The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 77, July 1973 - April, 1974 Page: 419

Book Reviews

Charles V, is a "case study in the socioeconomic development of sixteenth-
century Mexico." It is also a signal contribution to a genre of literature that
is still far short of adequate.
The difficulties of researching and writing the institutional history of
Hispanic America bear brief mention. In contrast to the drama and ro-
mance of the Conquest, institutions are often regarded as deadly fare.
Studies of this nature are written by a specialist for other specialists. Analy-
sis of documentary sources is laborious and time-consuming work, and the
scholar is continually faced with the problem of choosing a logical stop-
ping point in his research. Were it not for university presses, this kind of
history would never be published in book form at the present time.
In this study the author penetrates our ignorance of the internal opera-
tional history of the encomienda in New Spain, a circumstance alluded to
several years ago by Lewis Hanke in The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the
Conquest of America. In I529 Cort6s, who had previously been cleared of
malfeasance by residencia litigation, received 23,000 tributary vassals in
twenty-two Indian pueblos of New Spain. (In reality, as Riley points out,
the number of encomienda Indians claimed by the conqueror was twice this
amount.) Excellent chapters detail the development and management of
labor, livestock, mines, business enterprises, and encomiendas within the
modern state of Morelos. The complex legal entanglements of Cortes and
the Morelos Marquesado round out this in-depth study of New Spain's
most important land holder and encomendero in the 153os and 154os.
Rich documentation, statistical appendices on sixteenth-century tribute
and land exploitation, as well as the polished literary style of Professor Riley
will make this book required reading for the Latin Americanist. Both the
author and the press are to be commended for producing such a handsome
volume.
North Texas State University DONALD CHIPMAN
CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, I942-1968. By August
Meier and Elliott Rudwick. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1973. Pp. xii+563. Notes, maps, index. $15.)
Founded three decades ago as an interracial organization to oppose dis-
crimination, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) survives today as a
stormy black separatist group envisioning "a nation within a nation." Its
thirty-year history tells much about the impact of the civil rights revolution
on American race relations and on the agents of change as well. The present
volume by August Meier and Elliott Rudwick is an elaborate study of

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