Her book Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century received the 1990 Herbert E. Bolton Prize of the Conference on Latin American History.
[5] For her study of the elite Marqueses de Aguayo over several generations, she drew on rich archival sources, mainly at the University of Texas, with specificity of locale and individuals, and placed them within the larger colonial world.
Altman followed up Emigrants and Society quickly with her second co-edited and co-authored volume, "To Make America": European Immigration in the Early Modern Period, which broadened the conversation about transatlantic migration.
[6] In her second single-author monograph, Transatlantic Ties, Altman focused on two particular localities, the textile-producing Spanish town of Brihuega and Mexico's second-most important colonial city, Puebla de los Angeles.
Puebla was a natural way-station between the port of Veracruz and the viceregal capital, Mexico City, but it developed as a rich agricultural zone and as a locus for textile production for a colonial mass market.
Altman's examination of the historical dynamics of the Mixtón rebellion is concrete evidence for long-term, complex planning by multiple indigenous groups to expel the Spaniards and regain their autonomy.
Those brought enormous demographic, economic, and social change as Europeans, Indigenous people, and Africans whom Spaniards imported to provide skilled and unskilled labor came into extended contact for the first time.
[9] With Mexicanist colleagues Sarah Cline and Javier Pescador, Altman co-authored a textbook entitled The Early History of Greater Mexico.