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Discipline | Latin American History |
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Language | English |
Edited by | Martha Few, Zachary R. Morgan, Matthew Restall, Amara Solari |
Publication details | |
History | 1918–present |
Publisher | |
Frequency | Quarterly |
Standard abbreviations | |
ISO 4 | Hisp. Am. Hist. Rev. |
Links | |
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.
The journal was founded by a group of Latin American historians within the American Historical Association, who met to create an institutional structure for this branch of history. Latin-Americanists felt marginalized within the AHA, with few sessions at the annual meeting and limited space within The American Historical Review . The Hispanic American Historical Review was founded in 1916 at the Cincinnati meeting of the AHA, originally to have had the title Ibero-American Historical Review. [1] [2] In the journal's first issue in 1918, J. Franklin Jameson, one of the founders of the American Historical Association, greeted HAHR's establishment as a step forward, indicating the growth of Latin American history as a field. [3] The journal had an initial editorial board of six, Charles E. Chapman, Isaac J. Cox, Julius Klein, William R. Manning, James A. Robertson, and William Spence Robertson , and two advisory editors, Herbert E. Bolton and William R. Shepherd. [4]
The journal published issues for four years, but foundered for lack of funding until in 1926, when Duke University Press stepped in, housing the journal and providing financial support, putting the journal on a firm basis since then. [5] [6] The journal predates the founding of the Conference on Latin American History in 1926 as an entity within the American Historical Association. Until the 1944 founding of the journal The Americas, HAHR was the main outlet for publication of scholarly articles on Latin American history. [7]
In 1949, the journal published three articles that assessed the history of its first thirty years. Lesley Byrd Simpson's article contains a series of tabulations of articles by time period and found that only 10% dealt with the twentieth century, 44% on the nineteenth century, with the colonial period having 14% for the sixteenth century, 15% for the eighteenth century, 4.5 for general colonial era articles, and just 4% for the seventeenth century. Mexico had the most articles dealing with its history, at 24%, with Brazil 11.5%, the Caribbean (The Antilles), 11.5% and Spanish borderlands now part of the U.S. 10%. In terms of fields, diplomatic history had the most articles at 28%, biography 16%, economic history 13%, social history 12%, and institutional history 10%. Simpson urged a "genetic approach to historical problems without which we cannot hope to expand our horizons." [8] Another article on the occasion of the 30th volume of HAHR was by Charles W. Hackett, who also did tabulations of the corpus, identifying authors with the most publications. [9] The third assessment, by Howard F. Cline, called for "some serious consideration of the methods which were an outgrowth of the 'New History'" and "to restore to our particular historiography a depth of insight, a part of its humanistic base," with young historians immersing themselves in the historiographical traditions of the field. [10]
In 1960, HAHR published the translation of an analysis of the journal's content by a Soviet scholar of Latin America, I.R. Lavretskii. [11] HAHR's editors' aim in publishing it was to "demonstrate what Soviet historians are doing in Latin American history." [12] Lavretskii's article was preceded a brief one by J. Gregory Oswald, "A Soviet Criticism of the Hispanic American Historical Review", in which he suggests that based on Lavretskii's article "historical scholarship in the U.S. S. R. remains a branch of politics." [13] Lavretskii's article assesses a number of HAHR articles and concludes by saying "A survey of HAHR materials indicates that the official Latin Americanists of the U.S. falsify and distort the historical truth in order to benefit imperialism." [14] Letters to the editor followed, but the journal demurred in publishing them. "For the HAHR to publish rebuttals of only a few of the statements would suggest that the remaining ones stand as correct and acceptable, an impression which would be unfair to the other capitalistic historians who were singled out for attention." [15]
There are four issues per year in February, May, August, and November, which are published in a bound paper version and an electronic version. Issues contain three to five articles, occasionally a discussion forum, thirty-five to forty book reviews, and obituaries, as well as advertisements for books in the field. Each issue typically runs 200 pages. Some issues have thematically related articles. Book reviews are categorized by time period: background, colonial era, nineteenth century, and the modern era, with a category for "general and sources." There are book reviews of varying length, generally of a single monograph or edited volume. Articles are submitted to a peer-review process. Book reviews are solicited by the journal.
