Caldera of New Spain: Frontier Justice and Mestizo Symbol

1961 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 325-342
Author(s):  
Philip Wayne Powell
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
The Past ◽  
Extensive Documentation ◽  
Critical Phase

In any study of extensive documentation of the past, one inevitably encounters personalities whose recorded actions stimulate speculation about the unknowable portions of their lives and their impact upon larger historical events. Such a one, to me, is the man called Miguel Caldera. For some years, and through many thousands of pages of Mexican frontier documentation, I have been increasingly intrigued by the story of this mestizo captain. He is omnipresent in the official papers of a critical phase of North American frontier history. His deeds—and their setting—have a dramatic, symbolistic quality which entitles him, I think, to recognition as one of the continent's most significant frontiersmen. Hence this present attempt—brief and incidental though it is—to “define” Miguel Caldera and his measure of significance.

The Mission and Historical Missions: Film and the Writing of History

1995 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Schofield Saeger
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
South America ◽  
Future Study ◽  
North American ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Academic

Because of the power of film, movies with historical themes affect public perceptions of the past more deeply than do scholarly reconstructions. Film makers and historians search for meaning in separate ways, but their quests can converge. Examples of different approaches to similar destinations are found in a newer film and older historical views of Catholic missions in South America. Released in 1986, The Mission, directed by Roland Joffé with a screenplay by Robert Bolt, displays paternalistic attitudes like those of an earlier generation of North American academic historians. The film's voice is a white European distortion of Native American reality. This essay will examine that voice, offer alternative explanations of historical events, and suggest a research agenda for future study of the Guarani missions of Paraguay, often mentioned in surveys but seldom studied by North American historians.

scholarly journals NOTES ON NORTH AMERICAN HESPERIDÆ

1892 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 119-120
Author(s):  
Eugene Murray Aaron
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
The Past

From time to time for the past ten years I have been in the habit of receiving, from various collectors in this country and Europe, speciments of North American Hesperidœ for comparison and identification with my large collection, which has been justly famous for its completeness. As this collection is now no longer in my possession, being now the property of my friend C. B. Aaron, of Philadelphis, and as I have transferred my allegiance from entomology to ethnology it has occurred to me that it will be well fro me to give here to the students of the Hesperidœ the benefit of such tables, nots teh compilations as have, in years past, been of value to me in the identification of the species in this difficult family.

Historiography: An Introductory Guide

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Ka-May Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Historian ◽  
Subjective Perspective ◽  
The Many

“What is historiography?” asked the American historian Carl Becker in 1938. Professional historians continue to argue over the meaning of the term. This book challenges the view of historiography as an esoteric subject by presenting an accessible and concise overview of the history of historical writing from the Renaissance to the present. Historiography plays an integral role in aiding undergraduate students to better understand the nature and purpose of historical analysis more generally by examining the many conflicting ways that historians have defined and approached history. By demonstrating how these historians have differed in both their interpretations of specific historical events and their definitions of history itself, this book conveys to students the interpretive character of history as a discipline and the way that the historian’s context and subjective perspective influence his or her understanding of the past.

Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christen Mucher
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
American History ◽  
New Spain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Material Base ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
British America ◽  
The Us ◽  
Ruling Elites

Before American History examines the project of settler nationalism from the 1780s to the 1840s in two of North America’s republics—the US and Mexico—through an analysis of historical knowledge production. As the US and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent republics—and before war scarred them both—antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America’s Indigenous pasts. Before American History approaches two iconic imaginings of the past—the carved Sun Stone and the mounded earthwork—as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, Indigenously-produced but settler-controlled and settler-interpreted. In making the connection between earthworks built by an allegedly vanished people merely peripheral to US citizens and the literal touchstone of Mexicans’ history, Before American History details how Mexican and US nationalists created national histories out of Indigenous pasts and thereby wrote Indigenous pasts out of their national histories and out of national lands. It uncovers how the manipulation of Indigenous pasts and (mis)interpretations of “American Antiquities”—Indigenous documents, objects and monuments—served the purposes of a trans-imperial/transnational network of creole ruling elites, first in New Spain and British America, and later in Mexico and the United States, as they struggled to construct new political, geographic, and historical orders.

