Quotes from Matthew Restall

The parallel is inescapable: General Scott is Cortés, and General Santa Anna is Montezuma; the two acts of surrender in Mexico City echo, illuminate, and legitimize each other, representing resonant moments in the march of progress that is "American" history.

The clash of civilizations, the conquest wars, the protracted process of colonization are all eclipsed and elided into a single symbolic moment.

To distinguish between the curved and the straight. —Horace (ca. 30 B.C.)

Collective achievement, of course, is less appealing both to the participants and to those later reading about it as the human impulse is to look for the heroes and villains.

Do we prejudice our discussion and privilege traditional answers by styling the invaders as explorers, th einvaded as Indians, and their war as the Conquest of Mexico ?

It is about something much larger -the pernicious prevalence and insidious ubiquity of traditional narratives that justify invasion, conquest and inequality.