Charles Gibson

2 Au–22 A

**Charles Gibson** (2 August 1920 - 22 August 1985) Charles Gibson was professor of Latin American history at the University of Michigan, who studied the Nahua peoples of colonial Mexico. Charles was the son of William W. (1885) and Helen J. Gibson (1900), born on 2 August 1920 in Bethlehem, Albany, New York, USA. His elder brother, also William W. was born a year earlier and he had a younger brother Edward J. born two years after him. During the late forties he went to University of Texas and got his Masters degree there in 1947 and three years later worked on his thesis at Yale University under the directorship of George Kubler. On gaining his Doctorate in Philosophy he joined the history faculty as professor at the University of Iowa (1949-1965). In 1965 he then became professor of history at University of Michigan until he retired thirty years later. He published his most significant works - *Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century* in 1952 and *Aztecs Under Spanish Rule* in 1964. > *"Perhaps more than any other historian of his time, [Charles] shed light on indigenous life in colonial New Spain. While his first book, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century, is not focused on Mexico City, it plays an important role in the overall historiography of Mesoamerican social history. By using a wide range of sources, he demonstrated that the indigenous government of Tlaxcala had not been subsumed by Spanish dictates, but rather had adopted aspects of Spanish culture and altered them to fit i

7 books in the database