Ida Louise Altman | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 14, 1950 Casablanca, Morocco |
| Nationality | American |
| Awards | Herbert E. Bolton Prize (1990) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, Johns Hopkins University |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History |
| Sub-discipline | Early Modern Spain,Latin America |
| Institutions | University of Florida,University of New Orleans,Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| Notable works | Emigrants and Society:Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century |
Ida Louise Altman (born 1950) is an American historian of early modern Spain and Latin America. Her book Emigrants and Society:Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century received the 1990 Herbert E. Bolton Prize of the Conference on Latin American History. [1] She is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Florida and served as Department Chair.
Altman is noted as a social historian for her primary research into migration patterns and individual migrations in the Spanish colonial period and the effects of source communities in the Old World on the economies and social development of destination communities in the New World,and vice versa. [2]
Ida Altman was born in Washington,D.C. She graduated from Washington-Lee High School (now Washington-Liberty High School) in Arlington,Virginia. She received her B.A. from the University of Michigan,Ann Arbor;a master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin;and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University,where she studied Atlantic history.
Altman taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and taught for many years at the University of New Orleans,where she was Professor of History and then designated University Research Professor. She served as chair of the History department until shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. [3] Dr. Altman joined the faculty of the University of Florida in August 2006 [4] and became chair of the history department in August 2010.
In 2002,she married Richmond F. Brown (1961-2016),a historian of Guatemala (PhD Tulane University).
Altman's first article was published in 1976,"A Family and Region in the Northern Fringe Lands:The Marqueses de Aguayo of Nuevo León and Coahuila",in the now classic anthology on regional variation in colonial Mexico. [5] For her study of the elite Marqueses de Aguayo over several generations,she drew on rich archival sources,mainly at the University of Texas,with specificity of locale and individuals,and placed them within the larger colonial world.
When Altman finished her Ph.D. in 1982,the idea of the Atlantic World was not widely accepted as a field in history,although Johns Hopkins University was an important innovator in this field. Through meticulous archival research,she traced patterns of Spanish conquistadors returning to their home region of Extremadura in Western Spain. Her doctoral dissertation brought attention to the whole field of Spanish Atlantic history,which culminated when she was a co-winner of the Conference on Latin American History's Bolton Prize (1990) for the book,followed quickly by a prize awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture.
Altman followed up Emigrants and Society quickly with her second co-edited and co-authored volume,"To Make America":European Immigration in the Early Modern Period,which broadened the conversation about transatlantic migration. [6]
In her second single-author monograph,Transatlantic Ties,Altman focused on two particular localities,the textile-producing Spanish town of Brihuega and Mexico's second-most important colonial city,Puebla de los Angeles. She traced social and economic networks,as well as cultural continuities and discontinuities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Puebla was a natural way-station between the port of Veracruz and the viceregal capital,Mexico City,but it developed as a rich agricultural zone and as a locus for textile production for a colonial mass market. Push factors from Spain as local industry declined meant that Puebla represented new economic horizons for skilled Spanish immigrants. Altman's research and reconstruction of social networks in Brihuega and Puebla shows how immigrants maintained their identity in a new location. Her work demonstrates that identity politics of immigrants is not a modern phenomenon,but one with a long history. [7]
In her third major monograph,The War for Mexico's West,Altman brings to an English-speaking readership the story of the Spanish attempts to conquer and settle Western Mexico,a far more complex and lengthy endeavor than the quick and decisive victory which they had gained in Central Mexico with the aid of indigenous allies. This historical study blends narrative history of the early campaigns from both the Spanish and indigenous perspectives,without the benefit of contemporary accounts by the participants. Through the close reading of Spanish-language documentation she has been able to produce a multifaceted picture of the indigenous peoples' response to Spanish conquest,settlement,and attempts to extract labor and tribute where there were no indigenous precedents. Unlike the conquest of central Mexico,the war in the west was protracted and marked by the most serious challenge to Spanish triumphalist expansion in the multi-ethnic region rebellion known in history as the Mixtón War (1541). Altman examines the initial Spanish expeditions to the region,one by a kinsman of Hernán Cortés,and then the more horrific campaign of Nuño de Guzmán.
Altman's examination of the historical dynamics of the Mixtón rebellion is concrete evidence for long-term,complex planning by multiple indigenous groups to expel the Spaniards and regain their autonomy. Her examination of the role of viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza in putting down the rebellion supports the general picture of Mendoza as a remarkable administrator. In Altman's close examination of Mendoza's end-of-term assessment (residencia) she recounts incidents that show even he had a ruthless and pragmatic side. [8] Altman's book brings narrative back into history,which is particularly for non-specialists.
