John Charles Chasteen (born 1955) is an American translator, historian, and educator. He is a cultural historian of Latin America, and a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [1]
Josephus Daniels was an American diplomat and newspaper editor from the 1880s until his death, who controlled Raleigh's News & Observer, at the time North Carolina's largest newspaper, for decades. A Democrat, he was appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to serve as Secretary of the Navy during World War I. He became a close friend and supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. After Roosevelt was elected President of the United States, he appointed Daniels as his U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, serving from 1933 to 1941. Daniels was a vehement white supremacist and segregationist. Along with Charles Brantley Aycock and Furnifold McLendel Simmons, he was a leading perpetrator of the Wilmington insurrection of 1898.
The term Latin America primarily refers to the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the New World.
Timothy B. Tyson is an American writer and historian who specializes in the issues of culture, religion, and race associated with the Civil Rights Movement. He is a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and an adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina.
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.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is an American historian and Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her scholarship and teaching forwarded the emergence of U.S. women's history in the 1960s and 1970s, helped to inspire new research on Southern labor history and the long civil rights movement, and encouraged the use of oral history sources in historical research. She is the author of Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching;Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World and Sisters and Rebels: The Struggle for the Soul of America.
Miguel Tinker Salas is a Venezuelan historian and professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He specializes in modern Latin America having written books, edited volumes, and essays on Mexico and Venezuela. He frequently serves as a political analyst and his comments can be seen on television, radio, and print media.
Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America is a book by John Charles Chasteen, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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.
Steve Ellner is an American scholar who has taught economic history and political science at the Universidad de Oriente (UDO), Venezuela, since 1977. He is the author of numerous books and journal articles on Venezuelan history, political parties, and organized labor. Ellner has written op-ed articles for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Many of his academic works have been translated and published in Spanish.
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.
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.
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 ideas of the Spanish Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, science, practicality, clarity rather than obscurantism, and secularism, were transmitted from France to the New World in the eighteenth century, following the establishment of the Bourbon monarchy in Spain. In Spanish America, the ideas of the Enlightenment affected educated elites in major urban centers, especially Mexico City, Lima, and Guatemala, where there were universities founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In these centers of learning, American-born Spanish intellectuals were already participants in intellectual and scientific discourse, with Spanish American universities increasingly anti-scholastic and opposed to “untested authority” even before the Spanish Bourbons came to power. The best studied is the University of San Carlos Guatemala, founded in 1676.
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.
Carl Abbott is an American historian and urbanist, specialising in the related fields of urban history, western American history, urban planning, and science fiction, and is a frequent speaker to local community groups. Since 1967 he has been married to Margery Post Abbott, a Quaker scholar and teacher.
John Frederick Schwaller is an American historian of Latin America, specializing in colonial Mexico, religion, and indigenous peoples. He has written monographs on religion in Mexico, edited scholarly editions of important colonial Mexican texts, and has coordinated and edited anthologies of articles on religion. His administrative service includes being President of State University of New York at Potsdam from 2006 to 2013 and Director of the Academy of American Franciscan History, 1993–95. He is currently professor of history at University of Albany, State University of New York.
Jaime Edmundo Rodríguez Ordóñez, historian of Latin America, particularly the independence-era in Mexico. His is now professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine.
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.
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.