James Lockhart (historian)


James Lockhart was a U.S. historian of colonial Spanish America, especially the Nahua people and Nahuatl language.
Born in Huntington, West Virginia, Lockhart attended West Virginia University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Late in life, Lockhart wrote a short, candid memoir. He joined the US Army and was posted to Germany, working in "a low-level intelligence agency," translating letters from East Germany. Returning to the US, he entered the graduate program at University of Wisconsin, where he pursued his doctorate in the social history of conquest-era Peru.
His dissertation, published in 1968 as Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: A Social History was a path breaking approach to this early period. Less interested in the complicated political events of the era, he focused on the formation of Spanish colonial society in the midst of Spanish war with the indigenous and internecine struggles between factions of conquerors. With separate chapters on different social groups, including Africans and indigenous brought into the Spanish sphere, and an important chapter on women of the conquest era, his work shifted the understanding of that era. His main source for the people and processes of this early period were notarial documents, often property transfers and other types of legal agreements, which gave insight into the formation and function of Spanish colonial society. The work is now a classic and was published in a second, revised edition in 1994.
While researching Spanish Peru, he compiled information on the Spaniards who received a share of the ransom of the Inca Atahualpa, extracted at Cajamarca. The Men of Cajamarca has both individual biographies of those who shared in the treasure, as well as a thorough analysis of the general social patterns of those conquerors. Both Spanish Peru and The Men of Cajamarca have been published in Spanish translation.
He began to do research on colonial Mexico while at University of Texas, looking both at the socioeconomic patterns there and began learning Nahuatl. Fruits of these new interests were the publication of the anthology Provinces of Early Mexico: Variants of Spanish American Regional Evolution and Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period.
He moved to University of California, Los Angeles, where he spent the bulk of his teaching career 1972–1994, retiring early and continuing to collaborate with colleagues on research projects and mentor graduate students working on historical sources in the Nahuatl language and the colonial-era Nahua people.
Among his many graduate students in colonial Spanish American social history and the philology of Mesoamerican indigenous languages, who earned doctorates under his mentorship are S.L. Cline, Kimberly Gauderman, Robert Haskett, Rebecca Horn, John E. Kicza, Leslie K. Lewis, Doris Namala, Leslie Offutt, Matthew Restall, Susan Schroeder, Lisa Sousa, Kevin Terraciano, John Tutino, John Super, and Stephanie Wood.
He was a major contributor to a field of ethnohistory built on the study of indigenous-language sources from colonial Mexico, which he called New Philology. He collaborated with colonial Brazilianist Stuart B. Schwartz in writing Early Spanish America, which is a foundational text for graduate students studying colonial Latin America. He was the series editor for the Nahuatl Studies Series, initially based at the UCLA Latin American Center and then jointly with Stanford University Press. Lockhart was honored by the Conference on Latin American History Distinguished Service Award in 2004.
He died on 17 January 2014 at the age of 80.

Works

Primary

  • We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico.
  • Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period.
  • Beyond the Codices: The Nahua View of Colonial Mexico.
  • The Tlaxcalan Actas: A compendium of records of the Cabildo of Tlaxcala, 1545–1627..
  • The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega's Huey tlamahuicoltica of 1649
  • Annals of His Time: Don Domingo de San Anton Munon Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin..

Secondary

  • Spanish Peru, 1532-1560.
  • The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru.
  • The Social History of Colonial Spanish America: evolution and potential Austin, Texas: University of Texas Institute of Latin American Studies, 1972).
  • Provinces of Early Mexico: Variants of Spanish American Regional Evolution..
  • Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, Sixteenth Century.
  • Early Latin America: A Short History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil..
  • The Art of Nahuatl Speech: The Bancroft Dialogues.
  • Charles Gibson and the Ethnohistory of Post-conquest Central Mexico.
  • Nahuas and Spaniards: Postconquest Mexican History and Philology.
  • The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries.
  • Of things of the Indies : essays old and new in early Latin American history,.
  • Grammar of the Mexican Language: With an explanation of Its Adverbs,, Horacio Carochi, James Lockhart.

Spanish Self-Translations of his Books

  • El mundo hispanoperuano, 1532-1560. .
  • Los de Cajamarca: un estudio social y biografico del los primeros conquistadores del Peru.
  • America Latina en la Edad Moderna: una historia de la America Espanola y el Brazil Coloniales.
  • Los nahuas despúes de la conquista: historia social y cultural de los indios del Mexico central, del siglo XVI al XVIII)(Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económico 1999.