Academic career
In 1910, Haring returned to Harvard University as an instructor in history, teaching a course in Latin American history, and began work on his doctoral dissertation on Trade and Navigation between Spain and the Indies in the Time of the Habsburgs under the direction of Professor Roger B. Merriman. In 1912, while he was still working on his dissertation, Bryn Mawr College appointed him head of its history department and in 1913, he married Helen Louise Garnsey, [2] with whom he later had two sons, Philip and Peter.
In 1915, Haring went to Clark University for a year and, in 1916, was appointed to the history faculty at Yale University, where he remained until 1923. In 1918, after completing extensive research in the archives at Seville, Haring published his doctoral dissertation, which had been awarded the David A. Wells Prize at Harvard for the best dissertation in economics.
In 1923, Harvard University appointed him the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History, named after a U.S. ambassador to Argentina prior to World War I; Haring held the post until he retired from Harvard thirty years later in 1953. [3] [4] While at Harvard, he played a key role in the newly emerging field of Latin American history by training a whole generation of Latin American historians, including Lewis Hanke, Howard F. Cline, Arthur P. Whitaker, and Miron Burgin. [5] Haring published on a variety of topics during his long career, though he was best known for his two major institutional studies. [6] A point of pride was his post as Master of Dunster House, which had a tradition of "individualism and of a strong interest in historical studies." [7] While at Harvard, he served as chairman of the Committee on Latin America for the American Council of Learned Societies from 1932 to 1942 and worked on a joint committee on Latin America of the Social Science Research Council. In 1935, he organized the Bureau of Economic Research at Harvard and, in the same year, served as a delegate to the Second General Assembly of the Pan American Institute for Geography and History. An enduring legacy was his involvement in the Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS), [8] a major bibliographic tool for scholars, published annually with the aid of staff in the Hispanic Foundation (later Hispanic Division) at the Library of Congress, begun when Haring's former graduate student Lewis Hanke was director. Such a tool was particularly important in the pre-digital age before the development of electronic library catalogs, with area contributing editors selecting publications for inclusion, along with short summaries. In 1936, Haring wrote an essay for the preface of the first volume of the HLAS, emphasizing that the bibliographic listings were the core of the project, but that "important bibliographical review articles will be included, summarizing recent progress on significant topics or pointing out where further research may be profitable be made." [9]
Appointed professor emeritus at Harvard, the United States Naval War College invited him to take up its chair in maritime history for the academic year 1953-54. [10] While Haring was occupying this academic post, the Secretary of the Navy formally named it, giving its occupants the title of Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History in honor of Fleet Admiral Ernest King. In 1955, Haring was visiting professor at the University of Puerto Rico. [11]
In 1953, he was awarded by the Academy of American Franciscan History their highest honor, the Junipero Serra Award. The citation written by Fr. Alexander Wyse of the Academy is a summary of Haring's importance. "The large number of experts whom [Dr. Haring] trained in his more than forty years as a teacher...bears witness to the importance of his work and the scope of his beneficent influence. Lest his own objectives of inter-American friendship perish with him, he has meanwhile happily given them indestructible form in a small shelf of outstanding publications. In addition, he has engaged in several missions in the interests of inter-American harmony and has taken part in many inter-American learned assemblies -- and ambassador of good will whose devotion to the truth has ever enhanced his prestige in those other Americas. Affiliated with half a score scholarly institutions in the Latin American world, and decorated by several of our sister republics, he enjoys a reputation that transcends the boundaries of our country. He truly is an honored citizen of that supranational community dedicated to truth, learning and understanding." [12] In an obituary in the Hispanic American Historical Review by one of his former students, he was praised for "his complete integrity, ready charm, and first-rate mind [that] made him an outstanding personality among the Latin Americanists of his day, as well as a chief supporter of high standards of scholarship in this new guild." [13]
A group of Haring doctoral students had wanted to present a festschrift for their mentor, but difficulties ensued, and they sought another way to honor him. Following Haring's death in 1960, the American Historical Association established the Clarence H. Haring Prize in Latin American History, awarded every five years to the best book by a Latin American author. [14] [15]
Clarence Crane Brinton was an American historian of France, as well as an historian of ideas. His most famous work, The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) likened the dynamics of revolutionary movements to the progress of fever.
Herbert Eugene Bolton was an American historian who pioneered the study of the Spanish-American borderlands and was a prominent authority on Spanish American history. He originated what became known as the Bolton Theory of the history of the Americas which holds that it is impossible to study the history of the United States in isolation from the histories of other American nations, and wrote or co-authored ninety-four works. A student of Frederick Jackson Turner, Bolton disagreed with his mentor's Frontier theory and argued that the history of the Americas is best understood by taking a holistic view and trying to understand the ways that the different colonial and precolonial contexts have interacted to produce the modern United States. The height of his career was spent at the University of California, Berkeley where he served as chair of the history department for twenty-two years and is widely credited with making the renowned Bancroft Library the preeminent research center it is today.
