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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 . [1] [2]
In 1916 a group of Latin American historians within the American Historical Association met to create institutional structures for this branch of history. Latin Americanists were marginalized within the AHA, with few sessions at the annual meeting and limited space within the American Historical Review. This group founded The Hispanic American Historical Review at the Cincinnati meeting of the AHA. [3] [4] Further work building a professional organization was accomplished in 1926 at the American Historical Association annual meeting in Rochester. Latin Americanists sought to expand the teaching of Latin American history and organized a session entitled "Means and Methods of Widening among Colleges and Universities an Interest in the Study of Hispanic-American History". The 1926 meeting led further work to create an identifiable group within the American Historical Association. [5] The constitution of the Conference on Latin American History was adopted in December 1938. [6] CLAH gained a firmer institutional grounding with its incorporation in the District of Columbia in 1964, giving it a legal identity, and locating its offices in the Hispanic Foundation (now Hispanic Division) in the Library of Congress. With that step, CLAH was no longer an organic part of the AHA, but "an affiliated but autonomous body." [7]
In 1964, the AHA was granted $125,000 by the Ford Foundation to aid over three years the expansion of CLAH's activities. The AHA received the funds that were disbursed to CLAH. All funding was for programmatic purposes and not for the support of individuals’ research. The projects identified for funding were to provide a bibliographical guide to nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspapers; develop policies for the collection of historical statistics for the field; discuss and plan for a multivolume history of Latin America; develop teaching aids for the field; fund for small conferences; earmark funds for preparation of colonial sources for publication; and develop a publication series of general works. The Hispanic Foundation at the Library of Congress was named the repository of the CLAH archives and provided services for the CLAH Secretariat. [8]
Women have participated in CLAH leadership since its early years, with four serving as Secretary Treasurer: Lillian Estelle Fisher (1928) and 1935–39; Mary W. Williams (1929–1934); Vera B. Holmes (1940–1943); and Ruth L. Butler (1944–1948). The first woman president of CLAH was Madaline Nicols in 1949, with a gap of 38 years until Peggy Liss was elected in 1987. The first woman recipient of the Bolton (now Bolton-Johnson) Prize for the best book in English was in 1977, with Doris M. Ladd, for The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780-1826 (University of Texas Press). The first woman to receive the Distinguished Service Award was Ursula Lamb in 1990. The first woman to be executive director of CLAH was Donna J. Guy in 1991–92. The first CLAH president originally from Latin America is Asunción Lavrin, 2001–02. [9]
The organization is governed by the Executive Committee and General Council. There is an executive committee: president (formerly chair), vice president, past president, and the executive director. Serving on the General Council are three elected members and ex officio representatives which include the editor of Hispanic American Historical Review , the editor of "The Americas" and the editor of H-Latam. [10] As CLAH grew in membership and complexity of its fields, it established a series of sections with regional or other focus including Andean Studies, Atlantic World studies; Borderlands/Frontiers Studies; Brazilian Studies; Caribbean Studies; Central American Studies; Chile-Rio de la Plata Studies; Colonial studies; Gran Colombian studies; Mexican studies; and the committee on Teaching and Teaching Materials. [11]
Starting in 1953, CLAH established a series of prizes, the first being the James A. Robertson Prize for the best article published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, followed by others for particular fields. Prizes now include the Distinguished Service Award, the highest honor of the organization; the Herbert E. Bolton-John J. Johnson Prize for the best book in English on Latin American history; the Lewis Hanke Award to enable revision of a dissertation into a publishable book; the James R. Scobie Awards to support travel for dissertation research; the Lydia Cabrera Award, for Cuban history up to 1898; the Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize for the best book on Latin American ethnohistory; the Warren Dean Award for Brazilian history; the Elinor Melville Award for the best book in environmental history; the María Elena Martínez Prize for the best work on Mexican history; Paul Vanderwood Award for the best article published in a journal other than Hispanic American Historical Review; the Antonine Tibesar Award for the best article published in The Americas . [12]
Chairpersons
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A hacienda is an estate, similar to a Roman latifundium, in Spain and the former Spanish Empire. With origins in Andalusia, haciendas were variously plantations, mines or factories, with many haciendas combining these activities. The word is derived from Spanish hacer and haciendo (making), referring to productive business enterprises.
