Although as much romanticized as the American cowboy, the Argentine gaucho lived a persecuted, marginal existence, beleaguered by mandatory passports, vagrancy laws, and forced military service. The story of this nineteenth-century migratory ranch hand is told in vivid detail by Richard W. Slatta, a professor of history at North Carolina State University at Raleigh and the author of Cowboys of the Americas (1990).
"Republics of Knowledge tells the story of how the circulation of knowledge shaped the formation of nation-states in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina, Peru and Chile, during the century after Iberian rule was defeated in the 1820s. Most immediately, the author has sought to provide a cross-disciplinary approach to the history of knowledge, combining the methods of global intellectual history with a new way of thinking about nations as experienced and enacted as well as how they are imagined, and in so doing offer a new interpretation of the history of independent Latin America to illustrate its wider significance in the making of the modern world. By bringing these lines of inquiry together within a transnational framework, Nicola Miller shows how evidence from the pioneering nations of Latin America can invite historians to rethink many of their general theories about how knowledge travels and how a sense of nationhood is created. The book is designed to stimulate debate about the significance of knowledge not only in Latin America but in all modern societies. As Miller explains, Latin America is usually regarded as an exception to general theories, notably of colonialism, nationalism and liberalism; and yet it was in that part of the world, not in Europe, that the Age of Revolution brought the founding of a second wave of modern republics, and it was in Latin America that pioneering attempts were made to apply liberal principles in societies with inherited caste divisions and corporate institutions. It was there that some of the richest debates about the vexed relationship between collective identities and individualism took place"--
In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere - the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglass - both published their first works. Each would become the most famous and enduring texts in what were both prolific careers, and they ensured Sarmiento and Douglass' position as leading figures in the canon of Latin American and U.S. African-American political thought, respectively. But despite the fact that both deal directly with key political and philosophical questions in the Americas, Douglass and Sarmiento, like African-American and Latin American thought more generally, are never read alongside each other. This may be because their ideas about race differed dramatically. Sarmiento advocated the Europeanization of Latin America and espoused a virulent form of anti-indigenous racism, while Douglass opposed slavery and defended the full humanity of black persons. Still, as Juliet Hooker contends, looking at the two together allows one to chart a hemispheric intellectual geography of race that challenges political theory's preoccupation with and assumptions about East / West comparisons, and questions the use of comparison as a tool in the production of theory and philosophy. By juxtaposing four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers - Frederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos - her book will be the first to bring African-American and Latin American political thought into conversation. Hooker stresses that Latin American and U.S. ideas about race were not developed in isolation, but grew out of transnational intellectual exchanges across the Americas. In so doing, she shows that nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American thinkers each looked to political models in the 'other' America to advance racial projects in their own countries. Reading these four intellectuals as hemispheric thinkers, Hooker foregrounds elements of their work that have been dismissed by dominant readings, and provides a crucial platform to bridge the canons of Latin American and African-American political thought.
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, president of Argentina from 1868 to 1874, is best known as an educator and as the author of Civilization and Barbarism: The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga, generally referred to as El Facundo. The contributors to this volume call attention to other facets of Sarmiento's life and to the results of the programs he encouraged.
When European explorers went out into the world to open up trade routes and establish colonies, they brought back much more than silks and spices, cotton and tea. Inevitably, they came into contact with the peoples of other parts of the world and formed views of them occasionally admiring, more often hostile or contemptuous. Using a stunning array of sources - missionaries' memoirs, the letters of diplomats' wives, explorers' diaries and the work of writers as diverse as Voltaire, Thackeray, Oliver Goldsmith and, of course, Kipling - Victor Kiernan teases out the full range of European attitudes to other peoples. Erudite, ironic and global in its scope, The Lords of Human Kind has been a major influence on a generation of historians and cultural critics and is a landmark in the history of Eurocentrism.
At the crossroad of intellectual, diplomatic, and cultural history, this book examines flows of information, men, and ideas between South American cities—mainly the port-capitals of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro—during the period of their modernization. The book reconstructs this largely overlooked trend toward connectedness both as an objective process and as an assemblage of visions and policies concentrating on diverse transnational practices such as translation, travel, public visits and conferences, the print press, cultural diplomacy, intertextuality, and institutional and personal contacts. Inspired by the entangled history approach and the spatial turn in the humanities, the book highlights the importance of cross-border exchanges within the South American continent. It thus offers a correction to two major traditions in the historiography of ideas and identities in modern Latin America: the predominance of the nation-state as the main unit of analysis, and the concentration on relationships with Europe and the U.S. as the main axis of cultural exchange. Modernization, it is argued, brought segments of South America’s capital cities not only close to Paris, London, and New York, as is commonly claimed, but also to each other both physically and mentally, creating and recreating spaces, ways of thinking, and cultural-political projects at the national and regional levels.
This collection of essays is an invaluable companion for understanding the composition, reception, and contemporary legacy of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic work Democracy in America. Chapters by political theorists, intellectual historians, economists, political scientists, and community organizers explore the major intellectual influences on Tocqueville's thought, the book's reception in its own day and by subsequent political thinkers, and its enduring relevance for some of today's most pressing issues. Chapters tackle Tocqueville's insights into liberal democracy, civil society and civic engagement, social reform, religion and politics, free markets, constitutional interpretation, the history of slavery and race relations, gender, literature, and foreign policy. The many ways in which Tocqueville's ideas have been taken up – sometimes at cross-purposes – by subsequent thinkers and political actors around the world are also examined. This volume demonstrates the enduring global significance of one of the most perceptive accounts ever written about American democracy and the future prospects for self-government.
Alexander von Humboldt explored the Spanish Empire on the verge of its collapse (1799–1804). He is the most significant German travel writer and the most important mediator between Europe and the Americas of the nineteenth century. His works integrated knowledge from two dozen domains. Today, he is at the center of debates on imperial discourse, postcolonialism, and globalization. This collection of fifty essays brings together a range of responses, many presented here for the first time in English. Authors from Schiller, Chateaubriand, Sarmiento, and Nietzsche, to Robert Musil, Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Bloch, and Alejo Carpentier paint the historical background. Essays by contemporary travel writers and recent critics outline the current controversies on Humboldt. The source materials collected here will be indispensable to scholars of German, French, and Latin and North American literature as well as cultural and postcolonial studies, history, art history, and the history of science.
