A Place for Hispanic America in North American Historiography: the Founding of the Hispanic American Historical Review and the Politics of History

Abstract

This article examines the establishment of a specific publishing place for the American historiography about the Hispanic America, namely the Hispanic-American Historical Review, in the 1910s in the USA. The article points out that such process consolidated this field as a discipline in the context of the time and also in terms of a few broader political needs, such as the affirmation of the legitimacy of the increasing hegemony of the USA to the south of its borders – a process that the analysis of selected articles on the Monroe Doctrine and the alleged anti-American mood of the Hispanic American republics, as presented by the journal in its early years, seeks to portray. In this sense, this article analyzes the ways how particular forms of historiography attain legitimacy not only on account of imperatives of their disciplinary fields, but also as a consequence of wider political needs.