9UNP1289SD_Florencia_Mallon_WordPress

- Now it's my great pleasure to introduce our guest speaker today, Professor Florencia Mallon. We would like to thank her in a heartfelt fashion for her acceptance of our invitation to present a lecture fitting the theme of the Peterson Lecture Series as well as the theme of The Year of Mexico. Professor Mallon received her doctorate degree in Nineteenth-century American History from Yale University. 
In the past three decades she has been teaching Modern 19th-century American History, Modern Mexican History, Gender and Ethnic History of Modern 19th-century America, and History of the Revolutions and Uprisings in Modern 19th-century America, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the meantime, through her research, scholarship, and publications Professor Mallon has established herself as one of the leading scholars in the field of Latin American History Studies. 
A list of her publications is a long one, but today I can only name three titles of her many books, partly because of the time limit for this introduction, also partly because I don't have enough practice-time to pronounce the Spanish titles of her books correctly. Book number one: Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolas Ailio and the Chilean State, 1906- 2001. This history monograph was published by Duke University Press. 
Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. This history monograph was published by the University of California Press.

Example number three: The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860- 1940. This history monograph was published by Princeton University Press. Not many historians write history monographs as well as novels, but Florencia does both. Recently she published a novel titled Beyond the Ties of Blood, a novel that is based on the turbulent history of Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. 
For her tireless pursuit of knowledge and her achievements in pursuing it, she has been awarded many academic honors, book awards, and academic titles, including the most recent one: Julieta Kirkwood Professor, a distinguished endowed professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So for today's program, Florencia will talk about her most recent research: the changing connotation and meaning of the concept of America. 
Now let's welcome Professor Mallon to share her scholarship and research with us. 
[applause]

- Thank you very much for that very generous and kind introduction. I also need to just say that as I learned more about Dr. Edward Peterson, I felt more and more honored at having been invited to give a lecture that is named after him. And I do have to say that the more I understood about Dr. 
Peterson, the more I understood that I actually do have a lot in common with him in terms of thinking broadly and globally; thinking in terms of power relations; and thinking also in terms of relationships among countries in the Western Hemisphere. And in that sense I think that my lecture does, hopefully in some important ways, connect with the sensibilities that he espoused as a teacher and as a researcher. So, let me just get going. 
As you can see here on the PowerPoint, this is a map of America, the Americas from the period of the so-called discovery, which I'm going to talk about why some scholars got to the point where they said it was not really a discovery but an invention. But we can see the ideas that it's a new hemisphere and a new, large continent that people didn't realize was there before. 
When José Martí, the Cuban writer, published his polemical essay "Nuestra América" in Mexico in January 1891, his use of the term "Our America" was a call to unity among the republics south of the Rio Grande. "For in what lands can men take more pride than in our long-suffering American republics?" he asked. And he continued: "Never in history have such advanced and united nations been forged in so short a time from such disorganized elements. 
Publishing the essay in Mexico in 1891, more than three decades after the US-Mexican War had dismembered the original territory of the Mexican nation, Martí was painfully aware of the need to sound the alarm about the country to the north. "The scorn of our formidable neighbor," he wrote, "who does not know us, is Our America's greatest danger. And since the day of the visit is near, it is imperative that our neighbor knows us, and soon, so that it will not scorn us. 
Through ignorance it might even come to lay hands on us."

Of course, as we know, his comment was prescient, since a mere seven years later the United States would invade Cuba and Puerto Rico as part of the Spanish-American War. My purpose here is to trace a genealogy, in the Foucaultian sense, of the multiple meanings of "America," and how they evolved from a hemispheric vision in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, to a series of disputed meanings, one of which was Martí's, in the nineteenth century and beyond. 
Following in the "ensayista" tradition of Latin American authors, a tradition to which Martí belonged, who have used this medium to destabilize existing ideas or concepts, I use the term "essay" in the French sense of "essayer," to try on or try out. In Spanish as well "ensayo" comes from "ensayar", to rehearse or try out. The purpose is, therefore, not to produce a definitive analysis, but rather to open up new and unexplored venues for discussion. 
I will begin by excavating again in the Foucaultian sense "subjected knowledges" is what he called them that is, knowledge that has been buried by unequal relations of power. I will explore the numerous and changing meanings of "America," placing them in the context of evolving power relations in the Western Hemisphere and in the Atlantic World of which it formed apart. 
Returning then to the multiple meanings of "America" and how they have been debated, both in the United States and in the rest of the hemisphere, I will conclude with what Foucault has called a genealogy, in his word, an "attempt to emancipate historical knowledges." I will then conclude with a reflection on how, in the northern country of which we form a part, "America" became a synonym for the United States.

