Visiones y revisiones de la independencia americana

For philosophical and nationalist reasons, many Latin American historians of the early nineteenth century sought to distance their respective countries from the legacy of three centuries of Spanish political, economic, and social domination. Their accounts of independence underscored an emerging and distinctive American consciousness, emphasized a clean break with Spain, and celebrated the region’s future connections to the liberal West. This view of the Latin American independence period as a well-defined pivot point between the colonial and modern history of the region remained a fixture in the historiography for the next 150 years. However, Visiones y revisiones de la independencia americana, an engaging collection of papers drawn from the Third International Colloquium of the History of America (Salamanca, 2001), makes and supports the compelling argument that historians should take advantage of the upcoming bicentennial of the collapse of the Spanish Empire in the Americas to reconsider long-standing presumptions and...