A MagnaHistoria Collection

Magna Stories

True history, read aloud — bound word for word to the documents that survived. Nothing claimed beyond the record. Press play and listen.

“I am married and I have three children, and they look on me as a cacique here. My face is tattooed and my ears are pierced. What would the Spaniards say about me if they saw me like this?” — Gonzalo Guerrero, recorded by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, c. 1568
Story I 1511 – 1818

First Contact

Three Europeans who, handed the chance to conquer, refused — and crossed over.

Read the full page →
I
The Refusal
Gonzalo Guerrero · Yucatán · 1511–1536
Free · 13:30 · read aloud
Reconstruction Guerrero & Zazil Há, Chetumal · AI-generated

A Spanish sailor wrecked on the Yucatán, enslaved, then risen to Maya war captain. When Cortés sent word inviting the bearded captives home, the friar wept and went. Guerrero folded the letter and stayed — and spent seventeen years making it impossible for his own people to take the land where his wife and children lived.

Bound to
c.1568
Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España
Bernal Díaz del Castillo
First pub. Madrid, 1632
1536
Letter to Carlos V, 14 August
Andrés de Cereceda
Archivo General de Indias, Seville
II
The Transformation
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · Texas to Mexico · 1527–1542
Members · 19:45 · read aloud
Reconstruction The escort of thousands — a Child of the Sun · AI-generated

A royal treasurer sailed for Florida with three hundred men. Four came back. He walked, naked and starving, six thousand miles — and returned something the Spanish language had no word for. He left a soldier. He came back a healer, arguing with his own countrymen for the right of the people who saved him not to be enslaved.

Bound to
1542
La Relación (The Account)
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
Zamora, Spain — first edition
III
The Memory
Hudson & the Lenape · the river, told twice · 1609 / 1818
Members · 16:46 · read aloud
Reconstruction The Halve Maen on the river, the Lenape watching, 1609 · AI-generated

One arrival on one river, recorded from both sides across two centuries: a working seaman's terse 1609 logbook, and the Lenape oral memory of the same day, carried for seven generations and written down in 1818. Almost no first-contact event in eastern North America survived from both sides. Here, for once, it did.

Bound to
1609
Log of the Halve Maen (Half Moon)
Robert Juet
Ship's mate, Dutch East India Co.
1818
Account of the Lenape oral tradition
John Heckewelder
Moravian mission, Pennsylvania
Story II Wounded Knee · 1889–1890

The Ghost Dance

A dance they tried to outlaw — Wovoka's vision, the Smithsonian ledger, and the eyewitnesses who stood in the ring. An interactive telling now; the film is in production.

Enter the visualization →
Story III Tsenacommacah · 1596–1617

Matoaka — The Overwriting

The girl the world renamed Pocahontas, told back from the record — not the legend. Four names, and the record kept none of them as hers. A 14-minute film, bound to the documents that survived.

Watch the film →
On the shelf in production

Coming to the collection

Films first — on the channel — then the full telling, bound to the record, here.

Paris · 1679–1680
The Erased · Vol I — The Woman the King Had to Burn
La Voisin and Louis XIV. A witness burned to keep a powerful man clean.
Subscribe to catch each one →

The collection grows. Every story that joins it is bound, line by line, to a document that survived.

The first chapter is yours.
The rest opens when you come inside.

These stories are public — anyone can read La Relación. What you can't get anywhere else is the telling, read end to end, and the living work it belongs to: a platform that goes looking for the threads history dropped, voices them, and reads the present back to you tuned to the ground under your own feet.

Subscribe for new films Come inside