Volume 41, Number 17 · October 20, 1994
Going Baroque
By J.H. Elliott
The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America
by Claudio Véliz
University of California Press, 254 pp., $35.00
In a famous presidential address delivered to the American Historical Association in 1932, Herbert Bolton challenged his fellow historians in the United States to move beyond national history and write an 'Epic of Greater America.'[1] Today Bolton's address makes disappointing reading; but it has the great merit of raising a question which has refused to lie down and die—the question of how far the Americas share common characteristics and a common history. Bolton saw a series of what he called 'larger historical unities,' like the frontier experience, as transcending the differences between British and Iberian America to create the distinctive civilization of a 'Greater America,' which awaited (and indeed still awaits) its historian. Others, less persuaded of the transforming characteristics of the American environment, have insisted on the extent to which the New World societies retained the imprint of the European societies from which they sprang. The new societies were 'fragments of the larger whole of Europe,' whose historical destinies were programmed by their time and place of origin.[2]
Review, 3849 words
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