The written history of Mexico spans more than three millennia. First populated more than 13,000 years ago, central and southern Mexico saw the rise and fall of complex indigenous civilizations. Mexico would later develop into a unique multicultural society. Mesoamerican civilizations developed glyphic writing systems, recording the political history of conquests and rulers. Mesoamerican history prior to European arrival is called the prehispanic era or the pre-Columbian era. Following Mexico's independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821, political turmoil wracked the nation. France, with the help of Mexican conservatives, seized control in the 1860s during the Second Mexican Empire but was later defeated. Quiet prosperous growth was characteristic in the late 19th century but the Mexican Revolution in 1910 brought a bitter civil war. With calm restored in the 1920s, economic growth was steady while population growth was rapid.
The Mexican Revolution was an extended sequence of armed regional conflicts in Mexico from 20 November 1910 to 1 December 1920. It has been called "the defining event of modern Mexican history". It resulted in the destruction of the Federal Army and its replacement by a revolutionary army, and the transformation of Mexican culture and government. The northern Constitutionalist faction prevailed on the battlefield and drafted the present-day Constitution of Mexico, which aimed to create a strong central government. Revolutionary generals held power from 1920 to 1940. The revolutionary conflict was primarily a civil war, but foreign powers, having important economic and strategic interests in Mexico, figured in the outcome of Mexico's power struggles; the U.S. involvement was particularly high. The conflict led to the deaths of around one million people, mostly noncombatants.
Lázaro Cárdenas del Río was a Mexican army officer and politician who served as president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. Previously, he served as a general in the Constitutional Army during the Mexican Revolution and as Governor of Michoacán and President of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. He later served as the Secretary of National Defence. During his presidency, which is considered the end of the Maximato, he implemented massive land reform programs, led the expropriation of the country's oil industry, and implemented many left-leaning reforms. He was the first Mexican president to serve as a sexenio, and is considered one of the most popular presidents in the history of Mexico.
The term Latin America primarily refers to the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the New World.
A cacique, sometime spelled as cazique was a tribal chieftain of the Taíno people, who were the indigenous inhabitants of the Bahamas, the Greater Antilles, and the northern Lesser Antilles at the time of European contact with those places. The term is a Spanish transliteration of the Taíno word kasike.
The Cristero War, also known as the Cristero Rebellion or La Cristiada, was a widespread struggle in central and western Mexico from 3 August 1926 to 21 June 1929 in response to the implementation of secularist and anticlerical articles of the 1917 Constitution. The rebellion was instigated as a response to an executive decree by Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles to strictly enforce Article 130 of the Constitution, a decision known as Calles Law. Calles sought to limit the power of the Catholic Church in Mexico, its affiliated organizations and to suppress popular religiosity.
Jean Meyer Barth is a French-Mexican historian and author, known for his writings on early 20th-century Mexican history. He has published extensively on the Mexican Revolution and Cristero War, the history of Nayarit, and on the caudillo Manuel Lozada. He is a faculty member at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Indigenismo is a political ideology in several Latin American countries which emphasizes the relationship between the nation state and indigenous nations and indigenous peoples. In some contemporary uses, it refers to the pursuit of greater social and political inclusion for indigenous peoples in Latin America, whether through nation-wide reforms or region-wide alliances. In either case, this type of indigenismo seeks to vindicate indigenous cultural and linguistic difference, assert indigenous rights, and seek recognition and in some cases compensation for past wrongdoings of the colonial and republican states. Nevertheless, some historical figures like José Martí are classified as having been both indigenistas and hispanistas.
John Womack Jr. is an American economist and historian of Mexico, the Mexican Revolution (1910–1921), and Emiliano Zapata. He is a former professor of Latin American history and economics at Harvard University. He is the grandfather of the late rapper Lil Peep.
Friedrich Katz was an Austrian-born anthropologist and historian who specialized in 19th- and 20th-century history of Latin America, particularly in the Mexican Revolution.
Roderic Ai Camp is an American academic specialized in Mexican studies. He is a frequent consultant to international media including the BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and was once a contributing editor to Microsoft Encarta.
Michael Lee Conniff is a historian of Latin America, who specializes on modern Brazil and Panama. Between 2002 and 2012 he also created and directed the Global Studies program and afterward served as professor of history at San Jose State University, California. He retired in 2012. He has a longstanding interest in the study of populism and Africans in Latin America..
