Columbus arrived on North American shores in 1492, and Cortes had replaced Moctezuma, the Aztec Nahua emperor, as the major figurehead in central Mexico by 1521. Five centuries later, the convergence of "old" and "new" worlds and the consequences of colonization continue to fascinate and horrify us. In "Transcending Conquest," Stephanie Wood uses Nahuatl writings and illustrations to reveal Nahua perspectives on Spanish colonial occupation of the Western Hemisphere.

Mesoamerican peoples have a strong tradition of pictorial record keeping, and out of respect for this tradition, Wood examines multiple examples of pictorial imagery to explore how Native manuscripts have depicted the European invader and colonizer. She has combed national and provincial archives in Mexico and visited some of the Nahua communities of central Mexico to collect and translate Native texts. Analyzing and interpreting changes in indigenous views and attitudes throughout three hundred years of foreign rule, Wood considers variations in perspectives--between the indigenous elite and the laboring classes, and between those who resisted and those who allied themselves with the European intruders.

"Transcending Conquest "goes beyond the familiar voices recorded by scribes in central colonial Mexico and the Spanish conquerors to include indigenous views from the outlying Mesoamerican provinces and to explore Native historical narratives from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. Wood explores how evolving sentiments in indigenous communities about increasing competition for resources ultimately resulted in an anti-Spanish discourse, a trend largely overlooked by scholars--until now. "Transcending Conquest" takes us beyond the romantic focus on the deeds of the Spanish conqueror to show how the so-called "conquest" was limited by the ways that Native peoples and their descendants reshaped the historical narrative to better suit their memories, identities, and visions of the future.

This collection of essays by leading scholars in Mexican ethnohistory, edited by Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, examines the life experiences of Indian women in preconquest colonial Mexico. In this volume: "Introduction," Susan Schroeder; "Mexica Women on the Home Front," Louise M. Burkhart; "Aztec Wives," Arthur J. O. Anderson; "Indian-Spanish Marriages in the First Century of the Colony," Pedro Carrasco; "Gender and Social Identity," Rebecca Horn; "From Parallel and Equivalent to Separate but Unequal: Tenochca Mexica Women, 1500-1700," Susan Kellogg; "Activist or Adulteress/ The Life and Struggle of Dona Josefa Mara of Tepoztlan," Robert Haskett; "Matters of Life at Death," Stephanie Wood; "Mixteca Cacicas," Ronald Spores; "Women and Crime in Colonial Oaxaca," Lisa Mary Sousa; "Women, Rebellion, and the Moral Economy of Maya Peasants in Colonial Mexico," Kevin Gosner; "Work, Marriage, and Status: Maya Women of Colonial Yucatan," Marta Espejo-Ponce Hunt and Matthew Restall; "Double Jeopardy," Susan M. Deeds; "Women's Voices from the Frontier," Leslie S. Offutt; "Rethinking Malinche," Frances Karttunen; "Concluding Remarks," Stephanie Wood and Robert Haskett. Susan Schroeder is Professor of History at Loyola University, Chicago. Stephanie Wood is Research Associate at the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. She is coeditor of Indian Women of Early Mexico, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Robert Haskett is Professor of History at the University of Oregon."

Euro-Americans see the Spanish conquest as the main event in the five-century history of Mesoamerica, but the people who lived there before contact never gave up their own cultures. Both before and after conquest, indigenous scribes recorded their communities' histories and belief systems, as well as the events of conquest and its effects and aftermath. Today, the descendants of those native historians in modern-day Mexico and Guatemala still remember their ancestors' stories. In "Mesoamerican Memory," volume editors Amos Megged and Stephanie Wood have gathered the latest scholarship from contributors around the world to compare these various memories and explore how they were preserved and altered over time.

Rather than dividing Mesoamerica's past into pre-contact, colonial, and modern periods, the essays in this volume emphasize continuity from the pre-conquest era to the present, underscoring the ongoing importance of indigenous texts in creating and preserving community identity, history, and memory. In addition to Nahua and Maya recollections, contributors examine the indigenous traditions of Mixtec, Zapotec, Tarascan, and Totonac peoples. Close analysis of pictorial and alphabetic manuscripts, and of social and religious rituals, yields insight into community history and memory, political relations, genealogy, ethnic identity, and portrayals of the Spanish invaders.

Drawing on archaeology, art history, ethnology, ethnohistory, and linguistics, the essays consider the function of manuscripts and ritual in local, regional, and, now, national settings. Several scholars highlight direct connections between the collective memory of indigenous communities and the struggles of contemporary groups. Such modern documents as land titles, for example, gain legitimacy by referring to ancestral memory.

Crossing disciplinary, methodological, and temporal boundaries, "Mesoamerican Memory "advances our understanding of collective memory in Mexico and Guatemala. Through diverse sources--pictorial and alphabetic, archaeological, archival, and ethnographic--readers gain a glimpse into indigenous remembrances that, without the research exhibited here, might have remained unknown to the outside world.

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'He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.'

Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach . . . Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby - young, handsome, fabulously rich - always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

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