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Originally titled Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España (The True History of the Conquest of New Spain), this first-person narrative by the military adventurer, conquistador, and settler Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492-1584) recounts the fall of Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II, the defeat of the Aztec Empire, and his participation in the Spanish military campaigns that brought them about. Díaz served in three Mesoamerican expeditions, that of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba to the Yucatán peninsula (1517); that of Juan de Grijalva (1518), and finally the expedition of Hernán Cortés (1519) in the Valley of Mexico. Amongst chroniclers, Díaz was most celebrated as Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was amongst novelists.

What was it like to search for fossilized remains back in the 1900s? While several advances have been made in the field of paleontology, a lot of the searching has remained much the same today. In his memoir, The Life of a Fossil Hunter, Charles H. Sternberg (1850-1943) provides us with a part scientific, part autobiography, and part adventure-like retelling of his discoveries, hardships, and close calls while searching and collecting fossils in the American West. A window into the life of an academic pioneer on the frontier.