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This class follows the violent emergence of a new society in the Americas in the half-century from Columbus’s encounter with the Caribbean in 1492 through Cortés’s and Pizarro’s lightning conquests of the Aztec and Inca Empires. It examines the interactions between indigenous peoples and Europeans in conjunction with Spain’s moral crisis over the brutality of its own imperial regime. Analyzes primary sources (Spanish, indigenous, and mixed) and explores how historians make meaning out of the past by using texts, records of warfare, bodies, and the environment as sources of evidence.