The status of women in Mexico has changed significantly over time. Until the twentieth century, Mexico was an overwhelmingly rural country, with rural women's status defined within the context of the family and local community. With urbanization beginning in the sixteenth century, following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, cities have provided economic and social opportunities not possible within rural villages. Roman Catholicism in Mexico has shaped societal attitudes about women's social role, emphasizing the role of women as nurturers of the family, with the Virgin Mary as a model. Marianismo has been an ideal, with women's role as being within the family under the authority of men. In the twentieth century, Mexican women made great strides towards a more equal legal and social status. In 1953 women in Mexico were granted the right to vote in national elections.
Jonathan Sperber is an American academic and historian who is a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri and author of modern European History.
Indigenismo is a Latin American nationalist political ideology that began in the late nineteenth century and persisted throughout the twentieth that attempted to construct the role of indigenous populations in the nation-state. The ideology was particularly influential in Mexico where it shaped the majority of indigenous-state relations since its incorporation into the Constitution in 1917. While the perspectives and methods of Indigenistas changed and adapted over time, the defining features of Mexican Indigenismo are the implementation by primarily non-indigenous actors, the celebration of indigenous culture as a part of the nation's history, and the attempt to integrate indigenous populations under the authority of the nation-state. The ideology was enacted by a number of policies, institutions, governmental programs, and through artistic expression. These included education programs, land reform, political reform, and economic development as well as national displays of indigenous heritage. Although generally viewed as beneficial for creating a platform to discussing indigenous issues, Indigenismo has been criticized as still operating under colonial paradigms of racial hierarchy and often helped to solidify some stereotypes of Indigenous peoples even while trying to break down others.
David Anthony Brading FRHistS, FBA, is a British historian and Professor Emeritus of Mexican History at the University of Cambridge, where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including the Bolton Prize in 1972, the Order of the Aztec Eagle, and the Medalla 1808—both of which were awarded by the Mexican government—and the Medal of Congress from the Peruvian government in 2011.
Conference on Latin American History, (CLAH), founded in 1926, is the professional organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association. It publishes the journal The Hispanic American Historical Review.
The historiography of Spanish America in multiple languages is vast and has a long history. 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, and people of Spanish descent born in the Americas (criollos) search for an identity other than Spanish, and the creation of creole patriotism. Following independence in some parts of Spanish America, some politically engaged citizens of the new sovereign nations sought to shape national identity. 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, dispassionate histories of the Spanish imperial project after its almost complete demise in the hemisphere, 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. 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. 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. The Latin American Studies Association has a section devoted to scholarship on the colonial era.
The environmental history of Latin America has become the focus of a number of scholars, starting in the later years of the twentieth century. But historians earlier than that recognized that the environment played a major role in the region's history. Environmental history more generally has developed as a specialized, yet broad and diverse field. According to one assessment of the field, scholars have mainly been concerned with "three categories of research: colonialism, capitalism, and conservation" and the analysis focuses on narratives of environmental decline. There are several currents within the field. One examines humans within particular ecosystems; another concerns humans’ cultural relationship with nature; and environmental politics and policy. General topics that scholars examine are forestry and deforestation; rural landscapes, especially agro-export industries and ranching; conservation of the environment through protected zones, such as parks and preserves; water issues including irrigation, drought, flooding and its control through dams, urban water supply, use, and waste water. The field often classifies research by geographically, temporally, and thematically. Much of the environmental history of Latin America focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but there is a growing body of research on the first three centuries (1500-1800) of European impact. As the field established itself as a more defined academic pursuit, the journal Environmental History was founded in 1996, as a joint venture of the Forest History Society and the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). The Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History (SOLCHA) formed in 2004. Standard reference works for Latin American now include a section on environmental history.
Gilbert M. Joseph is an American scholar and writer. He received his doctorate from Yale University in Latin American history in 1978, where he is presently a Farnam Professor Emeritus of History and International Studies. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sturgis Leavitt Best Article Prize (1981,1987), the Tanner Award for Inspirational Teaching of Undergraduates at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1980), and the Harwood F.Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Prize for Teaching Excellence at Yale University (2017). Joseph presided over the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) from 2015 to 2016.
