History Of America Research Articles

Deslizamientos entre la transgresión y la historia en Cien años de soledad

Cien anos de soledad (1967) was constructed as an allegory of the tale of biblical creation, the discovery of America and the history of the 20th century of Colombia. Thus, in the mythical universe of Macondo, transgression works as a touchstone or a fundamental axis in each of the moments recalled: incest, as a transgression on which western Judo-Christian culture lies; violation in which European civilization imposes itself on the New World; massacre as the foundation of recent Colombian history. Therefore, we aim to show how said elements combine in the construction of this allegory. Moreover, we are also interested in presenting how Cien anos de soledad is located on a line of continuity with chronicle texts of the 16th century.

Sin and pleasure: the history of chocolate in medicine.

In ancient Mayan texts cocoa is considered a gift of the gods: Pre-Columbian populations used chocolate as medicine, too. After the discovery of America, chocolate was introduced in Europe, but Christian Europe looked to this new exhilarating drink with extreme suspiciousness and criticism. From this reaction, the necessity derived to appeal to the reasons of health, with which doctors and scientists committed themselves to explain that chocolate was good for the body. However, during the Enlightment, the road of therapy separated from that of taste, and chocolate mainly maintained its leading role of excipient, bearing the burden, over time, of a negative valence, being associated with obesity, dental problems, unhealthy lifestyle, and so forth. The rehabilitation of chocolate has arisen only in recent times, re-establishing that value that Linnaeus himself credited to chocolate, calling the generous plant Theobroma cacao, food of the gods.

Hegemony and Resistance at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Simon Pokagon and The Red Man’s Rebuke

SIMON POKAGON WAS THE SPECIAL INVITED GUEST of Mayor Carter Harrison to Chicago Day celebration of Worlds Columbian Exposition in October 1893. Pokagon, whose father signed 1833 treaty ceding Potawatomi lands on which Chicago was built, was scheduled to participate in a re-enactment of treaty signing and join in ringing of Columbian Bell of Liberty, in recognition of sixtieth anniversary of land cession. Later, in parade of floats depicting Chicago history, he was central figure on float depicting events of 1812, including Fort Dearborn Massacre, in which some Potawatomi participated. Addressing crowd during festivities, Pokagon delivered a call for forgiveness of past wrongs and an appeal for future of his race:1I beseech you to lay aside all bitterness of spirit [and] look up and rejoice in thankfulness in present; for out of storm cloud of darkness that is around about us we now see helping hands stretched out to aid and strengthen us We must give up pursuits of our fathers; however dear... we must teach our children to give up bow and arrow [and] take plow and live as white men do. We must teach loyalty to this nation to our children, and solemnly impress upon them that war path leads but to grave.2At time of his address, however, a very different judgment was circulating among fairgoers, authored by Pokagon, and printed on spiritually significant birch bark leaves. It was more condemning than conciliatory:In behalf of my people, American Indians, I hereby declare to you, pale faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you great Columbian Fair now being held in this Chicago city, wonder of world. No; sooner would we hold high joy-day over grave of our departed fathers, than to celebrate our own funeral, discovery of America.3The explanation for this disparity is a subtext of power, agency, and resistance, underlying celebration of Chicago Day at Worlds Columbian Exposition. Simon Pokagons engagement with non-Native community throughout his life, but specifically at Exposition in Chicago, illustrates complexities of defining an Indian identity in an era in which programs of civilization and assimilation reached their zenith, but during which memories of 'savage' Indian continued to dominate public imagination.Simon Pokagon (Figure 1) was born in 1830, in an Indian village on Pokagon Creek, about one mile from St. Joseph River in what became Berrien County, Michigan.4 He was third son of Potawatomi chief Leopold Pokagon.5 Within his tribe, elder chief was second in rank only to Potawatomi Chief Topinabe. Leopold Pokagon signed a number of important treaties with United States, including 1833 Treaty of Chicago, which sold and ceded to United States territory on which city of Chicago was built. From all appearances devoutly Catholic after years of tutelage by Jesuits (which earned them distinctive moniker, 'The Catholic Potawatomi'), Pokagons band was described as the farthest advanced in civilization of all their race in St. Joseph valley.6 In press, Pokagon were portrayed as exemplary Indians to be extolled and imitated.7 Leopold's reputation with Euro-Americans as a 'noble red man,' along with civilizing effect of their Catholicism, persuaded United States government to allow his people to remain on a small portion of their original land base, when other Indian tribes, and all other Potawatomi bands of Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, suffered trauma of removal.8 On this land in southwestern Michigan, Simon spent early years of his life.In Publisher's Notes to Simon Pokagon's autobiography, O-gimaw-kwe Mit-i-gwu-ki (Queen of Woods), C.H. Engle relates how, as a young boy, Pokagon spent many happy hours listening to his father recite history of Potawatomi, passed down through oral tradition. …

