Associate professor of Spanish at Central College Tim Johnson has co-authored a new book, “Basques and Vicunas at the Mouth of Hell: A Documentary History of Potosi in the Early 1620s,” with Kris Lane, the France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University.

The project began when Lane discovered a previously unknown and uncatalogued manuscript in the New York Public Library. Over the next six years, Lane uncovered additional rare documents, which he and Johnson transcribed from their original manuscript form and translated into English. The resulting book presents eyewitness narratives of a Spanish civil conflict that played out in Potosi, then the largest and wealthiest city in the Western Hemisphere.

“Basques and Vicunas at the Mouth of Hell” sheds light on a little-known chapter of colonial Latin American history, offering readers a compelling glimpse into the tensions that shaped Potosi’s turbulent past.