The Mexican intellectual historian Edmundo O'Gorman struggled, from the 1940s, with the notion of the "discovery" of America, coming to believe that it should more properly be called "the invention of America. 
Shortly after publishing the first Spanish edition of his book with this name, he was invited to give a series of lectures at Indiana University, where he was able to deepen his understanding of this process of invention, placing its beginnings in the need to account for the new knowledge being produced by explorers as they uncovered the existence of lands to the west, between Europe and Asia. 
This involved a conflictual dialogue between this new knowledge and the view of the world confirmed through Christian theology, which denied the possibility that antipodal lands could be inhabited. O'Gorman concluded that the crucial expeditions that had provided the necessary additional information for the formulation of the concept of a "new world" had been Amerigo Vespucci's in 1501 and 1502, and Christopher Columbus's last voyage between 1502 and 1504. 
Indeed, O'Gorman saw Columbus and Vespucci as collaborators rather than as rivals because, because although each explorer was moved by personal interests and ambitions that were in competition with each other, they both were attempting to find a passage that, by sailing west, would give them access to the Indian Ocean and thus to Asia. The failures of both explorers were essential, O'Gorman explains, because and I quote, "They opened the way for an "unexpected and decisive revelation. 
Although each explained his failure differently, Vespucci's almost interminable voyage toward the south forced him to accept the existence of a new world. And here as you can see hopefully you can read it this is an image. It's a representation that was made by Bartolome Colon, Christopher Columbus's brother. And the idea was that there was this idea that supposedly Asia was supposed to be here. And this was Espanola, right?, Hispaniola. 
But then as Amerigo Vespucci began going down the edge of what we know now to be South America, trying to find a passage to the Indian Ocean, he was totally unsuccessful. So the lower down he got, and the colder it got, the clearer it became to him that there was no passage and that in fact this was a new world, Mondo Novo.

The final result of this complicated process was the publication in 1507 of Cosmographiae Introductio by the Academy of St. Dié. In addition to baptizing the new lands as America, the most important and transformational part of this document was the recognition of America as a fourth continent along with Europe, Africa, and Asia. 
This, O'Gorman argues, changed everything, because of and here I quote him "Modern man's contempt "for and his rebellion against the fetters "which he himself had forged under "pressure of archaic religious fears." "It was not by chance coincidence," he continues, "that America appeared on the historical scene "of Western culture as the land of opportunities, "of the future, and of freedom." We can put O'Gorman's reflections together with historian Jack P. 
Greene's suggestion that not only Vasco de Quiroga in Mexico, but also the Jesuits in Paraguay and the Puritans in New England desired to find in America and I quote, "a site for the realization of dreams "and hopes that could not be "achieved in the Old World." As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra makes clear, there was also an underside to this shared utopian yearning. 
Both Spanish and British, Catholic and Puritan, he writes, shared the "tradition of Christian holy wars" from which they took common images and understandings of their role in the New World, resulting in a broadly shared notion that European colonization of the New World was in fact a mission to liberate the American population from oppression by the Devil.

Indeed, he argues, this was at the center of shared Catholic and Protestant what he calls "demonological discourses" that informed the colonization of the Americas more broadly, reverberating with biblical narratives of the conquest of a new Canaan in order to found a new Jerusalem. It is also important to remember that, by the time the Puritans set their sights on North America, the Spanish and Portuguese colonizations had been ongoing for nearly a century. 
The wealth reaching Spain and Portugal from the Americas, Greene explains, was a strong motivation for other European countries to consider doing something similar. At the same time, the Dutch struggle for independence from the Hapsburg Empire generated a deep enmity between Spain and the Netherlands that, as Benjamin Schmidt argues, reverberated in complex ways with narratives of the Spanish conquest in America. 
Although scholars disagree quite deeply about the origins and diffusion of the Black Legend, one thing that seems fairly clear is that most versions began from Father Bartolomé de las Casas's Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. 
As Lewis Hanke has written, most of Las Casas's earlier writings, perhaps especially his Very Brief Account, and I quote, "May be considered as passionate "lawyer's briefs put together for a particular "occasion to achieve a definite end" and "have the tone of piping-hot pamphlets "designed to be hawked in the streets to influence "men's minds toward some specific "and immediate action on behalf of the Indians. 
And Schmidt further points out that and I quote, "Calculations of casualties, "or what might anachronistically be called 'body counts,' "occur obsessively throughout" Las Casas's narrative, adding that "the Dominican never quite clarified "how he arrived at these sturdy figures, "and, added all together, the sum total of casualties "from the individual islands and provinces "he assessed actually tops twenty million."

Although we cannot reconstruct the process through which Las Casas calculated the numbers, we can definitely reconstruct the origins and context of his passionate denunciation. As a member of the first colonizing generation in Hispaniola, he received an "encomienda", a Crown grant of Indian tribute and labor in exchange for Christianizing and quote/unquote "civilizing" the natives. 
Ironically, this was given to him as a reward for participating in the conquest of Cuba when already an ordained priest, and this conquest, along with his travels in Mexico and Central America, would form the main basis for his denunciations of abuse in his later writings. Las Casas was also part of a colonizing lineage, since his father and uncle had earlier participated in Christopher Columbus's final expedition to Hispaniola in 1510. 
Oh, sorry Christopher Columbus's final expedition to the Caribbean and, writes David Brading, brought him back an enslaved Indian boy for his service.

