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In the first decade of the 19th century the U.S. and Mexico reached out to one another to initiate diplomacy, trade, and cultural borrowings. Each faced the task of decolonization and nation-building. This book explores the political and cultural history of Mexico at the time of its independence from Spain. At the center of the study are letters written to the Philadelphia book publisher Mathew Carey by Thomas Robeson, a book agent Carey sent to Mexico in 1822. Author Vogeley demonstrates the important role that the inter-American book trade played in the formation of post-colonial national identities in the Americas and casts a new light on the historical interconnections between print capitalism and nationalism. Illustrations.
This book contains a systematic study of economic institutions during the Spanish Enlightenment in the areas of print culture (the press, merchants’ handbooks, teaching materials), education (university chairs in political economy and commerce) and the organisation of financial matters at state level (economic societies, trade consulates and the official statistics agency). A Unifying Enlightenment is a fresh interpretation of political economy’s contribution to the development of the European Enlightenment. Jesús Astigarraga shows that, far from being a straightforward intellectual phenomenon, this new science played a crucial role in both the circulating and institutionalisation of Enlightenment culture and the process of political unification and articulation undergone by the Spanish monarchy, which culminated in a constitutional culture.
The first in-depth analysis of some of the most important epic poems of the Spanish Golden Age, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain breathes new life into five of these long- neglected texts. Elizabeth Davis demonstrates that the epic must not be overlooked, for doing so creates a significant gap in one's ability to appraise not only the cultural practice of the imperial age, but also the purest expression of its ideology. Davis's study focuses on heroic poetry written from 1569 to 1611, including Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana, undeniably the most significant epic poem of its time. Also included are Diego de Hojeda's La Christiada, Juan Rufo's La Austriada, . Lope de Vega's Jer...
The Splendor and Opulence of the Past traces the career of Jaume Caresmar (1717–1791), a church historian and a key figure of the Catalan Enlightenment who transcribed tens of thousands of parchments to preserve and glorify Catalonia's medieval past in the face of its diminishing autonomy. As Paul Freedman shows, Caresmar's books, essays, and transcriptions—some only recently discovered—provide fresh insights into the Middle Ages as remembered in modern Catalonia and illustrate how a nation's past glories and humiliations can inform contemporary politics and culture. From the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, Catalonia was a thriving, independent set of principalities within what would...
Introduction to the Spanish Universalist School presents the most significant authors, works, and concepts of a distinctive humanistic and scientific intellectual community, one mostly comprised of ex-Jesuits exiled to Italy at the end of the eighteenth century. The study of this corner of the Hispanic Enlightenment, marked especially by the work of Juan Andrés, Lorenzo Hervás, and Antonio Eximeno, offers contributions to the history of European sciences and letters, to the history of ideas, and to the concepts of universality and globalization.
With a focus on the economic, social, and political impetus for producing monuments to knowledge, this volume recognizes the encyclopedic compilation as the quintessential tool of enlightenment knowledge transfer.
The Ideal of the Practical is a study of efforts by a segment of the upper class in an aristocratic Latin American society to alter cultural values in the society, creating stronger orientations toward the technical and the practical. Frank Safford describes attempts by members of Colombia’s nineteenth-century political elite to use technical education as a means of nurturing energetic upper-class entrepreneurs and an industrious working class in a static agrarian economy. In the course of his analysis, Safford sketches the historical development of scientific and technical education and of the engineering profession in Colombia. The book opens with a description of the economic and social...