Overview

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 others—for 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 Mexico—are widely considered classics of the genre.