Summarizing Las Casas's own account, David Brading explains that the priest's change of heart began with the arrival of Dominican friars to Hispaniola in 1510, where they quote, "Soon won fame for "their austere life and missionary zeal. 
Still Las Casas maintained his encomienda and his way of life until at Easter his Dominican confessor refused to grant him absolution and he was assigned for his Easter sermon a passage from Ecclesiastes that began and I quote, "If one sacrifices from what has "been wrongfully obtained, the offering is blemished; "the gifts of the lawless are not acceptable".
The result of these accumulated revelations was and to quote Brading once again, "That in 1514 Las Casas decided to free his "Indians and seek reform of the entire system."

This story of personal transformation is central in explaining the passion and missionary zeal with which Las Casas wrote about Spanish cruelty to the Indians, he had been a part of it. Whether or not his numbers can be confirmed and there has been much debate about this among historians of colonial Spanish America his repeated attempts to reform Spanish practices, as well as his entrance into the Dominican Order, are most likely connected to his need to seek atonement for his earlier behavior. 
It is in this context as well that we must understand the passion of his Very Brief Account, which in its later travels through Europe became the basis for the Black Legend. Interestingly, this central, personal, and moral element of the story got lost in the many and passionate historiographical scuffles over the Black Legend that took place among historians of colonial Spanish America in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In addition to the various and complex ways in which Las Casas's text was transformed through travel and colonial competition, we must also point out that, even though conquest was violent and destructive everywhere, there were differences from region to region.

In the Aztec and Inca empires, for example, the conquerors were able to benefit from divisions among native peoples to garner at least some limited support for their enterprise.

And we can see here that here is where the Aztec empire was located. The Inca empire was located here. And both of these empires were complex and multi-leveled political systems. And because of this there were divisions among native peoples due to some of the political and violent forms of conquests that both the Aztecs and Incas had used. And these divisions the Spaniards were able to take advantage of and garner at least some limited support from native peoples for their enterprise. 
Although Hernán Cortés initially used extensive violence to quote unquote "convince" the Tlaxcalans to become his allies against the Aztecs, so much so that Charles Gibson calls Cortés's confrontation with them "The conquest of Tlaxcala," once the alliance was forged it proved to be quite effective militarily against the Aztecs, despite the horrific costs of taking the capital city of Tenochtitlan, today Mexico City. 
Although the Pizarro brothers were two-faced and violent in their dealing with the Inca emperor Atahualpa, who was ultimately executed, their conquest of the Andean region benefited from the assistance of the Wanka people of the Central Highlands of Peru, recently conquered by the Incas. And the Wankas were more or less in this region here, and this was the area where the Incas first started and had moved up.

The story was different in regions like Chile and the Argentine pampas. If we look at the area today of Chile and of Argentina, this area suffered from a scarcity of precious metals. This limited the resources that conquerors were willing to invest and the peoples who inhabited the area were politically decentralized, which also made it much more difficult to actually conquer them effectively. 
In fact, these regions would not come under the formal authority of any centralized state until after the colonial period was over. These differences better explain the processes and outcomes of different conquest and colonization processes in the Americas than do the differences between Spanish and Northern European cultures. So do the economic opportunities in each region. 
Mining wealth was concentrated, as I mentioned, in Mexico and Peru, precisely where existing complex empires already had labor systems the Spanish could appropriate and extend. In the Caribbean and Circum-Caribbean there were less easily captured sources of wealth, although as we know, in the long run, sugar production became central. In New England, local wealth was embedded more in lumber, agriculture, and fur trapping. 
Although market forces were part of the equation from the very beginning, the process of colonization, as Neal Salisbury has argued, began with a successful trading economy in which French and Dutch merchants exchanged European consumer items, such as tools, cloth, copper pots, and glass beads for pelts. 
In contrast to the French and Dutch, Salisbury writes and I quote, "English expeditions "from 1602 through the late 1610s sought "to coerce and dominate one or another of "the French allies in order to obtain food, labor, "territory and to assert political "authority and cultural superiority. 
For these reasons especially, Salisbury explains, the English were initially unsuccessful, and their fortunes changed only after the first major epidemic reduced the native population and I quote, "By about ninety percent." Indeed, he concludes that in a similar way to other parts of the Americas, it was quote, "epidemic "diseases for which the natives lacked immunities" that became the most effective weapon of colonization. 
Thus, although the timing and character of the colonizations were clearly quite different, there was a dramatic similarity in the process of "conquest through epidemic disease" quote unquote that lends an especially ironic twist to the notion of a Black Legend of cruelty that only applied to Spanish colonists. 
We should also remember that the Black Legend itself, and the use of Las Casas's Very Brief Account as evidence, followed a long and winding trajectory repeatedly informed by struggles for supremacy among aspiring colonial powers, not only in the period from the 1500s to the 1800s, but through the beginning of the twentieth century. 
Indeed, if we consider the evolution of the Black Legend in a context of international conflict among aspiring colonial powers, it is perhaps especially interesting to note that the conservative Spanish intellectual Julián Juderías, an avid supporter of dictator Francisco Franco, published the first edition of his denunciation of this legend in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, and the second edition in 1917 when, in his own words, "A war without precedent "in history is at its apogee. 
"This war, which has destroyed with indescribable "brutality those nations considered the most civilized, "has shattered many of our illusions." Although there is disagreement as to the details, most scholars agree that the Black Legend emerged in Europe in the context of the Eighty Years' War, during which the Dutch fought for their independence from the Hapsburg Empire. 
Though there had been anti-Spanish sentiment before, most notably in Italy, the virulence and widespread diffusion of the Dutch attacks was unprecedented. As K.W. Swart has written, and I quote, "The Dutch "greatly surpassed the Italians in the vehemence "with which they denounced Spain's political "and religious system and in the success "which they achieved in turning popular "hatred of Spain to political ends. 
Indeed, as Schmidt makes clear, the Spanish invasion of the Low Countries was represented, in Dutch narratives, in a parallel fashion to the conquest of the Indies. "In the Low Countries as in the West Indies," he writes, "the Spanish waged a 'war of fire and blood' In Antwerp as in the Antilles, they pounced upon natives like 'wolves' or 'lions,' and they slaughtered innocent women and children 'like so many sheep. 
" It is also quite telling to note that the same year, 1620, saw the publication in Amsterdam of two books about Spanish tyranny, one concerning the Netherlands and the other concerning the West Indies. Both also sported illustrations that graphically, and quite similarly, detailed the horrific abuses of Spanish soldiers. As Schmidt points out, the original images of Spanish cruelty in the Indies reproduced in these editions had appeared in Theodore de Bry's 1598 Latin translation of Las Casas.