In Altman's fourth single-author monograph,Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean:The Greater Antilles,1493–1550 (2021),she examines the half century of European activity in the Caribbean that followed Columbus’s first voyages. Those brought enormous demographic,economic,and social change as Europeans,Indigenous people,and Africans whom Spaniards imported to provide skilled and unskilled labor came into extended contact for the first time. The book examines their interactions and the transformation of the islands of the Greater Antilles,addressing the impact of disease and ongoing conflict,the Spanish monarchy’s efforts to establish a functioning political system and an Iberian church,the islands’economic development,and the formation of a highly unequal and coercive but dynamic society. She discusses the work in an author interview with James Boyden. [9]
With Mexicanist colleagues Sarah Cline and Javier Pescador,Altman co-authored a textbook entitled The Early History of Greater Mexico. It is described in a review as "the best textbook on colonial Mexico to date. It is unrivaled in its breadth of coverage and its insight." [10] There is ample coverage of the conquest of Mexico as an event as well as a separate chapter on narratives of the conquest. There is a strong emphasis on socioeconomic history of different regions of Mexico. "Greater Mexico" in the title alludes to the territorial expanse of New Spain's northwest,which is now the Southwest of the U.S.
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The Spanish colonization of the Americas began in 1493 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola after the initial 1492 voyage of Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus under license from Queen Isabella I of Castile. These overseas territories of the Spanish Empire were under the jurisdiction of Crown of Castile until the last territory was lost in 1898. Spaniards saw the dense populations of indigenous peoples as an important economic resource and the territory claimed as potentially producing great wealth for individual Spaniards and the crown. Religion played an important role in the Spanish conquest and incorporation of indigenous peoples, bringing them into the Catholic Church peacefully or by force. The crown created civil and religious structures to administer the vast territory. Spanish men and women settled in greatest numbers where there were dense indigenous populations and the existence of valuable resources for extraction.
New Spain, officially the Viceroyalty of New Spain, originally the Kingdom of New Spain, was an integral territorial entity of the Spanish Empire, established by Habsburg Spain. It was one of several domains established during the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and had its capital in Mexico City. Its jurisdiction comprised a large area of the southern and western portions of North America, mainly what became Mexico and the Southwestern United States, but also California, Florida and Louisiana; Central America, the Caribbean, and northern parts of South America; several Pacific archipelagos, including the Philippines and Guam. Additional Asian colonies included "Spanish Formosa", on the island of Taiwan.
The encomienda was a Spanish labour system that rewarded conquerors with the labour of conquered non-Christian peoples. In theory, the conquerors provided the labourers with benefits, including military protection and education. The encomienda was first established in Spain following the Christian Reconquista, and it was applied on a much larger scale during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Spanish East Indies. Conquered peoples were considered vassals of the Spanish monarch. The Crown awarded an encomienda as a grant to a particular individual. In the conquest era of the early sixteenth century, the grants were considered a monopoly on the labour of particular groups of indigenous peoples, held in perpetuity by the grant holder, called the encomendero; starting from the New Laws of 1542, the encomienda ended upon the death of the encomendero, and was replaced by the repartimiento.
Nuevo Reino de Galicia or simply Nueva Galicia was an autonomous kingdom of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. It was named after Galicia in Spain. Nueva Galicia's territory consisted of the present-day Mexican states of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit and Zacatecas.
Antonio de Mendoza was a Spanish colonial administrator who was the first viceroy of New Spain, serving from 14 November 1535 to 25 November 1550, and the second viceroy of Peru, from 23 September 1551, until his death on 21 July 1552.
Spanish colonial architecture represents Spanish colonial influence on the cities and towns of its former colonies, and is still seen in the architecture as well as in the city planning aspects of conserved present-day cities. These two visible aspects of the city are connected and complementary. The 16th-century Laws of the Indies included provisions for the layout of new colonial settlements in the Americas and elsewhere.
Since the colonial era, the economic history of Mexico has been characterized by resource extraction, agriculture, and a relatively underdeveloped industrial sector. Economic elites in the colonial period were predominantly Spanish-born, active as transatlantic merchants and mine owners, and diversifying their investments with the landed estates. The largest population sector was indigenous subsistence farmers, which predominantly inhabited the center and south.
The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was a pivotal event in the history of the Americas, marked by the collision of the Aztec Triple Alliance and the Spanish Empire, ultimately reshaping the course of human history. Taking place between 1519 and 1521, this event saw the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, and his small army of soldiers and indigenous allies, overthrowing one of the most powerful empires in Mesoamerica.
