Event Description
For centuries, we’ve been taught that modern global history began with Columbus’s arrival in America. However, Caroline Dodds Pennock’s groundbreaking book reveals that tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit, and others had already “discovered” Europe. These Indigenous Americans experienced Europe as a land of riches, marvels, and brutal disparities. Their stories, largely absent from our collective imagination, involve abduction, loss, cultural appropriation, and apocalypse.
Pennock’s book draws on surviving literature and poetry, layering European eyewitness accounts to provide a sweeping narrative of Indigenous Americans in early modern Europe. From Brazilian kings to Aztecs, Inuk babies to mestizo children, these individuals were rendered exotic, demeaned, and marginalized, yet had a profound impact on European civilization.
Speaker
Caroline Dodds Pennock is a renowned expert on Aztec history with a strong academic background and impressive credentials. She holds a senior lectureship in international history at the University of Sheffield. She completed her training at Oxford and won the prestigious Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society in 2008 for her study “Bonds of Blood” on Aztec human sacrifice.
Co-sponsorship
Presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley Library, the Institute of European Studies, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies