An English Utilitarian Looks at Spanish-American Independence: Jeremy Bentham’s Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria

1996 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Harris
Keyword(s):  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Central American ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Good Government ◽  
University Level

On August 31 1832, when news arrived of the death of the English utilitarian philosopher and jurisconsult, Jeremy Bentham, the Guatemalan Statesman José del Valle introduced a resolution to the congress of the Central American Republic requesting all its members to wear mourning as a mark of respect. He also took the opportunity to bestow fulsome praise on Bentham, not only as the sage who had taught the art of legislation and government, but also as the defender of Spanish-American independence.Few would dispute the first claim. Bentham’s work on the science of legislation, Traités de législation, had been translated into Spanish and was widely read throughout Spanish America. Francisco Santander was said to have always had a copy open on his desk and it was adopted as a basic text for study at University level in Buenos Aires and Santiago. Many of Bentham’s other works enjoyed similar esteem and his opinions on what constituted good government were constantly cited and debated in the assemblies of the new republics.

Ultraísmo

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Vanderbosch
Keyword(s):  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Cultural Distance ◽  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Vicente Huidobro ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Guillermo De Torre

Ultraísmo is an early twentieth-century art movement which developed in Spain around 1920 and was introduced to Argentina by Jorge Luis Borges in 1921. It was strongly influenced by European avant-garde movements, particularly Cubism and Dadaism, and by the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s Creationism. The poets of Ultraísmo rejected the fin de siècle aesthetics of Spanish and Spanish-American modernism and experimented with the graphic and acoustic dimensions of poetry, emphasising rhythm over rhyme. The origins of Ultraísmo go back to late 1918, when Vicente Huidobro visited Madrid for a short period, and Rafael Cansinos Assens, host of a literary circle in the Café Colonial, wrote the first Ultraist Manifesto, published in the magazine Grecia in January 1919 (Videla 1963: p. 27). Other founding texts of the movement are El movimiento ultraísta español and Manifiesto Vertical, both written by Guillermo de Torre in 1920. The movement of Ultraísmo was oriented both toward Europe and Spanish America. Ultraísmo adopted ideas from different European avant-garde movements in an effort to reduce the cultural distance between Spain and the rest of Europe, rather than develop an original programme. Their poetry gives importance to images and metaphors, experiments with typography and calligrams, rejects punctuation and often rhyme, and focuses on poetic rhythm. Ultraísmo developed in Spanish America when Jorge Luis Borges, who had spent several years in Spain and had published poems in Ultraist magazines, introduced the movement in the literary circles of Buenos Aires upon his return to Argentina in 1921.

“This England and This Now”: British Cultural and Intellectual Influence in the Spanish American Independence Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Racine
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Cultural Model ◽  
The Press ◽  
Conscious Choice ◽  
Intellectual Influence ◽  
Independence Era ◽  
Early Republican

Abstract This essay argues that Great Britain provided the strongest and most relevant contemporary model for the Spanish American independence leaders. Over the course of two eventful decades, 1808 to 1826, over 70 patriot leaders made the long and difficult journey to London to seek political recognition, arms, recruits, and financial backing for their emancipation movements. Countless others remained at home in Spanish America but allied themselves with Britain through their commercial ventures, their ideological affiliation, or their enthusiastic emulation of British institutions, inventions, and practices such as the Lancasterian system of monitorial education, trial by jury, freedom of the press laws, steam engines, and mining technology. This generation of independence leaders carried on a purposeful correspondence with famous British figures such as abolitionist William Wilberforce, prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, scientist Humphrey Davy, and vaccination proponent Edward Jenner. Their conscious choice to draw closer to Great Britain, rather than Napoleonic France or the early republican United States, reveals much about the kind of cultural model the Spanish American independence leaders admired and their vision of the countries they wanted to create.

Las presencias de la Reto´´rica en la obra de Alfonso Reyes: Esbozo de una evolucio´´n

2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 149-174
Author(s):  
Eugenia Houvenaghel
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Classical Rhetoric ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
The World ◽  
Alfonso Reyes ◽  
The Subject ◽  
American Society

The Mexican diplomat Alfonso Reyes (1889––1959) was notable in the cultural panorama of Spanish America in the first half of the 20th century for his acquaintance with classical rhetoric, a discipline rarely studied at that time in that part of the world. This article distinguishes four aspects of rhetoric throughout Reyes' oeuvre: (i) a vulgar sense, (ii) an erudite sense, (iii) classical theories, (iv) and modern applications. In his early work, Reyes uses rhetoric in a pejorative and vulgar sense. Around the year 1940, Reyes starts to show a lively interest in rhetoric, opts definitively for an erudite sense of the term, and initiates the study of the classical art of persuasion. In his third phase, Reyes gains deeper knowledge of rhetoric, lectures on the subject, and explains his favorite orators andtheorists. Finally,his use of rhetoric reveals a commitment to the reality of Spanish America. Reyes' rhetoric is an "actualised" and "Americanised" version that shows the possibilities of the classical art of persuasion in Spanish American society.

