Book · 2003
Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
by Matthew Restall
Matthew Restall takes seven stories every American thinks they know about the Spanish Conquest and explains, one chapter at a time, why each one is wrong.
What does Reddit think of Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest?
Sixteen of the book's 18 Reddit mentions land in r/AskHistorians, and the pattern is consistent: historians recommend it not as a starting point but as the corrective layer on top of whatever introductory reading someone already did. The ↑266 comment that names the book directly describes it as tackling "the big stories that US Americans have largely internalized" — disease myths, military superiority myths, the Tlaxcalan question — and handling each as its own themed chapter. That framing shows up again in the ↑105 and ↑130 threads, where flair-verified contributors drill into Aztec politics and the composition of anti-Mexica alliances, citing Restall as the historian who does the disaggregation properly. The r/history audience is thinner — 2 mentions, last seen in 2020 — and treats it as one entry in a longer indigenous-history syllabus rather than a centerpiece. Sentiment across both subs is neutral in the data; that's less about controversy than about how r/AskHistorians operates: flaired experts cite books, they don't rate them.
Community feedback & reader fit
Themes
- · Debunking conquest mythology
- · Indigenous agency and alliance politics
- · Disease, demography, and colonial historiography
- · Tlaxcalan and multi-group resistance coalitions
- · How popular memory distorts colonial history
Common praise
- + The chapter structure — one myth per chapter — lets readers assign readings surgically without assigning the whole book.
- + r/AskHistorians contributors with indigenous-history flair cite it specifically when correcting Tlaxcalan-as-traitor narratives.
- + It handles the alliance question (Huexotzinco, Chalco, Acolhua alongside the Tlaxcalans) without flattening it into a single villain.
- + Works as a syllabus-ready corrective that pairs cleanly with 1491 for readers moving from introductory to analytical.
Common criticism
- − The r/history presence is thin — 2 mentions in seven years — suggesting it doesn't travel well outside specialist-adjacent audiences.
- − None of the top-upvoted threads engage the book's arguments critically; it gets cited as authority, not debated.
Who it's for
You've read 1491 or a general colonial survey and you keep running into the same myths in comment sections — disease did all the work, the Spanish were just braver, the Tlaxcalans betrayed everyone. This is the book that disassembles each of those. Graduate students and flair-verified r/AskHistorians regulars treat it as a citation-ready reference; the ↑266 recommendation thread describes it as essential for anyone trying to understand how and why colonization narratives calcified the way they did. If you want primary-source depth on a single region, you'll need to supplement it — but as a framework for what questions to ask, it does the job.
Mentions over time
Top subreddits
Which Reddit comments matter for Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest?
Top-upvoted quotes across the subreddits where this book is mentioned. Click through to read the full thread.
“That's great that you want to learn more about U.S. history! I focus on indigenous history, as well as the indigenous slave trade, and in the list below highlight some of my favorite books, with a little nod to Texas/Western U.S. history. I'm going to recommend some of my favorites below, in a roug…
“One great place to start is "Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest" by Matthew Restall. As the title suggests, he takes on some of those big stories that US Americans have largely internalized about why and how colonization happened. Each chapter is about different themes like disease, militaries, pop…
“**The American Peoples: resistance in Argentina’s northwest** Finally, let’s look at a third side to this issue, the Calchaquí Wars. Laura Quiroga tells us that the main objective of the colonizing expeditions of conquering the resources and controlling the communities inhabiting the northwest of…
“There's a fantastic answer here by /u/sunagainstgold (thanks for the mention!) already, and I'd also like to add a few points. Adapted from some earlier answers of mine: The Spanish drew many parallels between (Iberian) Muslims and America's native populations. They perceived the previously unknown…
“No, you would not be wrong, you would be completely right and very astute. Mexico City is Tenochtitlan. It is also a conglomerate of numerous other precontact indigenous cities and early modern and modern towns, which now sit on the drained lake bed, that have been incorporated into the modern cit…
“Perhaps the simples answer is that there were more than just the Tlaxcalans fighting against the Mexica. People from Huexotzinco, Chalco, and even a few from Acolhua, also stepped in to help. To understand how this happened we need to know a little bit about Aztec politics as well as a few key event…
“I'm not qualified to fully discuss Jaynes' hypothesis of the bicameral mind, because this is the first I've heard of it. A quick survey does not show it to be anything near an accepted idea in any of the academic fields it touches upon. So instead I went looking for what Jayne actually had to say ab…
“It's hard to tell how much was what Columbus was thinking vs what Columbus was saying for pragmatic reasons, but I would say that he knew he wasn't in Asia. In *Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest*, Matthew Restall points out that Columbus's expeditions (and those of his successors) were on a cont…
Convinced? Pick up Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
Readers also mention
Books that share discussion threads with Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest — counted from the comments, not curated.
Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
Daniel K. Richter
Daniel K. Richter's colonial history flips the map, reading European settlement from indigenous vantage points that colonial archives almost never preserved.
One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark
Colin G. Calloway
A history of the Great Plains told through the winter counts — pictographic calendars tribes used to track time — spanning 20,000 years of indigenous life before and after contact.
Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas
Jeffrey Ostler
Jeffrey Ostler traces how Native nations held together from the American Revolution through Bleeding Kansas while U.S. policy ground toward erasure.
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
Andrés Reséndez
Andres Resendez reconstructs five centuries of Indian enslavement in the Americas — a system that ran parallel to African chattel slavery and outlasted it.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles C. Mann
Charles Mann reconstructs the Americas before Columbus — bigger populations, denser cities, and more deliberate landscapes than most history classes ever admitted.
Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest — frequently asked
What does Reddit actually think of Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest?+
The top-upvoted direct endorsement (↑266) describes it as the book for understanding how conquest stories got internalized, not just what happened. Nobody argues with that framing.
Is Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest a good first book on the Spanish Conquest?+
Depends on your starting point. The r/AskHistorians pattern is consistent: contributors reach for it after recommending something introductory like 1491. It's structured as a corrective — each chapter targets a specific myth — so readers who don't know the myths yet get less out of it. The ↑321 r/history syllabus thread lists it mid-tier, after foundational reads.
Does Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest address the Tlaxcalan alliance question?+
Yes, and that's one of the main reasons r/AskHistorians experts cite it. The ↑105 and ↑130 threads deal directly with Aztec alliance politics — who fought alongside the Spanish, why, and what it means — and Restall's framework for disaggregating the coalition (Huexotzinco, Chalco, Acolhua, not just the Tlaxcalans) is treated as the baseline for that conversation.
Who is Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest for if I'm not an academic?+
Anyone who has absorbed the standard conquest narrative and wants to know what historians actually think. The ↑266 comment frames it as tackling stories 'US Americans have largely internalized,' which is a precise description of its audience. You don't need prior academic background — the chapter-per-myth structure is accessible — but some familiarity with the basic timeline helps.