Constructing a Precolonial Owan Chronology and Dating Framework

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 219-249
Author(s):  
Onaiwu W. Ogbomo
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
African History ◽  
Accurate Assessment ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relative Chronology ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Genealogical Data

Oral tradition has been recognized by historians as a vital source for historical reconstruction of non-literate societies. However, one of its “deficienc[ies] is an inability to establish and maintain an accurate assessment of the duration of the past [it] seeks to reconstruct.” As a result of its time-lessness it has been declared ahistorical. In the same vein R.A. Sargent argues that [c]hronology is the framework for the reconstruction of the past, and is vital to the correlation of evidence, assessment of data, and the analysis of historical sources. Any construction of history [which] fails to consider or employ dating and the matrix of time to examine the order and nature of events in human experience can probably be labelled ahistorical.Basically, the concern of critics of oral tradition is that, while they are veritable sources of history, the researcher “must work and rework them with an increasing sophistication and critical sense.” Because dating is very pivotal to the historian's craft, different techniques have been adopted alone or in combination to create a relative chronology. In precolonial African history, the most commonly used have been genealogical data which include dynastic generations, genealogical generations (father-to-son succession) and the age-set generation. Also systematically charted comets, solar eclipses, and droughts have been employed by historians in dating historical events, or in calculating the various generational lengths.A dynastic generation is determined by “the time elapsing between the accession of the first member of a given generation to hold office and the accession of the first representative of the next.”

scholarly journals A Magical Reorientation of the Modern: Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 438-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Kilroy-Marac
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
North American ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Hoarding Disorder ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
Dsm V ◽  
Double Movement ◽  
Domestic Variety

Within the past decade, material disorder—especially that of the domestic variety—has come to stand alternately as evidence, symptom, and potential cause of mental disorder in the North American popular and psychiatric imagination. Sources ranging from the newly defined Hoarding Disorder diagnosis in the DSM-V, to popular media, to agents of the burgeoning clutter-management industry describe disorder in terms of an irrational attachment, closeness, or overidentification with objects. At the same time, these sources imagine order to result from the cool distance and controlled passion a person is able to maintain toward his or her possessions. Drawing on more than twenty interviews and numerous fieldwork encounters with professional organizers (POs) in Toronto between 2014 and 2015, this article describes how POs aim to reorient their clients materially, morally, and affectively to relieve the disorder they report in their lives. Here, I argue, POs emerge as a species of late capitalist healer whose interventions are animated by a paradoxical double movement. For just as POs act to loosen the object attachments and disrupt the “secret sympathy” their clients share with their possessions, they operate within a realm of magical correspondence where matter and mind are imagined to reflect and affect one another, and where bringing order to a client’s possessions means also bringing order to his or her mind.

Epilogue, as Prologue

2018 ◽  
pp. 174-182
Author(s):  
Matthew D. O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
The Past

This concluding chapter looks at the discovery of a perplexing set of documents created in New Spain. Referred to as títulos primordiales, or primordial titles, the sources described the founding of Indigenous communities in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. The títulos resonate strongly with other colonial documents of futuremaking and the shared ways of relating to time surveyed throughout this book. The Indigenous authors of the primordial titles engaged in a radical act of situating themselves in time: they marshaled the resources of the past, the resources of memory, and the resources of tradition to achieve goals in the present and craft diverse futures. Sometimes they presented their assembled resources as a narrative of the sixteenth-century present, at other times in the form of history or chronicle.

Prayers

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-149
Author(s):  
Matthew D. O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

This chapter studies the logic of traditional innovation by investigating a form of sanctioned Catholic practice. In the eighteenth century, a new movement flourished in many of the most important cities and towns of New Spain. Calling themselves Holy Schools of Christ, these groups combined collective piety sometimes associated with baroque Catholicism, such as the lashing of flesh, with an intense demand for self-regulation of an individual's thoughts and actions. The participants in the Holy Schools might appear as surprisingly modern in their attitude toward controlling the future and their attempts to achieve individual or collective improvement. Yet to characterize this movement as a moment of hybrid modernity in which elements of the past persisted despite a turn toward the modern would be deeply misleading. For the members and supporters of the Holy Schools, innovation required tradition. Individuals of this period, in other words, were often future-oriented without being modern.

scholarly journals “Eyes Have No Border”. Presencing the Slovenian-Hungarian Border in Goričko and the Rába Valley

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-378
Author(s):  
Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik ◽  
Katalin Munda Hirnök
Keyword(s):  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Work Family

The article draws on the written and oral memories of people living along the border between Slovenia (Goričko in Prekmurje) and Hungary (the Rába Valley). They are presented as comments on a century-long process of political changes in this borderland and demonstrate a plethora of ways in which border shifts intrude on people’s everyday lives. People’s concern with the border is reflected in the fact that it is a topic that emerges in any conversation with individuals living next to it, whether in the context of work, family, daily errands or stories of the past and present. In this article, informed by two concepts–border and memory– we present memories and perceptions of the border as they are expressed in casual comments or observations and semi-structured conversations with interviewees in the field. Life in borderlands is always localized, and there are visible divergences in the experience of the border on the Slovenian and Hungarian side. In Prekmurje, historical events along the border, especially the post-Trianon one, and the memory of these events are perpetuated through anniversaries of the annexation of Prekmurje to the Kingdom of SCS, whereas in the Rába Valley, memories especially relate to the Iron Curtain period. In a much more poignant way, they also constitute the present Slovenian community in ethnic terms as they are mediated in their vernacular.

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