What Is Latin American History?

History can mean two different things: the past—in Jack Hexter's phrase, “what happened to happen”—and what has been recorded about the past, otherwise known as historiography. Marshall Eakin's succinct survey of Latin American history is concerned with the latter: how the history of the region has been researched, from the “gentlemen scholars” of the early days and the process of professionalization in the nineteenth century to the “boom” of the later twentieth. The focus is Anglophone scholarship, particularly in the United States: of the 500 source references, about 95 percent are in English. Compiling an extensive and useful bibliography is one thing; making sense of it all is another. Eakin opts for a sweeping chronological approach, charting the successive generations just mentioned and, for the twentieth century, the rolling waves of historiographical fashion: the early dominance of political history; the rise of socioeconomic analysis (some of it influenced by Marxism...