Writing Mexican History [Paperback]

This collection brings together a group of important and influential essays on Mexican history and historiography by Eric Van Young, a leading scholar in the field. The essays, several of which appear here in English for the first time, are primarily historiographical; that is, they address the ways in which separate historical literatures have developed over time. They cover a wide range of topics: the historiography of the colonial and nineteenth-century Mexican and Latin American countryside; historical writing in English on the history of colonial Mexico; British, American, and Mexican historical writing on the Mexican Independence movement; the methodology of regional and cultural history; and the relationship of cultural to economic history. Some of the essays have been and will continue to be controversial, while othersfor example, those on studies of the Mexican hacienda since 1980, on the theory and method of regional history, and on the new cultural history of Mexicoare widely considered classics of the genre.Written over a 25-year span, these essays explore the ways in which the rural, regional, political, and cultural history of colonial and nineteenth-century Mexico has been approached by scholars. Ultimately, these highly informative essays are even more useful as food for thought. They invite readers into a conversationcontentious or otherwisewith a knowing, sharp-minded interlocutor, who will challenge them to reevaluate their views on the most critical issues in Mexican history. Van Young's work is characterized by a zeal for theoretical reflection and a determination to allow primary sources to speak for themselves, although always under the narrator's gentle, ironic and skeptical prodding. . . This is a beautifully written and intellectually sparkling collection of essays. Van Young invites us to share his epistemological anxieties, urging scholars to be rigorous and skeptical in the interrogation of primary sources, in the selection of disl#&