Page 154 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers
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“Good morning…and still be killed”: “Sandy Speaks—April 8th 2015 (Black Lives Matter),”
YouTube, April 8, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIKeZgC8lQ4.
Confrontation between Cortés and Montezuma: William Prescott, History of the Conquest of
Mexico (New York: Modern Library, 1980).
“When we saw so many cities”: Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico
(London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928), p. 270,
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.152204/page/n295.
Description of first meeting up to “Yes, I am he”: Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Cortés, Montezuma,
and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 279.
“innumerable rooms inside…and admirable white fur robes”: Thomas, Conquest, p. 280.
The idea that Montezuma considered Cortés a god (in footnote): Camilla Townsend, “Burying
the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico,” American Historical Review 108,
no. 3 (2003): 659–87.
“The impossibility of adequately translating…Spanish surrender”: Matthew Restall, When
Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History (New York: Harper
Collins, 2018), p. 345.
If you are interested in the Cortés-Montezuma story, I strongly recommend the last two of these
sources. Restall’s book is marvelous. And Townsend is that rarest of historians, able to write
scholarly history in academic journals that reads like it was written for all of us.
