Restall, M.: “The New Conquest History” in History Compass 10:12
In this piece, Matthew Restall offers an overview of the New Conquest History (NCH), a revisionist effort that aims to unearth and closely examine the documentary sources produced by indigenous peoples. Since its emergence around 2000, NCH scholars have sought out to challenge the binary narrative of the victorious Spaniards and the defeated natives. Restall continues on to give a brief history since the beginnings of the NCH, which takes influence partly from the New Philology School developed by James Lockhart in his study of indigenous written sources during the 1970s. Restall presents the developmental stages of the NCH, which he divides into three: “… the centuries of conquest history and historiography that led up to 1990; the formative period of the 1990s; and the decade since 2000, when the NCH coalesced as a recognizable school” (151). He then goes on to mention some of the defining contributions by well-known scholars from a wide array of disciplines.
Precursors to the NCH such as James Lockhart (1972), Karen Spalding (1984), and Inga Clendinnen (1987), became points of reference for the subsequent wave of scholars that shaped its formative period. Examples of this period include the work by Matthew Restall (1998), Rebecca Horn (1997), Michel Oudijk (2000), Jeanette Peterson (1993), Barbara Mundy (1996), as well as post-1990s scholarship such as that of Elizabeth Hill-Boone, Cecelia Klein, Dana Leibsohn whose art history approach and/or the pre-colonial period came to complement the NCH. Because of the aforementioned scholars’ pioneering work, the venue is open for oncoming researchers to explore the conquest – and by extension the colonial period in Mesoamerica – through multiple protagonists and accounts gleaned from a myriad of archival materials. In addition, the experiences of diverse subjects (i.e. indigenous and black men and women) from understudied regions throughout the Americas – as recent work has also extended to South America – has also enriched and multiplied the kinds of interpretations of such a complex historical period. Overall, Rental's article serves as an introduction to an established path of scholarship that intersects diverse historical agents, geographies, and theoretical and methodological approaches that reflects the complexities of the pre- and colonial periods in the Americas.
“… the beating heart of the NCH – its living contribution to all the fields to which it is tied – is the rescuing of individual people from the obscurity of the past. Individuals who were not necessarily conquistadors, or even Spanish, or even men, let alone famous, but whose names can now be written and whose lives can be revealed… “ (155).