So this is one of the lithographs of Theodore de Bry, and as you can see this is meant to be happening in Cuba, or Hispaniola really, because here is the coast. There is the edge of the Spanish sailing ship. And I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail about what is being represented here, but among the things that are going on are the burning of babies, cannibalism, et cetera. So this is clearly an especially ugly form of visual propaganda against the Spaniards.

It is especially fascinating to learn, in this context, that Las Casas's Brief Account, with the Dutch illustrator Theodore de Bry's illustrations included, was dusted off, repackaged, and circulated in the United States in 1898 as part of a propaganda campaign to support the waging of the Spanish-American War.

Amy Kaplan and David Blight have both argued that the Spanish-American War constituted a potential resolution, on foreign soil, of the deep contradictions in US nation-state formation that had culminated in the Civil War. Blight comments on a cartoon that appeared in the Chicago Inter Ocean in May 1898.

And here I quote, "As the United States went "to war with Spain in 1898, this cartoon celebrated "the reconciliation of the Confederate "and Union veteran, both draped in the national flag." So here we see the two veterans draped in the national flag looking out at a burning Cuba.

Kaplan writes that journalists and politicians and I quote, "represented the war with Spain "as a nostalgic recuperation of the heroism "of an earlier generation and as a purgative final battle, "healing the wounds and divisiveness "of their internecine war while completing "its goals of national reunification." And what could be more convenient, she suggests, than the fact that it all occurred, "On the remote "islands of Cuba and the Philippines, "leaving the American landscape unscathed. 
Finally, a crucial element in her analysis is the focus, by US officers and war correspondents, exclusively on the presence of US soldiers on the battlefield. And she writes, "The conspicuousness of "American bodies and the corresponding invisibility "of all other combatants had to be produced "ideologically as subject positions, "not just perceived as military positions. 
"The positions were plotted in part by "a narrative that effaced the prior history "of the Cuban war against Spain "and located the US entry into the war "as the point of historical origin." Effacing the prior history of the Cuban war against Spain was at the center of the reissuing, in 1898 by a New York publishing house, of an English translation of the 1620 French edition of Las Casas's Brief Account. 
Entitled An Historical and True Account of the Cruel Massacre and Slaughter of 20,000,000 of People in the West Indies by the SPANIARDS, in capital letters. It was said to be "Written by again in "capital letters BISHOP LAS CASAS, AN EYE-WITNESS." After reproducing the text of the French edition in a translation claimed only by "N.M.L.," this version goes on to state and I quote, "The Spaniard of the 19th century differs but "little from the Spaniard of the 16th. 
"True, he does not dare commit such outrageous "actions as are narrated in the foregoing pages; yet, "when we remember their treatment of the defenseless "women and children in the Province of Havana, "and the dastardly crime of a Spanish officer who, "in his official report, boasted of killing "an entire Cuban family, save a girl of fourteen years, "who he kept as his mistress, one sees "that he compares very favorably "with his ancestors."