The Mexican Catholic Church, or Catholic Church in Mexico, is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope, his Curia in Rome and the national Mexican Episcopal Conference. According to the Mexican census, Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion in Mexico, practiced by 77.7% of the population in 2020. A Statistica survey suggests this number could be lower, suggesting Catholics could make up only 72% of the nation.
The term Latin America primarily refers to the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the New World.
Casta is a term which means "lineage" in Spanish and Portuguese and has historically been used as a racial and social identifier. In the context of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, the term also refers to a now-discredited 20th-century theoretical framework which postulated that colonial society operated under a hierarchical race-based "caste system". From the outset, colonial Spanish America resulted in widespread intermarriage: unions of Spaniards, indigenous people, and Africans. Basic mixed-race categories that appeared in official colonial documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a Spaniard and an Indigenous person; and mulatto, offspring of a Spaniard and an African. A plethora of terms were used for people with mixed Spanish, Indigenous, and African ancestry in 18th-century casta paintings, but they are not known to have been widely used officially or unofficially in the Spanish Empire.
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, cultural studies, gender studies, and literature.
John Henry Coatsworth is an American historian of Latin America and the former provost of Columbia University. From 2012 until June 30, 2019, Coatsworth served as Columbia provost. From 2007 until February 2012 Coatsworth was the dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and served concurrently as interim provost beginning in 2011. Coatsworth is a scholar of Latin American economic, social and international history, with an emphasis on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
James Lockhart was a U.S. historian of colonial Spanish America, especially the Nahua people and Nahuatl language.
Matthew Restall is a historian of Colonial Latin America. He is an ethnohistorian, a Mayanist, a scholar of the conquest, colonization, and the African diaspora in the Americas, and a historian of popular music. Restall has areas of specialization in Yucatán and Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. He is a member of the New Philology school of colonial Mexican history and the founder of a related school, the New Conquest History. He is currently Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and Anthropology, and Director of Latin American Studies, at the Pennsylvania State University. He is a former president of the American Society for Ethnohistory (2017–18), a former editor of Ethnohistory journal (2007–17), a former senior editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (2017–22), editor of the book series Latin American Originals, and co-editor of the Cambridge Latin American Studies book series. He also writes books on the history of popular music.
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.
Eric Van Young, Distinguished Professor of History at University of California, San Diego, is an American historian of Mexico who has published extensively on socioeconomic and political history of the colonial era and the nineteenth century. He is particularly well known for his 2001 book, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Struggle for Mexican Independence, 1810-1821, which won a major prize awarded by the Conference on Latin American History. His article "The Islands in the Storm: Quiet Cities and Violent Countrysides in the Mexican Independence Era," published in Past and Present won the Conference on Latin American History Award in 1989. He has also contributed to the study of haciendas and the historiography of rural history.
Woodrow Wilson Borah was a U.S. historian of colonial Mexico, whose research contributions on demography, economics, and social structure made him a major Latin Americanist. With his 1999 death "disappears the last great figure in the generation that presided over the vast expansion of the Latin American scholarly field in the United States during the years following World War II." With colleagues at University of California, Berkeley who came to be known as the "Berkeley School" of Latin American history, Borah pursued projects to gather data from archives on indigenous populations, colonial enterprises, and "land-life" relations that revolutionized the study of Latin American history.
William B. Taylor is a historian of colonial Mexico who held the Sonne Chair of History at University of California, Berkeley until his retirement. He made major contributions to the study of colonial land tenure, peasant rebellions, and many aspects of colonial religion in Mexico. In 2007, he received the Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History, the highest honor of the professional organization of Latin American historians.
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.
Murdo J. MacLeod is a Scottish historian of Latin America, publishing extensively on the history of colonial-era Central America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world. His monograph Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History is a major contribution to the field.
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, specializing 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."
María Elena Martínez-Lopez was a historian of colonial Mexico. Her landmark book, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico garnered significant academic recognition.
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.
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.
Silvia Marina Arrom is an American historian of Mexico. She is the Jane's Professor Emerita of Latin American Studies at Brandeis University.