Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

***Winner of the 2020 Cundill History Prize***

Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend, Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, is a wonderful book that tells the history of the Aztecs—or Mexica, as they called themselves—from their own point of view.

Recommendations from our site

“It’s a ground-breaking book in many ways. Camilla Townsend has been doing work on this for a while at what you might call a high scholarly level, and this is an attempt to take that learning to a slightly wider audience…She has access to these documents called xiuhpohualli, which she translates as ‘yearly accounts’, but they are the Nahuatl people’s annals and, using these, she concentrates on a period of roughly about a hundred years either side of Hernan Cortes’s arrival. She is very concerned not to portray the Mexica, the Aztecs, as these people who indulge in human sacrifice and all the other things we know from Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. But it does go on and the human sacrifice actually increases with time.” Read more...

The Best History Books of 2020

Paul Lay, Historian