Edward Gaylord Bourne, Ph. D. was an American historian. He was born in Strykersville, New York, and educated at Yale graduating in 1883 with high honors. He taught at Adelbert College, Cleveland from 1888 to 1895 when he became a professor of history at Yale. Bourne is considered one of the founders of Latin American history as a field in the United States. The publication of his Spain in America (1904), was "a major landmark in the development of the field," which "gave a lucid synthesis of the institutional life of Spanish America, ranging also through economic, social, and cultural developments...." In an assessment of Bourne's work, Charles Gibson and Benjamin Keen state that "He may justifiably be termed the first scientific historian of the United States to view the Spanish colonial process dispassionately and thereby to escape the conventional Anglo-Protestant attitudes of outraged or tolerant disparagement."
Howard Curtis Berg was the Herchel Smith Professor of Physics and professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University, where he taught biophysics and studied the motility of the bacterium Escherichia coli .
Latin American studies (LAS) is an academic and research field associated with the study of Latin America. The interdisciplinary study is a subfield of area studies, and can be composed of numerous disciplines such as economics, sociology, history, international relations, political science, geography, gender studies, and literature.
John Horace Parry CMG, MBE was a distinguished maritime historian, who served as Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University.
John Womack Jr. is an American economist and historian of Mexico, the Mexican Revolution (1910–1921), and Emiliano Zapata. He was a former professor of Latin American history and economics at Harvard University. He is the grandfather of the late rapper Lil Peep.
The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) is the largest association for scholars of Latin American studies. Founded in 1966, it has over 12,000 members, 45 percent of whom reside outside the United States, LASA brings together experts on Latin America from all disciplines and diverse occupational endeavors, across the globe.
Charles Gibson was an American ethnohistorian who wrote foundational works on the Nahua peoples of colonial Mexico and was elected President of the American Historical Association in 1977.
Thomas Elliott Skidmore was an American historian and scholar who specialized in Brazilian history.
Lewis Hanke (1905–1993) was an American historian of colonial Latin America, and is best known for his writings on the Spanish conquest of Latin America. Hanke, along with two others, Irving A. Leonard and John T. Lanning, presented a revisionist narrative of colonial history that focused on the role of Bartolomé de las Casas, who famously advocated for the rights of Native Americans, and searched for just resolutions to the tensions between the conquistadores and the natives during the colonial period of Spanish rule. Hanke's writings documented Las Casas' work as a political activist, historian, political theorist, and anthropologist. His scholarship also uncovered evidence to support Hanke's claim that Las Casas did not act as the sole voice of conscience during the colonial era, but actually constituted the head of what was a larger reform movement by a number of Spanish colonists to prevent "the destruction of the Indies.”
Relaciones geográficas were a series of elaborate questionnaires distributed to the lands of King Philip II of Spain in the Viceroyalty of New Spain in North America. They were done so, upon his command, from 1579–1585. This was a direct response to the reforms imposed by the Ordenanzas, ordinances, of 1573.
John Alcott Carpenter (1921–1978) was a historian, history professor, and public speaker. Carpenter, who specialized in the Reconstruction Period following the American Civil War, published biographies of Oliver Otis Howard and Ulysses S. Grant.
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 Hispanic American Historical Review is a quarterly, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal of Latin American history, the official publication of the Conference on Latin American History, the professional organization of Latin American historians. Founded in 1916, HAHR is the oldest journal of Latin American history, and, since 1926, published by Duke University Press. On July 1, 2017, editorial responsibility shifted from Duke University to Penn State for the 2017–2022 term.
Kalman H. Silvert, was an author of works on democracy in Latin America, the first president of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and professor of political science at Tulane University, NYU, and other universities. The Kalman Silvert Award is LASA's highest award.
Handbook of Latin American Studies is an annotated guide to publications in Latin American studies by topic and region, published since 1936. Its editorial offices are in the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. According to a Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) report, "The Handbook of Latin American Studies is the oldest and most prestigious area studies bibliography in the world." It now publishes in both print and digital format.
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.
Howard F. Cline was an American government official and historian, specialising in Latin America. Cline served as Director of the Hispanic Foundation at the Library of Congress from 1952 until his death in June 1971. He was one of the founders of the Latin American Studies Association. He was also active in the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), the professional organization of Latin American historians, which he chaired in 1964. He is still highly regarded as a scholar "devoted to and effective in the promotion of Latin American studies in the United States."
Stanley J. Stein was an American historian of Spanish America and Iberia, with interests in colonialism and post- colonialism as well as imperial history, political economy, and social history. Until his retirement, he taught at Princeton University, holding the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture. His most well-known book is The Colonial Heritage of Latin America, published jointly with his wife, Barbara H. Stein (1916–2005), which explores the idea that Spain's restrictive policies on trade meant that Spanish America's wealth did not enrich the region while simultaneously turning Spain into a dependency of Northern Europe. In an interview published in 2010, Vincent Peloso says of this work, "It is fair to say that no one who studied Latin American history over the last 35 years would have failed to engage the slim, elegantly written synthesis." Stein went on to publish with his wife significant work on the rise and decline of the Spanish Empire, works bringing them both high academic recognition.
