Establishing Exceptionalism: Historiography and the Colonial Americas

Description

Since the 1950s historians of the colonial era in North, South and Central America have extended the frontiers of basic general knowledge enormously; this rich historiographical tradition has generated robust methodological discussions about how to study the European encounter in the light of the experience of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. By bringing together major research reviews by a series of leading scholars, this volume makes it possible to compare directly approaches relating to colonial North America, Brazil, the Spanish borderlands, and the Caribbean. Contents Acknowledgements General Editor’s Preface • A.J.R. Russell-Wood Introduction: Do the Americas have a Comparable Colonial History? • Amy Turner Bushnell 1 A General View of the Colonial History of the New World • Silvio Zavala 2 The Old Regime in America: A Review of Recent Interpretations of France in America • John C. Rule 3 Society and Economy in the British Caribbean during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries • Jack P. Greene 4 ‘I Did the Best I Could for My Day’: The Study of Early Black History during the Second Reconstruction, 1960 to 1976 • Peter H. Wood 5 The Historiography of the Dutch in Colonial America • Joyce D. Goodfriend 6 The Social History of Colonial Spanish America: Evolution and Potential • James Lockhart 7 Brazil: The Colonial Period • Stuart B. Schwartz 8 Reconstructing British-American Colonial History: An Introduction • Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole 9 Some Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians • James H. Merrell 10 Interpretive Frameworks: The Quest for Intellectual Order in Early American History • Jack P. Greene 11 The Social and Ethnic Historiography of Colonial Latin America: The Last Twenty Years • John E. Kicza 12 John Francis Bannon and the Historiography of the Spanish Borderlands: Retrospect and Prospect • David J. Weber 13 The Contact of Cultures: Perspectives on the Quincentenary • Ida Altman and Reginald D. Butler Index