Word: aztec
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...19th century American historiography: William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843). Thomas' account is richer in detail than Prescott's, more balanced in its assessment of the Mexica (pronounced mesheeca; the author insists that this is a more authentic name for the conquered people than Aztec). But Prescott's narrative has a grace and flow that Conquest simply cannot match -- not least because in the latter work countless sentences contain a hedging "presumably," "perhaps" or "it must have seemed." It's all those unsettling new facts...
...influence on modern art is well documented. Less so is the effect of ancient American design on 19th and 20th century painters, sculptors and architects. Braun traces the aesthetic roots of artists such as sculptor Henry Moore, painter Paul Klee and architect Frank Lloyd Wright back to the Maya, Aztec and pre-Columbian civilizations of Peru...
This kind of quietly self-punishing, ultimately uplifting pop came out of Glasgow on a regular schedule between about '79 and '81, most of it on the Postcard record label. Postcard featured four bands: Josef K, the Go-Betweens, Aztec Camera--pre-Dire-Straits-on-downers Aztec Camera--and our rangy heroes, whose Postcard releases have been harder to find than true love for the last, oh, ten years. Postcard's head honcho revived his label last year, and two of the results so far are The Heather's on Fire--which collects all of Orange Juice's early...
...layering of material in chapters called "Stone," "Flesh," "Armies," "Iron" and so on -- permits him to range across time and distance to brilliant comparative effect. He roams from the Japanese suppression of firearms during the Tokugawa seclusion (an early success of gun $ control, unrepeatable and totalitarian) to the Aztec "Feast of the Flaying of Men"; from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz (whom he detests as the ideological godfather of modern war-as-policy); and from the dark, irrational roots of Roman military violence to the question of why the horse nomads left the steppe to go marauding...
Native Americans were victimized by colonialism in a different way: millions died of imported diseases like smallpox, which their immune systems could not handle. The conquistadores ruthlessly suppressed the imposing cultures of Aztec Mexico and Incan Peru, which nonetheless made a lasting and invaluable contribution to, among other things, world cuisine. Tomatoes, potatoes, corn and peppers, together with many other comestibles, were indigenous to the New World. So, less happily for humankind, was tobacco...