Recent Anglophone Scholarship on Mexico and Central America in the Age of Revolution (1750-1850)

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2828339
AutoresEric Van Young (autor de correspondencia)
Año1985
Volumen65
Número4
Páginas725
Fecha de publicación1985-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2514893
OpenAlexW4234506123
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas21

S OME years ago, while I was doing graduate work at Berkeley, a fellow Latin Americanist graduate student, himself in the process of changing fields to European intellectual history, said to me: Gee-it seems all the good people are getting out of Latin American I suspect that many people in our field would not agree with my friend's summary judgment. Certainly much of the body of literature I will briefly discuss in this article gives the lie to his assertion. Nonetheless, in thinking about giving the paper upon which this review was based, I was plagued with nagging doubts as to whether my friend might not have been right to some extent. A number of colleagues with whom I have discussed this problem have agreed with me that the literature on Latin America in general is not as good, at least in this country, as that produced on European or United States history. Even those who assert that much of the best of recent Anglophone writing on Latin America is dedicated to the colonial period, would probably also agree that the overall quality of what we produce is not up to the standard of work done on the Old World or Anglo-America. And if one includes Europeans writing on their own history, the comparison becomes even more skewed. After thinking about this, I have personally come to conclude that our fault, if such it be, lies not so much in our abilities as in our works. Speaking specifically of colonialists, the quality of our guild ranges from brilliant to atrocious-but so does that of the Englishspeaking scholars who study European and United States history. In short, it is not so much a question of what we know, or how well we understand or write it; nor even of what we can know, given our abilities, training, and the research materials to hand; but rather of what we want

Ancient history · Economic history · Latin Americans · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Suspect · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Law