One or more scholars serve as editors of the journal with an advisory board whose members serve five-year terms. The editor(s) are part of the executive committee of the Conference on Latin American History. [16] The James A. Robertson Award of CLAH is for the best article published in HAHR in a given year. [17]
Ethnohistory is the study of cultures and indigenous peoples customs by examining historical records as well as other sources of information on their lives and history. It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may not still exist. The term is most commonly used in writing about the history of the Americas.
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.
Clarence Henry Haring was an important historian of Latin America and a pioneer in initiating the study of Latin American colonial institutions among scholars in the United States.
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.
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.
Lewis Hanke was an American historian of colonial Latin America, and is best known for his writings on the Spanish conquest of Latin America. Hanke 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.”
Bailey Wallys Diffie was an American historian and teacher of Latin American and Iberian history who focused on Portuguese maritime and colonial 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.
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.
Ursula Schäfer Lamb was a distinguished American historian specializing in Latin American history, who published works on the age of exploration and the history of science. She was a pioneering woman academic in Latin American history, whose interdisciplinary works on history of science and globalization antedate the boom in such studies.
François Chevalier was a distinguished French historian of Latin America. His most well-known publication is La formation des grands domaines au Mexique. Translated to Spanish (1956) and English (1963), it is a classic and pioneering work on agrarian history in colonial Mexico, a point of departure for later studies of Mexican haciendas sparking a discussion on whether they were fundamentally feudal or capitalist.
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.
John Tate Lanning was a historian of Spanish America and held the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus position at Duke University. He was a major scholar of colonial Spanish American history and worked to strengthen organizations devoted to Latin American scholarship. In one obituary he was called, “a true giant” in the field. His work on the Spanish Enlightenment in Spanish America challenged received understandings of Spanish obscurantism.
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.
Lillian Estelle Fisher was one of the first women to earn a doctorate in Latin American history in the U.S. She published important works on Spanish colonial administration; a biography of Manuel Abad y Queipo, reform bishop-elect of Michoacan; and a monograph on the Tupac Amaru rebellion in Peru. As distinguished colonial Latin American historian John J. TePaske put it in 1968, "At least three generations of graduate students have studied the works of Lillian Estelle Fisher." Fisher is included as an example of sexual/gender discrimination in the historical profession.
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."
The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering political, social, economic, intellectual, and religious history of the Americas. It is published on behalf of the Academy of American Franciscan History by Cambridge University Press and the editor-in-chief is Ben Vinson III. The Conference on Latin American History awards an annual prize named for the journal's long-time editor, Antonine Tibesar, O.F.M., for the best article published in the previous year.
The Academy of American Franciscan History was founded in 1943 in Washington, D.C., as an institution to promote scholarship on the history of the Franciscan Order in the Americas. The inauguration of the Academy "brought together a large group of scholars in the Latin American field," including Howard Mumford Jones, John Tate Lanning, and Carlos E. Castañeda. The core members of the Academy included Antonine Tibesar O.F.M. and Maynard Geiger, O.F.M., with Roderick Wheeler, O.F.M., serving as its first director. A number of non-Franciscans pursuing the history of the order were made corresponding members of the Academy, including John Tate Lanning, France V. Scholes, Herbert E. Bolton, and George P. Hammond. The Academy is a research institute, now based in Oceanside, California, on the campus of Mission San Luis Rey and is affiliated with the Franciscan School of Theology. Fr. Antonine Tibesar, O.F.M. was succeeded by its first lay academic director John Frederick Schwaller. Its current director is Jeffrey Burns,, who also holds a faculty position at the Franciscan School of Theology. The Academy's books, reference works, and pamphlets remain in the Washington, D.C. area, in Takoma Park, Maryland. Its rare books and archival material are part of the library at University of San Diego. There is a finding aid for its microfilm collection. The academy is the publisher of the quarterly peer reviewed scholarly journal, The Americas, a leading journal in Latin American studies founded in 1944, published by Cambridge University Press and available electronically via Project MUSE. The editorial office is at Drexel University in Philadelphia. The journal has from its foundation "published articles unrelated to the Franciscans."
Silvia Marina Arrom is an American historian of Mexico. She is the Jane's Professor Emerita of Latin American Studies at Brandeis University.