Word: aztecs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...That Aztec craftsmen, who decorated every available square inch of their Spanish Gothic and baroque churches, created a native hybrid style known as Mexican churrigueresque, which in turn influenced the baroque and rococo architecture of Spain...
...That one Latin-American building, the great cathedral in Mexico City, contains the whole stratified history of Latin-American architecture on and within its four walls; it has Aztec foundations, a 16th-Century Gothic ceiling, baroque and churrigueresque chapels, Moorish tile-work, East Indian decorative motifs, is yet one of the most harmoniously beautiful structures in the Western Hemisphere...
...hill where Aztec priests once studied the stars, President Manuel Avila Camacho of Mexico dedicated a great modern observatory. Tonanzintla, near Puebla, 70 miles southeast of Mexico City, was the envy of visiting U.S. astronomers because of its latitude. Harvard's Harlow Shapley explained, "All the Milky Way can be seen-not merely the 60% or less which is satisfactorily explored from most northern observatories...
...Aztec religion there was no ethical concept-its heaven, like the Greek Hades, was devoid of moral significance. Aztec theology held that in bygone eras mankind had been successively wiped out by jaguars, by hurricanes, by fiery volcanic rains. The Aztecs in 1519 believed that their world would in time end amid horrendous earthquakes controlled by the Sun God. So with a relentless if grisly logic, they propitiated the deities at all costs, offering up mankind's most precious possession, its own lifeblood...
...Spain. Instead, Crown & Church at first tried to make good Christians and Spanish citizens out of them. Twenty of the 190 coats-of-arms granted during the conquest of Mexico and South America were given to Indians, and Spaniards often married Indian "princesses" under the delusion that the Aztec nobility, like that of Europe, was hereditary (actually it was earned). As great a blow to the Aztecs as the Spanish conquest was the English victory over the Armada. Mexican communication with the Crown & Church was thereby weakened, and the greedy, uncontrolled colonists only after 1588 began enslaving the Aztecs...