Pulitzer Prize-nominee David J Weber, whose "The Spanish Frontier in North America" marked a new era of scholarship about Spain in North America, narrows his focus here to the period 1804-1827 in Taos, New Mexico, and the life of a Spanish Colonial manor house. The Martinez Hacienda, whose twenty-one rooms have been fully restored by the Kit Carson Historic Museums, stands today as the finest remaining example of a great house of the late Spanish Colonial/Mexican periods. Protected by the walls of this fortified hacienda, we are given to understand in broad outline this extraordinary place in time and the stunning political, economic, cultural, and social changes that the patriarch Severino Martinez and his family experienced there. In the hands of the masterfully well-storied historian, this house and its inhabitants come vividly to life.