Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (OUP, 2016), which won multiple prizes, among them the Beveridge Award of the American Historical
Association.

A revolutionary history.

Ben Ehrenreich, The Guardian

This is the best book on the Aztecs yet written, full stop ... The value of Fifth Sun lies in how it rescues Aztecs and Nahuas from centuries of colonialist caricature and renders them human again - fully human, with flaws, people capable of brutal violence but also of deep love.

History Today

This wonderfully fresh, readable new work invites you to reconsider everything you think you knew about them.

Jonathan Gordon, All About History

Spanning the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, this book recreates key moments in the Mexica past as the Mexica themselves experienced and remembered them. We meet real men and women whose actions changed the course of history. We see time as the Mexica did, a sequence of years extending unbroken from mythic origins to intrepid migration to imperial splendor to the challenges of living with the Spanish colonial presence. Never before has the Aztecs' own epic
story been so vividly and engagingly recounted for readers of English.

Louise M. Burkhart, author of Aztecs on Stage: Religious Theater in Colonial Mexico

From the initial migration southward, to the second generation after the conquest, Fifth Sun is a masterful account of the history of the Aztecs in their own words. A whole world arises from the pages: vivid, complex, and much closer to us than expected. Townsend's understanding of the indigenous annals is unmatched, and her book reads like a novel. You simply cannot put it down.

Caterina Pizzigoni, author of The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico's Toluca Valley, 1650-1800

Never before has the political history of the Aztecs, who knew themselves as the Mexica, been told with such sweeping lan. Townsend brings keen insight into the motivations of the players, be they seasoned warriors, shackled slaves, or calculating concubines. Her gripping narrative, underscoring Aztec tenacity and endurance before and beyond the Spanish conquest, is sure to captivate readers.

Barbara Mundy, author of The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City

Camilla Townsend has an unusually profound understanding of Nahua culture, before and during the colonial period. She also has a rare set of research, linguistic, and writing skills. That combination of expertise and talent make her uniquely positioned to offer us a new book on the Aztecs, one that manages to be-despite the plethora of existing studies-both original and mandatory reading. This is a page-turner that is nonetheless packed with new insights and
interpretations.

Matthew Restall, author of When Montezuma Met Corts: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History