The teacher wars: a history of America's most embattled profession

The teacher wars: a history of America's most embattled profession

Four decades of terms-of-trade booms: A metric of income windfall

We study Latin America's history of terms-of-trade booms during the period 1970–2012 through the prisms of a metric that quantifies the associated exogenous income shock (‘income windfall’). We also document saving patterns during these episodes and propose a measure of how much of the income windfall was saved (i.e., the marginal saving rate). We find that Latin America's terms-of-trade shock of the last decade has not differed much in magnitude from that observed during the 1970s, but the associated income windfall has been substantially larger. While aggregate saving increased more than in past episodes, the share of the windfall saved has been lower, suggesting that greater aggregate savings reflect mainly the sheer size of the exogenous income shock rather than a greater effort to save it.

Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder (review)

Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder (review)

EBONY AND IVY: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder (review)

EBONY AND IVY: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder (review)

Postracial Mestizaje: Richard Rodriguez’s Racial Imagination in an America Where Everyone Is Beginning to Melt

Postracial Mestizaje:Richard Rodriguez’s Racial Imagination in an America Where Everyone Is Beginning to Melt Lee Bebout (bio) And it seemed to me that the larger questions about America that the color raised is the fact that we are, all of us, in our various colors, our various hues, melting into each other and creating a brown nation. I tried to write a brown book, that is, brownly, by engaging contradiction and paradox, and rhetorical devices that suggest the way that I experience my own life. That is, for example, as the descendent of a conquistador and the Indian—as a Hispanic. Richard Rodriguez1 In recent years, racial formation in the United States has thrived in precipitous tension. Since the social and political tumult of the various freedom struggles from the 1950s to the 1970s and the rise of multiculturalism, explicitly racist discourses and practices have fallen from favor.2 Yet as many have noted, the material saliency of race is felt as much as ever. Thus, we are left with a wide array of seeming contradictions that maintain white supremacy and other forms of inequality in the guise of fairness and the protection of rights: ever-rising incarceration rates in communities of color through mandatory sentencing and policies of disparate impact, delegitimization campaigns against the first African American President of the United States through questions of his birthright citizenship, anti-(Latino) immigration policies that respond to the Hispanicization [End Page 89] of America that mark people under “reasonable suspicion” of foreignness, and the targeting and banning of Mexican American Studies curricula by calling for students to be treated as individuals.3 These are but a few examples of the dynamic tension of racial formation in contemporary U.S. culture. It is within this context that I seek to situate Richard Rodriguez’s exploration of race in America in his 2002 book Brown: The Last Discovery of America. Responding in part to Huntingtonian fears of a “clash of civilizations” and a “browning of America,” Rodriguez exalts the impurity of brown as a great American tradition.4 For Rodriguez, it is not “Brown, … in the sense of pigment, necessarily, but brown because mixed, confused, lumped impure, unpasteurized, as motives are mixed, and the fluids of generations are mixed and emotions are unclear, and the tally of human progress and failure in every generation is mixed, and unaccounted for, missing in plain sight.”5 Here one may find common ground between Rodriguez’s “brown” and theorizations of complex personhood by Gloria Anzaldúa and Avery Gordon. Each maps the interactions of multiple, contradictory elements that constitute any individual. For Anzaldúa, this means embracing rejected aspects of the self: the working class, the indigenous, and the queer.6 In complementary fashion, Gordon suggests that people are not so easily compartmentalized as either victims or agents of their own destiny.7 Together, they articulate the impurity that Rodriguez terms brown. As this article will demonstrate, however, even as Rodriguez seeks to contest notions of purity, racial and otherwise, Brown serves the interests of the dominant racial order vis-à-vis its relationship to neoliberal thought and discursive strategies. Through Brown, Rodriguez advances a post-racial mestizaje, an embrace of mixture and contradiction that seeks to subvert the social construct of race and yet simultaneously acquiesces to the logics that undergird current inequalities. In a Brown Context The political thrust of Rodriguez’s brown project takes on greater significance when placed in context with his earlier work and its critical response. A child of Mexican immigrants who came of age during the Chicano movement—although certainly not a part of it—Rodriguez is one of the most recognized Latina/o public intellectuals today. Yet his vocal arguments against bilingual education, ethnic studies, and affirmative action have long made him a target of criticism. With the publication of his first memoir, Hunger of Memory, and his speaking engagements in conservative circles, Rodriguez advanced a problematic argument of a split between private and public selves. For Rodriguez, his Mexican heritage and the Spanish language were relegated to the private, familial sphere. Because of this argument, Rodriguez became a veritable Hispanic, anti-Chicano boogieman. Tomás...

