| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States. Ed. by Richard L. Kagan. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xiv, 286 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-252-02724-8.)

In an article published in the American Historical Review in 1996 and reprinted as an appendix to this collection of seven engaging essays, Richard L. Kagan sets forth his thesis that William Hickling Prescott, in publishing his History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837), originated an interpretation of Spanish history that still "exerts influence over Spanish historical scholarship, particularly of the early modern era, in the United States" (p. 248). According to Kagan, "Prescott's paradigm" is an understanding of Spain as the antithesis of the United States because of its fanatical Catholicism, absolutism, and lack of support for commerce and individual liberties. Despite his obvious fascination for Spain, Prescott presented that nation's history as representing everything that his America was not: in Kagan's words, "America was the future—republican, enterprising, rational; while Spain—monarchical, indolent, fanatic—represented the past" (p. 253).

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