Writing Mexican History

This collection brings together a group of important and influential essays on Mexican history and historiography by Eric Van Young, a leading scholar in the field. The essays, several of which appear here in English for the first time, are primarily historiographical; that is, they address the ways in which separate historical literatures have developed over time. They cover a wide range of topics: the historiography of the colonial and nineteenth-century Mexican and Latin American countryside; historical writing in English on the history of colonial Mexico; British, American, and Mexican historical writing on the Mexican Independence movement; the methodology of regional and cultural history; and the relationship of cultural to economic history. Some of the essays have been and will continue to be controversial, while others--for example, those on studies of the Mexican hacienda since 1980, on the theory and method of regional history, and on the "new cultural history" of Mexico--are widely considered classics of the genre.