Historiography of Colonial Spanish America

The historiography of Spanish America has a long history, dating back to revisionist accounts of the conquest, Spaniards’ eighteenth-century attempts to understand the apparent decline in its empire and ways to revive it, and American-born Spaniards (creoles') search for identity separate from Spain's and the creation of creole patriotism. Following independence in some parts of Spanish America, some politically-engaged citizens new sovereign nations sought to shape national identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-Spanish American historians began writing chronicles important events, such as the conquests of Mexico and Peru, dispassionate histories of the Spanish imperial project after its almost complete demise in the hemisphere, and histories of the southwest borderlands, areas of the United States that had previously been part of the Spanish empire, led by Herbert Eugene Bolton. At the turn of the twentieth century, scholarly research on Spanish America saw the creation courses dealing with the region, the systematic training of professional historians in the field, and the founding of the first specialized journal, Hispanic American Historical Review. For most of the twentieth century, historians of colonial Spanish America read and were familiar with a large canon of work. With the expansion of the field in the late twentieth century, there has been the establishment of new subfields, the founding of new journals, and the proliferation of monographs, anthologies, and articles for increasingly specialized practitioners and readerships. The Conference on Latin American History, the organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association, awards a number of prizes for publications, with works on early Latin American history well represented.

Although the term "colonial" is contested by some scholars as being historically inaccurate, pejorative, or both, it remains a standard term for the titles of books, articles, and scholarly journals and the like to denote the period 1492-ca. 1825.

A number of general works have focused on the Spanish era and provide an overview of the era. A short but classic general history is Charles Gibson's Spain in America. A major textbook comparing Spanish America and Brazil is James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz's 1983 Early Latin America, which argues that Spanish America and Brazil were structurally similar. Its annotated bibliography of important works in the field remains important, but many significant studies have been published since 1983. New emphases, such as women, indigenous, and blacks as groups and as political actors in rebellion and other resistance to colonial regimes. A standard work on colonial Latin America that has gone through multiple editions is Mark Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson's Colonial Latin America. Collections of primary source documents have been published over the years, which are especially valuable for classroom use.

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