James Lockhart

Frist studied early Spanish American social history, developing a method of deducing larger structures and trends from a series of lives of ordinary people synthesized from scattered local sources; the approach is often called career pattern history. SInce the sources for this kind of work primarly concern Spaniards, he later began to work with indigenous languages, especially the Mexican language Nahuatl, and developed a type of philological ethnohistory sometimes called the New Philology. Work contains large monographs, volumes of essays, a textbook, edited indigenous texts, and a grammar of Nahuatl.