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The Age of Revolution has traditionally been understood as an era of secularization, giving the transition from monarchy to independent republics through democratic movements a genealogy that assumes hostility to Catholicism. By centering the story on Spanish and Latin American actors, Pamela Voekel argues that at the heart of this nineteenth-century transformation in Spanish America was a transatlantic Catholic civil war. Voekel demonstrates Reform Catholicism's significance to the thought and action of the rebel literati who led decolonization efforts in Mexico and Central America, showing how each side of this religious divide operated from within a self-conscious intercontinental network of like-minded Catholics. For its central protagonists, the era's crisis of sovereignty provided a political stage for a religious struggle. Drawing on ecclesiastical archives, pamphlets, sermons, and tracts, For God and Liberty reveals how the violent struggles of decolonization and the period before and after Independence are more legible in light of the fault lines within the Church.
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Although the Spanish Inquisition looms large in many conceptions of the early modern Hispanic world, relatively few studies have been made of the Spanish state and Inquisition’s approach to book censorship in the seventeenth century. Merging archival and rare book research with a case study of the fiction of Baltasar Gracián, this book argues that privileged authors, like the Jesuit Gracián, circumvented publication strictures that were meant to ensure that printed materials conformed to the standards of Catholicism and supported the goals of the absolute monarchy. In contrast to some elite authors who composed readily transparent critiques of authorities and encountered difficulties with the state and Inquisition, others, like Gracián, made their criticisms covertly in complicated texts like El Criticón.
In an age of revolution, Mexico's creole leaders held aloft the Virgin of Guadalupe and brandished an Aztec eagle perched upon a European tricolor. Their new constitution proclaimed 'the Mexican nation is forever free and independent'. Yet the genealogy of this new nation is not easy to trace. Colonial Mexico was a patchwork state whose new-world vassals served the crown, extended the empire's frontiers and lived out their civic lives in parallel Spanish and Indian republics. Theirs was a world of complex intercultural alliances, interlocking corporate structures and shared spiritual and temporal ambitions. Sean F. McEnroe describes this history at the greatest and smallest geographical scales, reconsidering what it meant to be an Indian vassal, nobleman, soldier or citizen over three centuries in northeastern Mexico. He argues that the Mexican municipality, state and citizen were not so much the sudden creations of a revolutionary age as the progeny of a mature multiethnic empire.
The years 1899 through 1941 are remarkable even by Latin America's uniquely turbulent standards. During this time, border disputes and domestic insurrections forcefully shaped the history of this area, as many countries made the rocky transition from agrarian to industrial societies. This volume provides a concise survey of Latin American wars between 1899 and 1941. It compares and contrasts the wars and considers them in light of military theory. It also demonstrates how instrumental wars have been in directing the history of Latin America, and how the United States has often influenced these wars in a decisive manner. Wars examined include border disputes in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama,...
Rafael Carrera (1814-1865) ruled Guatemala from about 1839 until his death. Among Central America’s many political strongmen, he is unrivaled in the length of his domination and the depth of his popularity. This “life and times” biography explains the political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances that preceded and then facilitated Carrera’s ascendancy and shows how Carrera in turn fomented changes that persisted long after his death and far beyond the borders of Guatemala.