In this section of the retranslation, entitled "The Spaniards Now in Cuba," descriptions of abuse by the Spanish army are accompanied, on the facing pages, by engravings taken originally from the Dutch versions of the Las Casas text. And this you can see it's the same lithograph that I pointed to before, but it appeared also in the retranslation of Las Casas's Brief Account that was circulated in the United States in 1898.

The positioning of the illustrations is clearly meant to associate what the Spanish were doing in Cuba in the 16th century with what they were doing at the end of the 19th century, providing in this way a humanitarian justification for US intervention. 
Toward the end of this section, just in case the reader had not yet gotten the message, the following passage appears and I quote, "Nearly four hundred years have passed "since Pizarro and Cortez, and their band "of reckless and brutal followers, devastated "the West Indies and South America. "Today, there appears a new Pizarro, "in the form of a General Weyler." In a moment I'll explain who General Weyler is in more detail. 
In the final section of the retranslation titled "A Few Facts About Cuba," potential investors are provided with a description of the geography and resources of the island, with the assurance that quote, "About two thirds of the coast, "is free from keys and reefs, "and of easy access." By this point the message of the retranslation could not be clearer. 
The United States must intervene in Cuba to prevent further abuses by the bloodthirsty Spaniards who, based on the eyewitness account of Las Casas, have been responsible for the deaths of millions of innocents from the time of Pizarro and Cortés to the present day. The reward for such humanitarian action will, of course, be access to the bountiful resources of the island, which are of quote unquote "easy access. 
But if we think through this retranslation alongside Kaplan's analysis, we see how the erasure of the Cuban Independence Wars against Spain, beginning in the 1860s, transforms the substantial human rights abuses of the Spanish army under the leadership of General Valeriano Weyler from a tactic of counterinsurgency against a powerful enemy in the form of a multiracial Cuban revolutionary army into a simple continuation of Spanish abuses dating back to the end of the 15th century. 
And what could be more convenient, from the standpoint of an emerging international colonial power, than being able to construct its actions as the humanitarian defense of innocent victims with no apparent agency of their own in the conflict?

It seems precisely at this moment of increasing international ambition, not only in the Western Hemisphere but also in the Pacific, that the effective ownership, from a US perspective, over the term "America" would most likely have been confirmed. 
It was also at this precise moment that the Berlin Conference confirmed the ambitions of European powers over the African continent, creating an additional and powerful motive for the United States, in its constant competition with European powers, to define its own sphere of influence between the Caribbean and the Pacific. 
But we must also consider the previous political history of the United States, and explore the uneasy emergence of a postcolonial nation that attempted to bring together disparate and conflicting colonies into a single entity. And I promise this section is the shortest because it's the part I know least about. It's US history and it's not my area, but I've really enjoyed getting to know it a little better. 
So in any case, we see here of course, and I think from the standpoint of an image this is especially powerful, because we see that at the moment of independence this was the United States. That was it. French territory and Spanish territories surrounded it. And if we look at it that way, then perhaps it is understandable why then the Founding Fathers would have been a little bit worried about what happened with the European powers.

Indeed, as Leonard Sadosky makes clear in his book Revolutionary Negotiations, "The process of US Independence, "as well as the difficult negotiations "around confederation vs. 
federation "that occupied the period between "the Declaration of Independence "and the Ratification of the Constitution, "can best be understood in a broader Atlantic context "in which US aspirations to form part of the broader "Westphalian system that had emerged "after the Thirty Years' War were repeatedly thwarted, "in the context of a confederation model, "by the lack of a centralized diplomatic voice or policy. 
All of this pushed hard in the direction of a more unified polity, something especially difficult given the deeply held sense of autonomy present among the original colonies brought together as a confederation, generating a deep contradiction between the concepts of "the American people" and "the States. 
Indeed, in The Federalist Papers, as we know written by James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton under the pseudonym Publius, when discussing the relationship among the different sectors of the national government, the authors write the following and I quote, "The House of Representatives will derive "its powers from the people of America. 
Then, almost immediately afterward, they add: "The Senate, "on the other hand, will derive its powers from the States, "as political and coequal societies." Here we see both the contrast and the tension between the notion of "America" as denoting union, and "the States" as denoting autonomy and separation. 
Since the purpose of this document was to provide an explanation and justification for the transition from a confederation to a federation with the 1787 Constitution, the tension is especially interesting. 
We also see that the notions of territory, prestige and legitimacy are central to the development of the United States; and, according to Publius, the lack of a unified government makes their achievement impossible, resulting in the nation's reaching and I quote, "Almost the last stage of national humiliation. 
There are, for example and I quote, "valuable "territories and important posts in "possession of a foreign power, which, "by express stipulations, ought long "since to have been surrendered." But it has not been possible to act in order to recuperate them, since quote, "We have neither troops, "nor treasury, nor government." We can also read in this section of The Federalist a strong current of frustration that the new nation has not received that to which it is entitled. 
And here I quote again, "Are we entitled by nature "and compact to a free participation in "the navigation of the Mississippi? "Spain excludes us from it. "Is commerce of importance to national wealth? "Ours is at the lowest point of declension. "Is respectability in the eyes of foreign powers "a safeguard against foreign encroachments? "The imbecility of our government even "forbids them to treat with us. "Our ambassadors abroad are the mere pageants of mimic sovereignty. 
With its origins in the process of independence, this frustration, involved not only the English, French, and Spanish, but indigenous nations as well. 
The fear that the English, Spanish, and French possibly with the aid of discontented indigenous nations might stand in the way of the full development of the United States of America was not entirely an illusion, giving further credence to the argument, as Publius put it, that the power to decide matters relating to national interest and I quote, "Ought, in the first instance, to be lodged "in the national depository. 
Across the last two decades of the 18th century, the conflicts among France, Spain, and Great Britain intensified, prompted by the Haitian Revolution in the Caribbean. 
Laurent Dubois has demonstrated the global impact of these conflicts, and also that the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was part of the process, lending further credence to the notion that US continental expansion was intimately tied to the belief, on the part of US leaders, that only through expansion could the United States compete effectively with European countries. And we see, of course, the size of the expansion that the Louisiana Purchase provided the United States of America.

