Camilla Townsend, Professor of History, Rutgers University

Camilla Townsend is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of numerous books, including Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, and The Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (OUP, 2016), which won multiple prizes, among them the Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association.

Winner of the Cundill History Prize
Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2019

"It is admirable how Townsend exploits the details of microhistory based on Native accounts to answer bigger questions, reveal meanings behind particular events, and offer the reader macro-level conclusions ... through this book we actually experience the past rather than simply read about it. It is not only convincing; it is simply captivating. Townsend has the courage to resort to "poetic license", but even then we do not lose the sense of transparency as the endnotes provide a full disclosure, informing critical readers about exact sources, possible discrepancies, uncertainties about the facts, and the source of the historian's preferred interpretation. By combining deep reading of Native sources with reexperiencing the emotions of their actors and reliving their deeds and decisions, Townsend puts into practice an ideal of historical writing." - Justyna Olko

"A revolutionary history." - Ben Ehrenreich, The Guardian

"Camilla Townsend has made the extraordinary happen. She has written a chronological history of the Mexica (Aztecs) from their origins into the sixteenth century relying principally on documents that they themselves generated...Camilla Townsend has provided scholars and the reading public with a wonderful history of the Mexica. By relying closely on Native texts, she has avoided the tropes normally associated with books on the precontact populations of Mexico. The writing itself is lyrical...Everyone with any interest at all in Mexico should read this work." - John F. Schwaller, Hispanic American Historical Review

"Camilla Townsend's incredibly compact and helpful Fifth Sun will serve equally well professional historians, upper-division undergraduate and graduate students, and the general public." - Andrae Marak, World History Connected

"This is the best book on the Aztecs yet written, full stop ... The value of Fifth Sun lies in how it rescues Aztecs and Nahuas from centuries of colonialist caricature and renders them human again - fully human, with flaws, people capable of brutal violence but also of deep love." - History Today

"This wonderfully fresh, readable new work invites you to reconsider everything you think you knew about them." - Jonathan Gordon, All About History

"Shows the Mexica empire in a fresh, thrilling new light." - Simon Sebag Montefiore, Aspects of History

"Spanning the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, this book recreates key moments in the Mexica past as the Mexica themselves experienced and remembered them. We meet real men and women whose actions changed the course of history. We see time as the Mexica did, a sequence of years extending unbroken from mythic origins to intrepid migration to imperial splendor to the challenges of living with the Spanish colonial presence. Never before has the Aztecs' own epic story been so vividly and engagingly recounted for readers of English." - Louise M. Burkhart, author of Aztecs on Stage: Religious Theater in Colonial Mexico

"From the initial migration southward, to the second generation after the conquest, Fifth Sun is a masterful account of the history of the Aztecs in their own words. A whole world arises from the pages: vivid, complex, and much closer to us than expected. Townsend's understanding of the indigenous annals is unmatched, and her book reads like a novel. You simply cannot put it down." - Caterina Pizzigoni, author of The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico's Toluca Valley, 1650-1800

"Never before has the political history of the Aztecs, who knew themselves as the Mexica, been told with such sweeping élan. Townsend brings keen insight into the motivations of the players, be they seasoned warriors, shackled slaves, or calculating concubines. Her gripping narrative, underscoring Aztec tenacity and endurance before and beyond the Spanish conquest, is sure to captivate readers." - Barbara Mundy, author of The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City

"Camilla Townsend has an unusually profound understanding of Nahua culture, before and during the colonial period. She also has a rare set of research, linguistic, and writing skills. That combination of expertise and talent make her uniquely positioned to offer us a new book on the Aztecs, one that manages to be-despite the plethora of existing studies-both original and mandatory reading. This is a page-turner that is nonetheless packed with new insights and interpretations." - Matthew Restall, author of When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History