How to Write the History of the New World
Subtitle: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: June 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 450
ISBN-13: 9780804740845
Subjects: American history; c 1700 to c 1800; c 1800 to c 1900; History - General History; Historiography; Modern - 18th Century; History: World; The Americas; Latin America - South America; Europe; 18th century; Attitudes; Historians; History; Latin America
Description: "In the mid-eighteenth century, the French naturalist Buffon contended that the New World was in fact geologically new - that it had recently emerged from the waters - and that dangerous miasmas had caused all organic life on the continents to degenerate. In the "dispute of the New World" many historians, naturalists, and moral philosophers from Europe and the Americas (including Thomas Jefferson) sought to either confirm or refute Buffon's views.

This book maintains that the "dispute" was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the continent and its peoples?".

"The author traces the cultural processes that led early-modern intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to question primary sources that had long been considered authoritative: Mesoamerican codices, early colonial Spanish chronicles, and travel accounts. In the process, he demonstrates how the writings of these critics led to the rise of the genre of conjectural history.

The book also adds to the literature on nation formation by exploring the creation of specific identities in Spain and Spanish America by means of particular historical narratives and institutions. Finally, it demonstrates that colonial intellectuals went beyond mirroring or contesting European ideas and put forth daring and original critiques of European epistemologies that resulted in substantially new historiographical concepts."--BOOK JACKET.