SOURCE: "Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Spanish Empire in America: Four Centuries of Misunderstanding," in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 97, No. 1, February, 1953, pp. 26–30.

In the following excerpt, Hanke, an American professor of Latin American history, briefly reviews the ongoing controversies surrounding the reputation of Las Casas.

When Ferdinand Cortez and his little band of Spaniards fought their way in 1519 from the tropical shores of the coast of Mexico up to the high plateau and first saw stretched below them the great Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, gleaming on its lake under the morning sun, they experienced one of the truly dramatic moments in the history of America. Fortunately we have the words of a reporter worthy of the scene, the foot soldier Bernal Diaz del Castillo, whose True History of the Conquest of New Spain is one of the classics of the western world. He wrote...