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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative
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April, 2004
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Book Review

Canada and the United States



Richard L. Kagan, editor. Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States. (Hispanisms.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 286. $42.50.

Here is a superb anthology that trances the development, institutionalization, and professionalization of the study of Spain's history and culture in the United States from the American Revolution to the mid-twentieth century. Gathering essays by some of this country's foremost Hispanists, editor Richard L. Kagan provides a dense genealogy of the origins and reception of ideas, the political and economic forces that shaped individuals and their thoughts, and the complicated ways women and men found personal meaning in their writing about Spain. Kagan contributes three of the most comprehensive essays to the tome. Hispanismo or Hispanism, as Spain's Diccionario de la literature española defines it, is "the study of the language, literature, and history of Spain by foreigners." This volume takes a much broader approach, including the study of Spanish art, music, and folklore in its scope. 1
      Kagan informs us that U.S. relations with Spain were born of the minor help Spaniards offered the rebel cause, sending Louisiana's Governor Bernardo de Gálvez to distract British naval power in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, and thus blunt its force. Bourbon King Charles III was hardly disposed to helping the Americans rebels. Instead he hoped that a British defeat would allow him to recoup his occupied territories in Jamaica, Honduras, and portions of western Florida. When the United States became independent, relations with Spain festered due to territorial disputes over control of the Mississippi River, the Gulf Coast, and Florida. Some of these disputes were finally settled by the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819. Weakened by colonial revolt in the Americas, Spain then ceded Florida and recognized the Louisiana Purchase, which Thomas Jefferson had negotiated with Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803. In return, Spain got a vague promise that the United States would stay out of Mexico, something that quickly became moot with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. . . .

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