Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Inequality, Living Standards And Growth: Two Centuries Of Economic Development In Mexico, Ingrid Bleynat, Amilcar Challú, Paul Segal

History Faculty Publications

Historical wage and incomes data are informative both as normative measures of living standards, and as indicators of patterns of economic development. We show that, given limited historical data, median incomes are most appropriate for measuring welfare and inequality, while urban unskilled wages can be used to test dualist models of development. We present a new dataset including both series in Mexico from 1800 to 2015 and find that both have historically failed to keep up with aggregate growth: per worker GDP is now over eight times higher than in the nineteenth century, while unskilled urban real wages are only …

“The Path Of Dictatorship”: The Erosion Of Democracy And Capitalism In Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico And Colombia*, James E. Sanders

History Faculty Publications

The first erosion of democracy in Latin America did not occur in the twentieth-century, but, rather, the nineteenth. I will argue that in Mexico and Colombia a vibrant, democratic political culture had emerged by the 1850s; however, by the 1870s, a political movement that united Liberals and Conservatives began to suspect that the democratic politics they had once regarded as making them modern was instead hindering their societies’ progress. Democracy was not promoting, but, rather, hindering economic progress. This essay will explore the historic relation between capitalism (as Latin America entered into a period of export-oriented capitalist growth) and democracy …

Agricultural Crisis And Biological Well-Being In Mexico, 1730-1835, Amilcar Challú

History Faculty Publications

The article examines how adverse climatic conditions and high food prices influenced the opportunities of peasants in pre-industrial Mexico between 1730 and 1835. Particular attention is paid to data of soldier heights, global climate events, warm-season tree growth, and real food prices to determine how these factors may have affected urban and rural populations. Declines were seen in the general standard of living and average height, while the cost of food increased. It is argued that distribution and acquisition of food has an equal influence on biological well-being as the availability of food at any specific given time.

Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, And Baptists In Texas (Book Review), R. Bryan Bademan

History Faculty Publications

Book review by R. Bryan Bademan.

Barton, Paul. Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. ISBN 029271291X1

Race, Nation, And Religion In The Americas, Edited By Henry Goldschmidt And Elizabeth Mcalister, R. Bryan Bademan

History Faculty Publications

Book review by R. Bryan Bademan.

Goldschmidt, Henry and Elizabeth McAlister, eds. Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

ISBN 978-0195149197

Defiance And Deference In Mexico’S Colonial North: Indians Under Spanish Rule In Nueva Vizcaya. By Susan M. Deeds, Charlotte M. Gradie

History Faculty Publications

Reviews the book "Defiance and Deference in Mexico's Colonial North: Indians Under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya," by Susan M. Deeds.

Rereading The Conquest: Book Review, Charlotte M. Gradie

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Charlotte Gradie.

Krippner-Martinez, James. Rereading the Conquest: Power, Politics and the History of Early Colonial Michoacan, Mexico, 1521-1565. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

ISBN 0-271-02129-2

Michoacán And Eden: Vasco De Quiroga And The Evangelization Of Western Mexico, By Bernardino Verástique, Charlotte M. Gradie

History Faculty Publications

Reviews the book `Michoacan and Eden: Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico,' by Bernardino Verastique.

Discovering The Chichimecas, Charlotte M. Gradie

History Faculty Publications

The European practice of conceptualizing their enemies so that they could dispose of them in ways that were not in accord with their own Christian principles is well documented. In the Americas, this began with Columbus's designation of certain Indians as man-eaters and was continued by those Spanish who also wished to enslave the natives or eliminate them altogether. The word “cannibal” was invented to describe such people, and the Spanish were legally free to treat cannibals in ways that were forbidden to them in their relations with other people. By the late fifteenth century the word cannibal had assumed …