Howard F. Cline

Howard F. Cline (June 12, 1915 – June 1, 1971, Washington DC) was an American government official and historian, specialising in Latin America. Cline served as Director of the Hispanic Foundation at the Library of Congress from 1952 until his death in June 1971. He was one of the founders of the Latin American Studies Association. He was also active in the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), the professional organization of Latin American historians, which he chaired in 1964. He is still highly-regarded as a scholar "devoted to and effective in the promotion of Latin American studies in the United States."

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Cline grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was admitted to Harvard College on a scholarship; in his sophomore year became a resident in Dunster House, whose Master was Clarence H. Haring, later Cline’s dissertation adviser. In 1939 Cline graduated magna cum laude in history, writing his senior thesis on American journalist Benjamin Orange Flower, which he later published. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He won a Sheldon Fellowship, which funded travel for a year outside of the U.S. following graduation, and which he used to go to Mexico.

In 1940, Cline entered the graduate program in History at Harvard, with Clarence Haring as his adviser. He did fieldwork in a then-remote Chinantec village of San Pedro Yólox in Oaxaca in 1942-43 as a Social Science Research Fellow, which resulted in several publications. Cline's dissertation was on the Caste War (guerra de las castas). In 1947 he briefly taught at Yale and then Northwestern University. He left academia in 1952 to become Director of the Hispanic Foundation at the Library of Congress.

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