Consuming "Conquest of Mexico" With A Grain of Salt

            I went back and read James Lockhart’s introduction after I had read a good number of Prescott’s chapters.  Lockhart’s introduction confirmed many of my suspicions of Prescott’s narrative.  Nonetheless, I can’t help but love Prescott’s account.  His literary style is absolutely magnificent.  The preface also acknowledges that while Prescott “has been called the nation’s first ‘scientific historian’ for his use of manuscript sources, he would live on as a creator of literature.”  It is quite obvious while reading Prescott’s book that he would be considered one of the literary historians that Townsend mentions in History’s Babel, more so than a scientific one.  And yet, while I can’t help but feel guilty for buying into a dramatized narrative, I also can’t help but also absolutely eat it all up.

            Only a week after reading Trouillot’s book, I know that I need to take this narrative with a grain of salt.  It is quite evident that Prescott has added flare and color to his narrative, and it is important to keep this in mind while consuming it.  One must be sure as to not buy completely into a sort of consumer-friendly history of the kind seen in Trouillot’s book that fails to acknowledge the complexities and intricacies of the past, such as the “social complexity among the conquerors that…Prescott could not divine” (xxviii).  Nonetheless, this classic surely has its place within the historical enterprise, and perhaps it is best used as a building block to lure in intrigued historians, upon which they can further refine their expertise of the subject with more scientific accounts.