I enrolled in this class for three reasons: 1) I have long been fascinated with the Reconquista, which has led to an interest in the early modern Spanish Empire; 2) I am principally interested in studying the social and cultural history of government during a period of conquest, and so studying this Conquest seemed...
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And now every April I sit on my porch And I watch the parade pass before me And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march Reliving old dreams of past glory And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war And the young...
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The first three essays discussed here, by Elizabeth Archuleta, Kathy Freise, and Phillip B. Gonzales, all deal with the subjectivity of memory and, by extrapolation, history. Archuleta’s “History Carved in Stone” discusses and analyzes national (nationalistic?) monuments and their significance and often enduring contradictions. Mount Rushmore, with its quasi-likenesses of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and...
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Thought One This week’s readings shed light on the continuing fight for the past. What gets commemorated and what gets ignored? When historical events or figures are placed in either category, it says as much about the people doing the categorizing as it does the importance of the subject under consideration. The same can...
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Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700, while not without its problems, is a fascinating and enjoyable study of the points of convergence between Catholic Iberians in Central and South America, and Puritan English in New England in North America. Despite the evident, and usually highlighted, differences between the two, Esguerra argues for...
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Allergic reaction to a food you ate? Must be Satan. Storm? Shipwreck? Must be Satan. Indian uprising? Again, Satan. Opossum sighting? Don’t be fooled–clearly, it’s only Satan in disguise. As I read Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s book, Puritan Conquistadors, I kept hearing Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” from Saturday Night Live in the nineties, in my head,...
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I congratulate Canizares-Esguerra for succeeding in his goal of writing a book that doesn’t fit neatly into any genre. I’m a fanboy of the Atlantic World so approached his book with all the auspices in line. Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic is a confusing title. I certainly understand his point that the literary traditions...
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Jorge Canizares-Esguerra's Puritan Conquistadors focuses on the similarities between the Spanish and English colonial experience in the Americas. Essentially they framed their conquest in the same terms, as a chivalrous struggle over Satan and his minions. To both civilizations, Satan had control over the indigenous populations and the new world was his fiefdom, a...
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Although a pan-American examination of the various “Conquests” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be refreshing and revealing, as Patricia Seed had shown, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra’s Puritan Conquistadors falls short of that goal. The subtitle, Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 does not offer much help in terms of explaining the book’s thesis and contents. Canizares-Esguerra...
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Jorge Canizares-Esguerra’s Puritan Conquistadors is brilliant. Canizares-Esguerra makes two important arguments about the colonial history of the Americas. First, the colonial Europeans shared a Christian fanaticism that transcended the gulf between Catholicism and Protestantism, and that ultimately derived from Spanish culture. Second, the Spanish experience in the Americas is the normal and central experience...
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