The Contest for New Mexico

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Before 1700, encounters between Indigenous peoples and Spanish colonizers in New Mexico alternated between violence and accommodation. This lecture will focus on the period from 1598 to 1680, an era that witnessed both brutality and efforts at coexistence. Miscommunication, arrogance, religious inspiration, enslavement, and savage punishment meted out to enemies in New Mexico reflected circumstances across the Western Hemisphere in the generations following 1492. Observers in the southwest (of the modern United States) described decisive moments with precision. Tales of religious conversion can be found in the archive alongside the stories of violent conflict revealing how individuals, in certain moments, proved willing to engage in intimate and bloody carnage, especially during the assault on Acoma in 1598 and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. North America in these generations was a contested place—and New Mexico an ideal historical laboratory for understanding why events unfolded as they did.

Peter C. Mancall is Distinguished Professor, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, the Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, and Professor of History, Anthropology, and Economics at the University of Southern California. He is also Chair of the Board of Directors of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. His eight books include “Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson—a Tale of Mutiny and M**der in the Arctic” (Basic Books, 2009) and “The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England” (Yale, 2019). His newest book, published in 2026, is “Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680,” which is volume one of the Oxford History of the United States. In the 2019-20 academic year he was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. And he was the Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library in 2024-25.