Author : Byron Ellsworth Hamann
Release : 2022-08-30
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 737/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK

Book Synopsis The Invention of the Colonial Americas by : Byron Ellsworth Hamann

Download or read book The Invention of the Colonial Americas written by Byron Ellsworth Hamann. This book was released on 2022-08-30. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Seville’s Archive of the Indies reveals how current views of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are based on radical historical revisionism in Spain in the late 1700s. The Invention of the Colonial Americas is an architectural history and mediaarchaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain’s pre-1760 documents about the New World. To fill this new archive, older archives elsewhere in Spain—spaces in which records about American history were stored together with records about European history—were dismembered. The Archive of the Indies thus constructed a scholarly apparatus that made it easier to imagine the history of the Americas as independent from the history of Europe, and vice versa. In this meticulously researched book, Byron Ellsworth Hamann explores how building layouts, systems of storage, and the arrangement of documents were designed to foster the creation of new knowledge. He draws on a rich collection of eighteenth-century architectural plans, descriptions, models, document catalogs, and surviving buildings to present a literal, materially precise account of archives as assemblages of spaces, humans, and data—assemblages that were understood circa 1800 as capable of actively generating scholarly innovation.