Henry Clay and the Poinsett Pledge Controversy of 1826

1972 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-440
Author(s):  
Randolph Campbell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Monroe Doctrine ◽  
Secretary Of State ◽  
Initial Task ◽  
Practical Implications ◽  
American Nation

It is well known that the initial task of interpreting the Monroe Doctrine as a functional policy in international relations fell largely on John Quincy Adams. Somewhat ironically, the noncolonization principle in Monroe's famed Annual Message of 1823 for which Adams, then Secretary of State, was most responsible, received relatively little attention in the 1820's. Leaders in the United States and Spanish America alike were more concerned with the meaning of the other main principle involved in the Message—nonintervention. What were the practical implications of Monroe's warning that the United States would consider intervention by a European power in the affairs of any independent American nation “ as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States ” ? John Quincy Adams laid the groundwork for an answer to this question in July, 1824, when Colombia, alarmed by rumors of French interference in the wars for independence, sought a treaty of alliance. The President and Congress, Adams replied, would take the necessary action to support nonintervention if a crisis arose, but there would be no alliance. In fact, he added, it would be necessary for the United States to have an understanding with certain European powers whose principles and interests also supported nonintervention before any action could be taken or any alliance completed to uphold it. The position taken by the Secretary of State cooled enthusiasm for the Monroe Doctrine, but Spanish American leaders did not accept this rebuff in 1824 as final.

scholarly journals ¿Un cronista provinciano? Dos textos desconocidos de Rubén Darío en El Orden de Tucumán

(an)ecdótica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Javier Caresani ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Buenos Aires ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Ruben Dario ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Local Newspaper ◽  
Other Hand

Hand in hand with recent theoretical and empirical developments related to the notion of archive, the field of Spanish American Modernism Studies is currently undergoing a stage of profound transformation. The validity in Literary Studies of a “new” philology not only highlights problems in the editions of classical texts from the fin de siècle period, but also invites researchers to review the clichés associated with this movement. In this sense, the case of Rubén Darío (1867-1916), whose texts remain in a state of notable precariousness, is exemplary. This article comments and recovers two unknown chronicles published in El Orden, a local newspaper in the Argentine province of Tucumán, that were written by this author. Besides their evident documental value, these texts, which were conceived at the farewell to his residence in Buenos Aires in 1898, acquire relevance if they are connected to the concerns that Darío will cultivate on his imminent trip to Europe. On one hand, they can be read as yet another episode of Buenosairean “calibanism”; on the other hand, they can be understood as an anticipation of a critical perspective towards the mythification of the concept of progress in the Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1900.

The State of Scientific Inquiry in Colonial Spanish America During the Enlightenment: A Preliminary Bibliography

1975 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-500
Author(s):  
Leo M. Jacques
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Time Lag ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
The Other ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Scholarly Journals ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Close Proximity

The scientific contributions of native scholars in the Americas have often been overlooked or neglected. The simultaneous discoveries of European scientists reached a wider audience because of the number of education centers in close proximity. The existence of several scholarly journals also facilitated the rapid dispensation of new scientific knowledge. Although Spanish American scholars lived far from the centers of European knowledge, there was no appreciable time lag between European discoveries and their circulation in Spain's colonies. On the other hand, Spanish American discoveries were unknown in Europe or North America except to a handful of prominent scholars.

scholarly journals World Trade in Medicinal Plants from Spanish America, 1717–1815

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Gänger
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medicinal Plants ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Medical Systems ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Relative Ease ◽  
Global Spread ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis article outlines the history of the commerce in medicinal plants and plant-based remedies from the Spanish American territories in the eighteenth century. It maps the routes used to transport the plants from Spanish America to Europe and, along the arteries of European commerce, colonialism and proselytism, into societies across the Americas, Asia and Africa. Inquiring into the causes of the global ‘spread’ of American remedies, it argues that medicinal plants like ipecacuanha, guaiacum, sarsaparilla, jalap root and cinchona moved with relative ease into Parisian medicine chests, Moroccan court pharmacies and Manila dispensaries alike, because of their ‘exotic’ charisma, the force of centuries-old medical habits, and the increasingly measurable effectiveness of many of these plants by the late eighteenth century. Ultimately and primarily, however, it was because the disease environments of these widely separated places, their medical systems and materia medica had long become entangled by the eighteenth century.

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