Perhaps the most telling evidence concerning the interconnection of all of these events and concerns can be found in a November 1819 excerpt from John Quincy Adams's memoirs where, reacting to a conversation with several other important political leaders where concern had been expressed that both England and France considered the United States to be quote "an ambitious and encroaching people. 
Adams wrote and here I quote, "I said I doubted whether we ought to "give ourselves any concern about it. "Great Britain, after vilifying us twenty years as a mean, "low-minded, peddling nation, having no generous ambitions "and no God but gold, has now changed her tone, "and was endeavoring to alarm the world "at the gigantic grasp of our ambition. 
"Spain was doing the same; and Europe, who, "even since the commencement of our Government "under the present Constitution, "with the Indians and negotiating to bound us by the Ohio, "has first been startled by our acquisition of Louisiana, "and now by our pretension to extend "to the South Sea i.e. the Pacific "and readily gave credit to the envious and jealous clamor "of Spain and England against our ambition. 
"Nothing that we could say would remove this impression "until the world shall be familiarized with the idea "of considering our proper dominion "to be the continent of North America." It is also in this context that we must understand the War of 1812. 
As Sadosky makes clear, there was an important southeastern dimension to the War, for in the midst of that conflict, a civil war erupted among factions of the Creek nation, with a radical anti-European faction known as the Red Sticks confronting the more moderate and European sectors of their people. 
In addition to a Red Stick attack on the Fort Mims stockade in Alabama that killed hundreds of settlers, it became known the Red Sticks were procuring arms from British suppliers through the Spanish at Pensacola, Florida. So you can see how this, then, becomes a big issue of national security. Fort Mims and a huge massacre of settlers. And the Red Sticks are getting their arms from British suppliers through a port in what is still Spanish Florida.

In such a context, it is not surprising that between 1812 and 1827 the United States also waged two wars against the Seminole in an attempt to limit Spain's influence on the Florida peninsula and prevent the Seminole from harboring fugitive slaves. And indeed if you look at as it says here in my explanation of the PowerPoint, this photo of the Seminole family makes clear that they are accepting into their families a series of runaway slaves. 
Their phenotypes are really quite representative of that combination. Given the aspirations of US leaders in the Atlantic World, it is perhaps not surprising that the relationship with Europe should have played such a central and defining role in the development of US policy toward its neighbors in the hemisphere. 
What is perhaps less well analyzed is the similarity and interplay of US policy toward Native American and toward Latin American nations, and how both were clearly subject to concerns about US national security. 
As Sadosky argues, the purpose of the Jackson Doctrine, which was quote, "To limit the ability of the European "powers to interfere in the Indian nations' internal "affairs and the United States' diplomacy with them "is almost exactly what the United States wanted "in terms of European relations with the new "Latin American states, as outlined by the Monroe Doctrine. 
Furthermore, he continues, "It is especially ironic to note "the role that John Quincy Adams played "in articulating both the Monroe and Jackson doctrines." These questions of national security, in combination with a demand for respect as an equal partner in the Atlantic World system, were also intimately interconnected, within the United States, with ongoing and intense debates about states' rights. 
As we shall see, these conflicts were deeply interconnected with debates about slavery, and all of these tensions would emerge again and again across the rest of the nineteenth century as the dynamics of US nation formation drove a westward expansion in search of, as John Quincy Adams so aptly put it, the "proper dominion" over "the continent of North America." An especially dramatic flashpoint in this process would be the US-Mexican War.

When US commercial penetration, especially of the Texas region, intensified after Mexican Independence in the 1820s, the issue of slavery became a point of great conflict after Mexican abolition in 1829, culminating in the Texas Revolution of 1835. 
And as you can see here, at that point this was the part of Texas that was considered already to be part of the US, and this was the part that was under contention, and which of course the settlers in Texas were interested in including within their purview. 
As John Tutino writes and I quote, "Anglo Texans "who had claimed independence in 1835 "sought annexation to the United States a decade later; "they were ready to relinquish sovereignty "to preserve the cotton and slave economy and "to take control of the Rio Grande." And you see here the Rio Grande, of course, is right here. But also it's important to remember that this whole region in blue was a part of Mexico before the US-Mexican War.

