What is Latin American History?. Marshall Eakin

and discarded more and more of their common colonial heritage. That shared past of conquest, colonization, and Iberian control recedes into the past after two centuries of separation from the European metropolis. Guatemala, for example, has less and less in common with, say, Argentina and Brazil. Cuba and Bolivia become increasingly distinct and distant from their shared history. In short, even if we can argue (and I believe we can) that what makes Latin America a coherent region is a common history over several centuries, the shared heritage forged in that colonial past is less and less central to their present circumstances. The cultural, economic, and political processes and patterns that once defined the region have increasingly diverged over the past two centuries. In 2092, on the six-hundredth anniversary of the controversial and transformative Columbian voyage, we may find it very difficult to define Latin America as a coherent world region, either with the term Latin America or with some other name we may eventually create.

Notes

      1  1 See, for example, J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

      2  2 Thomas H. Holloway, “Introduction,” in Thomas H. Holloway, ed., A Companion to Latin American History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 1–9; Michel Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race,” American Historical Review, 118/5 (2013): 1345–75.

      3  3 For an important discussion of this topic, see Mark T. Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 1898–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 16–17. See also Richard D. Lambert, et al., ed., Beyond Growth: The Next Stages in Language and Area Studies (Washington, DC: Association of American Universities, 1984); David Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), esp. Paul W. Drake and Lisa Hilbink, “Latin American Studies: Theory and Practice,” pp. 34–73; Helen Delpar, Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008); Ricardo Donato Salvatore, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

      4  4 José Moya, “Introduction,” in José Moya, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 18.

      5  5 For a fascinating analysis of the “invention” of world regions, see Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), esp. pp. 162–82. The U.S. Department of Education defines Latin American Studies as “A program that focuses on the history, society, politics, culture, and economics of one or more of the Hispanic peoples of the North and South American Continents outside Canada and the United States, including the study of the Pre-Columbian period and the flow of immigrants from other societies” (http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/cipdetail.aspx?y=55&cipid=88024).

      6  6 Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).

      7  7 William Spence Robertson, Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the Lives of Their Liberators (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1921); Herman G. James and Percy A. Martin, The Republics of Latin America: Their History, Governments and Economic Conditions (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923); Hubert Herring, A History of Latin America from the Beginnings to the Present (3rd edn, New York: Knopf, 1968); John Gunther, Inside Latin America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941).

      8  8 Dana Gardner Munro, The Latin American Republics: A History (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1942); J. Fred Rippy, Latin America: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958); Edward Gaylord Bourne, Spain in America, 1450–1580 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904); Charles Edward Chapman, Colonial Hispanic America: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1933); John A. Crow, The Epic of Latin America (4th edn, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992 [originally pubd by Doubleday (1946)]; Donald E. Worcester and Wendell G. Schaeffer, The Growth and Culture of Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).

      9  9 E. Bradford Burns, Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History (6th edn, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1994).

      10  10 The first edition of Keen’s book appeared in 1980 as A Short History of Latin America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), with Mark Wasserman as the co-author. Wasserman had dropped off the title page by the fourth edition (1992), and the sixth and seventh editions, A History of Latin America (2000 and 2004), are co-authored with Keith Haynes. John Charles Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Lawrence A. Clayton and Michael L. Conniff, A History of Modern Latin America (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1999); Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America (2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (London: Penguin, 1992).

      11  11 Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol. I: Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. xiv.