Reductions were settlements established by Spanish rulers and Roman Catholic missionaries in Spanish America and the Spanish East Indies. In Portuguese-speaking Latin America, such reductions were also called aldeias. The Spanish and Portuguese relocated, forcibly in many cases, indigenous inhabitants of their colonies into urban settlements modeled on those in Spain and Portugal. The Royal Academy of Spain defines reducción (reduction) as "a grouping into settlement of indigenous people for the purpose of evangelization and assimilation." In colonial Mexico, reductions were called "congregations" (congregaciones). Forced resettlements aimed to concentrate indigenous people into communities, facilitating civil and religious control over populations. The concentration of the indigenous peoples into towns facilitated the organization and exploitation of their labor. The practice began during Spanish colonization in the Caribbean, relocating populations to be closer to Spanish settlements, often at a distance from their home territories, and likely facilitated the spread of disease. Reductions could be either religious, established and administered by an order of the Roman Catholic church, or secular, under the control of Spanish or Portuguese governmental authorities. The best known, and most successful, of the religious reductions were those developed by the Jesuits in Paraguay and neighboring areas in the 17th century. The largest and most enduring secular reductions were those imposed on the highland people of the former Inca Empire of Peru during the rule of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569–1581).
The Atlantic World comprises the interactions among the peoples and empires bordering the Atlantic Ocean rim from the beginning of the Age of Discovery to the early 19th century. Atlantic history is split between three different contexts: trans-Atlantic history, meaning the international history of the Atlantic World; circum-Atlantic history, meaning the transnational history of the Atlantic World; and cis-Atlantic history within an Atlantic context. The Atlantic slave trade continued into the 19th century, but the international trade was largely outlawed in 1807 by Britain. Slavery ended in 1865 in the United States and in the 1880s in Brazil (1888) and Cuba (1886). While some scholars stress that the history of the "Atlantic World" culminates in the "Atlantic Revolutions" of the late 18th early 19th centuries, the most influential research in the field examines the slave trade and the study of slavery, thus in the late-19th century terminus as part of the transition from Atlantic history to globalization seems most appropriate.
Brihuega is a municipality located in the province of Guadalajara, Spain. According to the 2007 census (INE), the municipality had a population of 2,835 inhabitants.
New Philology generally refers to a branch of Mexican ethnohistory and philology that uses colonial-era native language texts written by Indians to construct history from the indigenous point of view. The name New Philology was coined by James Lockhart to describe work that he and his doctoral students and scholarly collaborators in history, anthropology, and linguistics had pursued since the mid-1970s. Lockhart published a great many essays elaborating on the concept and content of the New Philology and Matthew Restall published a description of it in the Latin American Research Review.
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.
Spanish Mexicans are citizens or residents of Mexico who identify as Spanish as a result of nationality or recent ancestry. Spanish immigration to Mexico began in the early 1500s and spans to the present day. The vast majority of Mexicans have at least partial Spanish ancestry; the Northern regions of Mexico have a higher prevalence of Spanish heritage. There are three recognized large-scale Spanish immigration waves to the territory which is now Mexico: the first arrived during the colonial period, the second during the Porfiriato and the third after the Spanish Civil War.
Afro-Mexicans, also known as Black Mexicans, are Mexicans who have heritage from sub-Saharan Africa and identify as such. As a single population, Afro-Mexicans include individuals descended from both free and enslaved Africans who arrived to Mexico during the colonial era, as well as post-independence migrants. This population includes Afro-descended people from neighboring English, French, and Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean and Central America, descendants of enslaved Africans in Mexico and those from the Deep South during Slavery in the United States, and to a lesser extent recent migrants directly from Africa. Today, there are localized communities in Mexico with significant although not predominant African ancestry. These are mostly concentrated in specific communities, including the populations of the Oaxaca, Huetamo, Lázaro Cárdenas, Guerrero, and Veracruz states.
Slavery in Latin America was an economic and social institution that existed in Latin America before the colonial era until its legal abolition in the newly independent states during the 19th century. However, it continued illegally in some regions into the 20th century. Slavery in Latin America began in the pre-colonial period when indigenous civilizations, including the Maya and Aztec, enslaved captives taken in war. After the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese, of the nearly 12 million slaves that were shipped across the Atlantic, over 4 million enslaved Africans were brought to Latin America. Roughly 3.5 million of those slaves were brought to Brazil.
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.
Codex Tlatelolco is a colonial-era Aztec codex written on amatl, around 1565. It depicts royal ceremonies involving Spanish monarchs Charles V and his son and successor Philip II. The pictorials show the jura (oath) ceremony of swearing the oath of allegiance to the new Spanish monarch, Philip following the abdication of his father in 1556, performed in the Plaza Mayor of Zócalo in 1557. There are depictions of Charles V and Philip II, as well as the indigenous rulers of Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlan,, who along with all officials took the oath of allegiance. There is a written account in Spanish that differs from that depicted in the pictorial. The pictorial account omits the presence of the Spanish cabildo members. The codex refers to the indigenous participation in the Mixtón War ca. 1542, a major indigenous rebellion in western Mexico. Its depictions of Nahua dances and nearly full-body feather costumes make it particularly important for understanding indigenous cultural continuities in the early colonial period. The manuscript is held in the National Library of the Mexican Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.
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.