In A Wicked War Amy Greenberg explores how the war with Mexico between 1846 and 1848 was in part a consolidation and reproduction of earlier ideologies and practices of expansion and conquest against the native peoples of North America. She describes how the invading armies, the US armies, most notably the Arkansas volunteer detachments that had prior experience in the Indian Wars, used tactics that included scalping against some of the Mexican civilians. 
She also shows how the War became a proving ground for military leaders who would quickly emerge as the main officers of the Civil War, especially Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, George Meade, and Jefferson Davis. In addition to tracing the connections between the US-Mexican War and the Civil War, Greenberg's analysis also suggests a relationship between North-South sectional conflict in the United States, and ideologies and practices of expansionism. 
US territorial expansionism, as we have seen so deeply motivated by the need to be an equal player, so to speak, in the Atlantic World system and the hemispheric conflicts among European colonial powers, also helped fuel and was fueled by confrontations between North and South. Greenberg writes that the War, "fractured the delicate sectional balance within the United States. 
And indeed, she concludes, victory in Mexico spurred expansionists in both sections of the country to push for more land, in Hawaii, Central America, the Yucatán, and particularly Cuba, further exacerbating sectional tensions. The stage was set for secession. It was an argument that could not be settled with words. 
At the same time, as John Tutino argues, the US-Mexican war resulted in an expansion of the United States into Texas as well as what had been the Mexican Northwest, what I pointed to and obviously is now the US West and Southwest resulting not only in a deeper conflict over slavery, but also in a dramatic expansion of the US economy. "Vast lands rich in resources enhanced "the prospects for US economic power," Tutino writes. 
This claim merits further consideration, especially in the context of the existing narratives of US economic history. In its more recognizable textbook versions, US industrial development is, to some extent, already predetermined by the unique history of the Thirteen Colonies. 
In other versions, a narrative of technological development, the construction of railroads, the outstanding forms of innovation and invention, and the arrival of industrially skilled immigrants helps explain the unique development of industry in the United States. 
While all of this is clearly important, one is also left to wonder whether the easier capital accumulation that became possible as a result of the mining and agricultural wealth incorporated with the US-Mexican War might have also played an important role. 
Combining Tutino's conclusion that the US-Mexican War, and the wealth of the new territories acquired through it, underwrote US economic power, and Walter LaFeber's argument concerning the economically powered take-off of US expansionism, this hypothesis gains greater traction. As LaFeber writes, "The economy reached its "take-off stage between 1843 and 1857. 
And he continues: "These two facts that by 1860 "the industrial economy was already moving "ahead rapidly and that the Civil War marked "the transference of power from planters "to industrialists and financiers do much to explain "the dynamics of the new empire." If we place Tutino's and LaFeber's arguments together, we can suggest a mutually constitutive relationship between economic growth and territorial expansion that began to emerge most dramatically with the US-Mexican War. 
In this context, the Civil War was the last step in the reorganization of the economic balance of power that would move the United States toward expansion as a new empire that set its sights beyond the territory of North America. 
At the same time, however, as we saw earlier in the work by David Blight and Amy Kaplan, the Civil War was not an entirely effective solution to the deep conflict between North and South of the previous period, and the Spanish-American War turned into an additional attempt to move beyond sectional confrontation. 
Indeed, the difficulty of resolving the internal wounds and divisions left by the Civil War and the attempt to heal these on foreign soil also facilitated the emergence of a new vision of the United States as the savior of those still suffering under the weight of Spanish colonialism.

You'll be happy to know that you my exploration of how a term that initially denoted the full Western Hemisphere was transformed into a shorthand word meaning the United States of America has now reached its final stage. A Foucaultian archaeology of the term "America" has suggested that, from the moment it was invented in dialogue with initial European explorations, the term denoted new possibilities and a sort of utopian imaginary. 
At the same time, the idea that European colonizers were in the New World in order to liberate the American population from oppression by the Devil provided justification, from a European perspective, for much of the violence and the death by epidemic suffered by the native population. In this way, throughout the hemisphere, the process of conquest and colonization complicated the utopianism of the American imaginary with an underside of violence and exploitation. 
This expropriation and exploitation of native and Afrodescendant peoples was covered over in a variety of ways across the hemisphere, and nowhere with more success than in the British colonies that would become the United States of America.

The case of Spanish America was somewhat different, given the passionate interventions of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. As becomes clear from an examination of the debates among Latin Americanist historians about the Black Legend, the cruel treatment of indigenous peoples remained a thorn in the side of Spanish colonialism. 
So much so, that even at the beginning of our current century, with the massive genocide carried out against Guatemala's indigenous peoples by the military dictatorships during the country's extensive civil war, the effective comparison of the two genocides was a powerful weapon, a powerful weapon among analysts and activists in favor of indigenous rights. And me just say a couple of words about, this is the cover of a book by a British law professor and human rights activist Bartolome Clavero.