America’s Birth Certificate: The Oldest Globular World Map: c. 1507

In 2012, a woodcut print for a c. 11 centimeter globe was discovered in an ancient volume in the University Library in Munich. This pivotal 1 million US$ globular world map, which only differs marginally from four other extant woodcut copies, attracted worldwide media attention. This discovery ignited the search for the date and the origin of an enigma in the form of an intricate secretive small Renaissance map. The aforementioned had been acquired inserted in a French adapted and unauthorised copy of the Introduction to Cosmography dated 1507 and printed in Lyon. The son of a Dutch American immigrant from Flusching, H. C. Kalbfleisch bought it in Paris in 1881 and brought it to New York. The author offers key evidence that this secretive map is an important misinterpreted and misdated cultural historical prototype which antedates five later woodcut copies: gores in Munich UB, Minnesota-Hauslab, Christie’s, SL Munich and Offenburg. He proves that its size and scale are inspired by a calculation of Leonardo da Vinci as described in one of his Codices, and applied on the 1504 Ostrich Egg globe discovered in London 2012. The research methodology used is stemmatics as developed by the German scholar K. Lachmann applied on ancient maps and the evaluation of the scientific aspects and architectural, historical and artistic design. Evidence was offered that the Introduction to Cosmography printed in France in which the engraved map was loosely inserted, together with two additional copper engravings, was printed prior to March 1508. The map research leads to the Benedictine monk and German cartographer, globe constructor and astrologist Donnus Nicolaus Germanus. The latter was the first who constructed a terrestrial and a celestial globe for the library of the Pope Pius IV. The two additional copper engravings lead to the Dutch born medical doctor and astrologer Guillelmus de Wissekerke, supplier of astrological instruments for French kings and the Duke of Milan. The artistic decorator for these copper engravings L. Boulengier was from the city of Albi in France, a possible key stepping-stone to the Papacy in Rome. The cathedral in Albi stood as an architectural symbol against the Cathars. Boulengier drew his inspiration from the Gothic flamboyant style of that world heritage cathedral in his home town Albi. He decorated these engravings on behalf of the powerful and art-loving Florimond de Robertet, Secretary of State for three subsequent French kings including King Francis I, 1515. Robertet was a client of Leonardo da Vinci. A date on two of the three artistic prints is a key date for the royalty of France. The French king Louis XII lost the succession of his House Valois-Orleans to the House of Valois-Angouleme after failing to produce a male heir to the throne. The author concludes that the small globular map naming America is America’s oldest Birth Certificate. A printed letter—early 1508—by Martin Waldseemuller provides the date. The small map precedes by more than eight years the large woodcut world map discovered in 1903 in Castle Wolfegg (Baden-Wurttemberg) by the Austrian Jesuit priest Dr. J. Fischer and which was sold to the Library of Congress, in 2001 for US $10 million. This research is a reappraisal. It is also a rebuttal of a misdirection in the history of science and a misleading error of 133 years ago. It combines medical, geographical, and cultural history of science. It leads the reader through Italian and French Renaissance and concentrates on aspects of architecture, map design, Leonardo da Vinci, French Royalty, and the early discovery of America. It offers a surprising ending leading to the city of New York, named Nouvelle-Angouleme in 1524.

Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder (review)

Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder (review)

Russian Writers’ Impressions of America in the Mirror of American Literary Criticism

This article analyzes the monographs of American theorists of literature devoted to the study of artistic responses of Russian writers who visited the USA in the 20th century. Some books appeared in critical field of American scientists: “The City of Yellow Devil” by M.Gorky, “Iron Mirgorod” by S.Yesenin, “My Discovery of America” by V.Mayakovsky, “O’key” by B.Pilniak, “The Little Gold America” by I.Ilf and Y.Petrov. In the paper the books by Gorky and Ilf and Petrov are analyzed. American approach to these works is shown in different ways: from critics to estimation of their positive influence on Russians’ attitude towards the USA.

Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean.

Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean.

Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: A Critical Edition by Alexander Von Humboldt (review)

Humboldt, Alexander von. Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: A Critical Edition. Ed. Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette. Trans. J. Ryan Poynter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. xl + 618 pp.The Prussian polymath geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) has long been something of a household name to students of Latin American literature and history. By contrast, his legacy among Anglo-American readers has suffered somewhat from the nationalist parochialism that has long characterized the North American understanding of America both as a geographical and as a historical concept. This parochialism is easily traced to the rise of an aggressive US expansionism in the mid-nineteenth century, which militated against Humboldt's cosmopolitan vision and hemispheric understanding of America's history. The fact that none of his works were originally written in English presumably did not help. His works were gradually marginalized in the United States, even though in his own day they were still widely admired by such prominent Anglo-Americans as Thomas Jefferson, himself a cosmopolitan who had welcomed Humboldt as his guest during the latter's visit to Washington in 1804. If Humboldt is currently seeing something of a revival in historical and literary scholarship in the United States, it is largely thanks to the transatlantic and interAmericanist collaboration of Vera Kutzinski, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt, and Ottmar Ette, a professor of Romance Languages at the University of Potsdam (Germany), as well as the research team assembled at the University of Potsdam. This collaboration has already resulted in a number of important recent publications, including the collection Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas (2013), which features essays by literary and cultural historians of science as well as several primary documents; a new edition of Humboldt's Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (2011); and the first complete English edition and translation of the Vues des cordilleres et monuments des peuples indigenes de l'Amerique, one of the works based on Humboldt's extensive five-year travels through the Americas from 1799 to 1804 in the company of the French botanist Aime Bonpland (1773-1858). The text was originally published in French in seven folio installments between 1810 and 1813 as part of his monumental Voyage aux regions equinoxiales du nouveau continent, which appeared between 1805 and 1838 in a total of thirty volumes, and which stands today as the origin of modern tropical zoology, botany, geography, and geology. Vues was a sort of a travel catalog structured into sixtynine views, each of which consisted of an engraving based on the travelers' sketches of New World natural landscapes, cityscapes, indigenous monuments and cultural artifacts, and Humboldt's detailed observations and encyclopedic commentaries. For example, in his view of the Cotopaxi, the engraving based on Humboldt's sketch of the famous South American volcano stands at the center of his detailed scientific descriptions, his measurements comparing its gigantic proportions to the greatest volcanoes of the Old World, a history of the awesome spectacles presented by its eruptions, and the cultural significance attributed to it in indigenous Andean cultures. Not all of the views originate with Humboldt's experiences during his American travels, however. Thus, a plate depicting a Mexica codex located at the Vatican Library forms the center of his meditations on the nature of various systems of writing (hieroglyphic, alphabetical, etc.), on what they can tell us about the spread of cultures and languages across the globe, and about what he saw as the universal evolution of human cultures.The present volume reproduces all sixty-nine plates that adorned the original edition and the original page references in the margins; the English translation by J. …

Miss Semple meets the historians: the failed AHA 1907 conference on geography and history and what happened afterwards

The year 2013 marked the sesquicentennial of the birth of Ellen Churchill Semple, at one time a towering figure in American geography. Like almost all of her geographer contemporaries in the first decade of the twentieth century, she was a stout defender of ‘geographic influences’ in history. This article examines a failed attempt by professional historians to give geographers a hearing at the American Historical Association in a critical ‘Conference’ on the relevance of geography to history, in 1907. Organized by Frederick Jackson Turner, it was the first time professional historians in America had given Miss Semple a public opportunity in which to defend her views. How and why it turned out to be an intellectual disaster, and how its major participants changed their views later, is the subject of this paper.

Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder (review)

Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder (review)

Invasive Gehölzinsekten: Bedrohung für den Schweizer Wald?

Invasive tree insects: a menace to the Swiss forests? The rate of introduction of non-native insects and other arthropods to Europe has been exponentially increasing in recent decades, amounting to 20 species per year in the past ten years. By 2008, a total of 1590 species had been introduced since the discovery of America. The main causes are the intensification and globalization of international trade. The most important pathways are trade in ornamental plants and import of goods in infested wooden crates. Most often new species first establish in residential areas, where the normally mild climate favors the survival of exotic species. Three species recently introduced from East Asia to Switzerland are particularly relevant to forests: the box tree moth (Cydalima perspectalis) has infested box tree stands near Basel, the chestnut gall wasp (Dryocosmus kuriphilus) now covers almost all of southern Switzerland, with single infestations also on the Swiss Central Plateau, and two infestation spots of the Asian longhorned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis) have been identified. Potential future species of invasive insects are discussed. The largescale introduction of foreign tree species in forests needs to be critically examined, as they may be hosts of current and future non-native insects.

The Smithsonian's history of America in 101 objects

The Smithsonian's history of America in 101 objects

Music, Eurocentrism and Identity: The Myth of the Discovery of America in Chilean Music History

During the past century, Edmundo O’Gorman, Tzvetan Todorov, Enrique Dussel and other scholars pointed out the Eurocentric perspective implied in traditional narratives about the discovery of America, most of which intended to confirm Europe as the center of world history and culture. At the same time, Claude Levi-Strauss, Hayden White and others argued for the mythical character of history. According to them, even though historians attempted to assemble documentary evidence objectively, they constructed their narratives incorporating such evidence in preexisting stories, characters and categories with a mythical origin. This paper uses these viewpoints to analyze and criticize the way in which Chilean music history has been constructed, particularly during the republican era. The main hypothesis is that traditional discourses about that history have constantly recycled narratives on the discovery of America, which thus operates as a kind of founding myth for historical and musicological interpretations, especially when dealing with turning points such as the change of dynasty (1700), the beginning of independence (c. 1810) and the centenary of the republic (1910). A corollary would be that documentary evidence about music has been frequently hidden or distorted precisely in order to fit such a myth. That is why the present paper examines both bibliography and original documents found in different archives.

The Desertification of Society: A Conversation with Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez is the author of four autobiographical narratives: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992), Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2003), and Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013). Among his many literary awards, he also received a Peabody Award for his PBS NewsHour essays on American life. The son of Mexican immigrants, his essays cover such themes as bilingual education, the writer's life, identity and culture, and spirituality in the postmodern world. His essays are sharp, nuanced, and, most important, tuned in to the ever-sensitive fault lines lying just beneath the cultural nerves of society.

The Mashriq Unbound: Arab Modernism, Criollo Nationalism, and the Discovery of America by the Turks

This paper explores ideologies of difference and mobility constructed in the circulation of Middle Eastern people and texts by framing these migrations through imperial and nationalist narratives produced in the Middle East and Mexico. The aesthetic and civilizational classifications defended by intellectuals of the Mexican Mahjar debating the Mexican intelligentsia in migrant and national press which situate Mashriqi peoples as fearless explorers and rightful ‘conquerors’ of less beautiful, less modern Middle American natives have a genealogy in Ottoman representations of New World populations. Cultivated during the nahda, the Arab modernist ‘awakening,’ these hierarchizing claims were concerned, like other anticolonial nationalisms, with situating Arabs as both heirs to a glorious ancient civilization and cosmopolitan moderns. Nahda narratives, an Arab decolonizing discourse, had emancipatory as well as subordinating effects as they intersected with Criollo nationalism. Mobilizing the universalist hierarchies integral to global modernism, the discursive decolonization of an ‘Arab civilization’ afforded the subalternization of Middle American populations. It enabled Mashriqi and Middle American elites to bisect Middle American nations into ‘primitive’ Indians and civilized Criollos, so that Mahjar notables and Criollo elites could come to understand themselves as partners in a civilizing mission.