A Concise History of the Aztecs

Moving beyond common misperceptions, this book sheds new light on Aztec history and civilization.

Susan Kellogg (Author)

9781108498999, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 February 2024

398 pages
22.3 x 14.6 x 2.6 cm, 0.64 kg

'Another excellent volume in Cambridge University Press's Concise History series. The series is intended to render complex subjects accessible to the educated general public, and Kellogg has worked hard to ensure that her book is both comprehensible and comprehensive.' Camilla Townsend, Pacific Historical Review

Susan Kellogg's history of the Aztecs offers a concise yet comprehensive assessment of Aztec history and civilization, emphasizing how material life and the economy functioned in relation to politics, religion, and intellectual and artistic developments. Appreciating the vast number of sources available but also their limitations, Kellogg focuses on three concepts throughout – value, transformation, and balance. Aztecs created value, material, and symbolic worth. Value was created through transformations of bodies, things, and ideas. The overall goal of value creation and transformation was to keep the Aztec world—the cosmos, the earth, its inhabitants—in balance, a balance often threatened by spiritual and other forms of chaos. The book highlights the ethnicities that constituted Aztec peoples and sheds light on religion, political and economic organization, gender, sexuality and family life, intellectual achievements, and survival. Seeking to correct common misperceptions, Kellogg stresses the humanity of the Aztecs and problematizes the use of the terms 'human sacrifice', 'myth', and 'conquest'.

1. Introduction
2. Living in the Aztecs' cosmos
3. Communities, kingdoms, 'empires'
4. Creating value: producing, exchanging, consuming
5. Sex and the altepetl: gender, sexuality, and Aztec family values
6. Resilience: Part I: Aztec intellectual life
7. Resilience: Part II: trauma, transformation, tenacity.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]