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Cover of Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

How long does it take to read Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest?

Matthew Restall

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest by Matthew Restall takes about 4 hours 24 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 24 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2003. 240 pages, about 66,000 words.

9 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 7 hours 20 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 24 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 45 minutes

The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Here is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which the history of the Spanish Conquest has been misread and passed down to become popular knowledge of these events. The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cortes,and Pizarro. Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each myth. This vividly written and authoritative book shows, for instance, that native Americans did not takethe conquistadors for gods and that small numbers of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. We discover that Columbus was correctly seen in his lifetime--and for decades after--as a briefly fortunate but unexceptional participant in efforts involvingmany southern Europeans...

Subjects: History, Nonfiction, Historiography, Spaniards, Errors, inventions, Myth

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