Education in New Granada: Lorenzo María Lleras and the Colegio del Espíritu Santo, 1846–1853

1977 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 490-503
Author(s):  
Robert H. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
School Systems ◽  
Educational Facilities ◽  
New Granada ◽  
Financial Difficulties ◽  
Educational Philosophies

Educational facilities in nineteenth-century New Granada were woefully inadequate. School systems were unable to accommodate more than a small percentage of the population, and the existing curricula were largely speculative or theoretical rather than empirical or pragmatic in nature. These deficiencies were openly recognized by many contemporary observers. Nevertheless, it appears that political animosities, conflicting educational philosophies, and financial difficulties hampered any attempt to improve the situation, as the experience of Doctor Lorenzo María Lleras and the Colegio del Espíritu Santo clearly illustrates.

Transportation Modernization and Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Colombia

1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hernán Horna
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Caribbean Coast ◽  
New Granada ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Magdalena River

Prior to the introduction of the steamboat on the Magdalena River during the 1820s, reaching Bogotá from the Caribbean coast required a two to five month journey. This trip included travelling in bongos (rafts) and traversing mountains on the backs of both men and beasts. Bogotá was the most isolated of all the Spanish viceregal capitals. No other viceroyalty was so dependent on river transportation as New Granada (now Colombia). Even by the late nineteenth century, travel within the country remained dreadfully difficult. In the best of weather most Colombian roads were barely suitable for mule traffic, and, whenever tropical rains poured, human carriers undertook the burden of transportation despite the fact that Colombia, following the newest American and European trends in transport innovations, built railroads to the point where they were the nation's leading technological import during the nineteenth century. The apparent futility of this modernization effort has led many scholars, both Colombians and non-Colombians, to conclude that Colombia moved directly from the age of the mule to that of the airplane.

Surveying the Lands of Republican Indígenas: Contentious Nineteenth-Century Efforts to Abolish Indigenous Resguardos near Bogotá, Colombia

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 771-799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lina del Castillo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Indigenous Community ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Community Governance ◽  
New Granada ◽  
National Capital ◽  
Communal Lands ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Political Spectrum

AbstractNineteenth-century republicans across the political spectrum agreed: the Spanish monarchy produced ‘miserable Indians’. Abolishing tribute and privatising communal lands, known as resguardos in New Granada (roughly today's Panama and Colombia), would transform that wretched class into equal citizens. Drawing on late eighteenth-century privatisation efforts by the Spanish Crown, early republican leaders in Gran Colombia inaugurated an era seeking equal access to wealth from communal land for all indigenous community members. After Gran Colombia (the first Colombian Republic, 1819–30) dissolved into New Granada, Ecuador and Venezuela in 1830, New Granada's experiments with indigenous resguardo policies went further. By then, legislative efforts considered the needs of all resguardo members, including unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children. Complex laws, diverse ecological terrain and nuanced social realities required well-trained surveyors to ensure each eligible indigenous family received a fair share of land. Whereas indigenous communities in Pasto, Santa Marta and the Cauca river valley resorted to armed insurrection against liberal policies through the War of the Supremes (1839–42), those in the highlands near Bogotá did not. Instead, these republican indígenas – with their greater access to the levers of power housed in the national capital – chose to engage in the reforms of a decentralising state. This article reveals how contentious experiments seeking republican equality within indigenous resguardos as a path towards abolishing the institution were consistently stymied by efforts to ensure that indigenous community governance and communal landholding remained intact.

Precarious Time, Morality, and the Republic

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-109
Author(s):  
Francisco A. Ortega
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Social Instability ◽  
New Granada ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Simon Bolivar ◽  
The Republic

Spanish American countries exhibited during the nineteenth century many of the features Koselleck associated with the Sattelzeit, the transitioning period into our contemporaneity. However, the region’s history was marked by social instability and political upheaval, and contemporaries referred to such experiences of time as precarious. In this article I explore the connection between this precarious time and the emergence of the sociopolitical concept of morality in New Granada (present-day Colombia) during the first thirty- five years of the republic (1818–1853). I focus on two conceptual moments as exemplified ed by the reflections put forth by Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), military and political leader of the independence period, and José Eusebio Caro (1817–1853), publicist, poet, and political ideologue of the Conservative Party.

Postcolonial Social Sciences of Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-172
Author(s):  
Lina del Castillo
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
New Granada ◽  
Land Surveying ◽  
Colonial Legacies ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
New Race

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Spanish American intellectuals believed science could diagnose, treat, and excise an array of “colonial legacies” left in the wake of Spanish monarchical rule. Drawing on New Granada as a case in point, this chapter considers two revealing examples of how Spanish American contributions to emerging social sciences challenged prevailing European and North Atlantic ideas about race well before the late nineteenth century adoption and adaptation of eugenics. The first example emerges from an 1830s land-surveying catechism by noted New Granadan educator and publicist, Lorenzo María Lleras. The catechism sought to ensure equitable land surveys of indigenous communal land holding. The second example spotlights José María Samper’s mid-century invention of comparative political sociology. Spanish American intellectuals like Lleras and Samper ultimately believed that the deployment of sciences in society would produce a new “race” of democratic republicans.

Public vs. Private

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert N. Gross
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
The United States ◽  
School Systems ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Public School Systems ◽  
Modern School

Americans today choose from a dizzying array of schools, loosely lumped into categories of “public” and “private.” How did these distinctions emerge in the first place, and what do they tell us about the more general relationship in the United States between public authority and private enterprise? Public vs. Private describes how nineteenth-century public policies fostered the rise of modern school choice. In the late nineteenth century, American Catholics began constructing rival, urban parochial school systems, an enormous and dramatic undertaking that challenged public school systems’ near-monopoly of education. In a nation deeply committed to public education, mass attendance in Catholic private schools produced immense conflict. States quickly sought ways to regulate this burgeoning private sector and the competition it produced, even attempting to abolish private education altogether in the 1920s. Ultimately, however, Public vs. Private shows how the public policies that resulted produced a stable educational marketplace, where school choice flourished. The creation of systematic alternatives to public schools was as much a product of public power as of private initiative. As ever more policies today seek to unleash market forces in education, Public vs. Private concludes that Americans would do well to learn from the historical relationship between government, markets, and schools.

Reading the Past on the Mountainsides of Colombia: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Patriotic Geology, Archaeology, and Historiography

2013 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy P. Appelbaum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Community Based ◽  
National Community ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Granada ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract The mid-nineteenth-century Colombian Chorographic Commission drew on geology, archaeology, and history to project a patriotic past onto the Andean landscape of the young republic then known as New Granada. This geographic expedition, led initially by Agustín Codazzi and Manuel Ancízar, explored and mapped the country from 1850 to 1859. For the commissioners and their associates among the creole elite, the history of past epochs was “written” on the mountainsides for scientific travelers such as themselves to “read.” They portrayed disparate historical and prehistoric events as overlapping and interrelated. The commission’s texts and images linked a catastrophic interpretation of geologic origins to historia patria (patriotic history). The commissioners merged the wars of conquest and independence into a two-act drama enacted on a singular territorial stage. Their reading of geologic, archaeological, and historical evidence endowed the impoverished young Republic of New Granada with a grandiose territory, a great precursor civilization, and a legacy of patriotic resistance to imperialism. Their interpretations, however, would prove controversial. During the second half of the nineteenth century, debates over geology, archaeology, and history reflected conflicting Liberal and Conservative political projects. Moreover, the midcentury intellectuals failed to incorporate contemporaneous indigenous and poor citizens into an imagined national community based on the ideal of a shared historical memory embedded on a readable landscape.

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