A book about the genocides in Guatemala. And as you can see, he uses the term, the destruction of the Indies yesterday and today. And he uses here a drawing that was made by Victor Ivan, who is the son of one of the more important Maya activists, Victor Montejo, in Guatemala.

At the same time, the use of Las Casas's Brief Account by competing colonial powers tended to become a self-serving way to shift attention to the abuses of Spain, so amply documented by the Dominican friar. His passionate denunciations of the cruelties inflicted upon native peoples in the Americas proved to be excellent ammunition in the hands of the Dutch, French, and English during their conflicts with Spain. 
And the Brief Account would once again be dusted off in 1898 by a new emerging colonial power, the United States. Although these geopolitical conflicts shed a different kind of light on the historical evolution of America as a hemisphere, we should not lose track of the fact that America, as a new, utopian, and exceptional place, was a concept shared by all in the hemisphere for centuries. 
Seen in this way, the use of America as a term denoting the unity of the different states within the United States suggests a utopian imagining that would be congruent with, maybe even recognizable to, other political thinkers in the hemisphere. 
José Martí, for example, had more than a small amount of utopian imagining in his concept of "Nuestra América" when he wrote, as quoted at the beginning: "Never in history "have such advanced and united nations been "forged in so short a time from such disorganized elements." Nevertheless, given the historical events explored here, the utopian imagining of America ended up articulating itself to imperial economic and military power in only one case, the United States. 
We have seen how the deep divisions between North and South, inscribed at the very heart of the federal system in the ideally productive tension between America and the States, was an important factor that helped generate continental expansionism, even as that expansionism itself generated deeper divisions, especially concerning slavery, that ultimately led to the Civil War. 
As Reconstruction failed and the South re-segregated under the veil of state's rights essentially appropriating the notion of the States what better use for America could be found than in the baptism of the United States as the protector and defender of freedom and democracy across around the world?

José Martí, given his presence at the beginning of this essay, seems the most relevant example to provide as we conclude.

At the end of 1889, before his essay Nuestra América, while Cuba was already engaged in its War of Independence against Spain and before the US invasion of the island, Martí published an essay in the Argentine newspaper La Nación in which he commented on the Pan-American Congress being held in the United States in October and November of that year. 

sent, "has there been a matter requiring more "good judgment or more vigilance, "or demanding a clearer and more thorough examination, "than the invitation which the powerful United States "glutted with unsaleable merchandise "and determined to extend its dominions in America "is sending to the less powerful American nations "bound by free and useful commerce to the European nations "for the purpose of arranging an alliance against Europe "and cutting off transactions with the rest of the world. 

 "Spanish America learned how to save itself "from the tyranny of Spain; and now, after viewing "with judicial eyes the antecedents, motives, "and ingredients of the invitation, it is essential to say, "for it is true, that the time has come for "Spanish America to declare its second independence."

Martí's comment on the Pan-American Congress serves as an important entry point for the consideration, in dialogue with our reflections and by way of conclusion, of a recent essay by Michel Gobat which appeared in the American Historical Review on The Invention of Latin America. 
In this essay, Gobat moves beyond John Leddy Phelan's original suggestion that the term "Latin America" was coined by the French in preparation for the invasion of Mexico in the 1860s to argue that the concept emerged as a result of the fear of US expansionism that took hold with the success of William Walker's filibuster expedition in Nicaragua in the 1850s. 
"The term 'Latin race' fits with the efforts of modernizing "liberals to disassociate their societies from Spain," Gobat writes, "which they deemed hopelessly backward." Yet as we think back on the various conceptualizations by Latin American intellectuals that we have analyzed in this essay, the issue of America vs. Latin America vs. Spanish America seems a bit more complex and multi-faceted. 
To begin, it is particularly interesting to note that, even at the end of the 1880s when Cuba was battling Spain in an independence war, Martí did not use the term Latin America, but instead America and Spanish America in distinct contexts. 
As can be seen in the excerpt quoted above, he used "America" to refer to the full hemisphere when he was emphasizing the expansionist ambitions of the United States, and Spanish America when calling for the nations south of the Rio Grande to declare a second independence. Finally, as we saw in the work of Edmundo O'Gorman in particular, the notion of America was seen, even in the 20th century, as an expansive and utopian one that helped release Europeans from their theological fetters. 
In this way, the utopian meanings and yearnings attached to America transcended specific locations in the hemisphere. Ultimately, then, the notion of America, as it emerged across the period of exploration and into the postcolonial era, continued to hold a utopian quality for intellectuals and political thinkers across the hemisphere. 
At the same time, as the United States began its process of imperial expansion into the Pacific and the Caribbean, the term took on for those north of the Rio Grande a greater connection specifically to the United States. Thank you. 
[applause]