Mexico

“Both the Aztec and the Inca states were the products of recent political developments”: Roger Howell discovers that the Spaniards who conquered them had little real understanding of the civilizations that they overthrew.

The earliest explorers to uncover the ancient Maya civilisation in Central America could not believe that it owed its creation to the indigenous population, whom they saw as incapable savages. Nigel Richardson explains how this view changed.

Hugh Latimer unearths the role of the rubber plant in the story of empire and Malayan nation-building.

Between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries two great Mayan civilizations arose and declined in Central America.

In the sixteenth century a Spanish bishop of Yucatán was active in preserving and also in destroying the records of Maya civilization.

Patricia Cleveland-Peck tells the story of Fanny Calderón de la Barca and her life as an author, ambassador’s wife and governess to the Spanish royal family.

After he was formally condemned to death in Moscow, the Mexican government offered Trotsky refuge and protection, on December 6th 1936.

Robin Bayley tells how his great grandfather, a Mancunian businessman, became caught up in the tumultuous period of worker unrest that paved the way for the Mexican Revolution.

Richard Cavendish charts the events leading up to the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz's, fall from power in 1911.

The death-obsessed and inward-looking Aztec civilisation sowed the seeds of its own destruction, argues Tim Stanley.

Hugh Thomas tells Paul Lay about his unparalleled research into the lives of the extraordinary generation of men who conquered the New World for Golden Age Spain.

Godfrey Hodgson tells the colourful story of Jane McManus, political journalist, land speculator, pioneer settler in Texas and propagandist who believed that the United States had a ‘manifest destiny’ to rule Mexico and the Caribbean.

Julia Swanson tells the extraordinary tale of her English grandfather and his family who were tragically caught up in the violence of the Mexican Revolution.