Historiography of Colonial Spanish America
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The historiography of Spanish America in multiple languages is vast and has a long history.[1][2][3] It dates back to the early sixteenth century with multiple competing accounts of the conquest, Spaniards’ eighteenth-century attempts to discover how to reverse the decline of its empire,[4] and people of Spanish descent born in the Americas (criollos) search for an identity other than Spanish, and the creation of creole patriotism.[5] Following independence in some parts of Spanish America, some politically engaged citizens of the new sovereign nations sought to shape national identity.[6] In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-Spanish American historians began writing chronicles important events, such as the conquests of the Aztec Empire and the Inca Empire,[7] dispassionate histories of the Spanish imperial project after its almost complete demise in the hemisphere,[8] and histories of the southwest borderlands, areas of the United States that had previously been part of the Spanish Empire, led by Herbert Eugene Bolton.[9] At the turn of the twentieth century, scholarly research on Spanish America saw the creation of college courses dealing with the region, the systematic training of professional historians in the field, and the founding of the first specialized journal, Hispanic American Historical Review.[10][11] For most of the twentieth century, historians of colonial Spanish America read and were familiar with a large canon of work. With the expansion of the field in the late twentieth century, there has been the establishment of new subfields, the founding of new journals, and the proliferation of monographs, anthologies, and articles for increasingly specialized practitioners and readerships. The Conference on Latin American History, the organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association, awards a number of prizes for publications, with works on early Latin American history well represented.[12] The Latin American Studies Association has a section devoted to scholarship on the colonial era.