The corpus of medieval historical works that addresses aspects of crusading is very diverse in its form and content and in the depth and range of its engagement with crusade expeditions, crusade ideas, and the actions and experiences of crusaders. If there is a common denominator, it is that each text is an exercise in war writing. But in so saying it is difficult to avoid unfavourable comparisons with the broad and variegated body of modern literature that describes war, its nature and its effects. One searches in vain in the narratives of crusades, and indeed in medieval historical writing as a whole, for close analogues to the acute and subtle reflections on the nature of the memory of participation in conflict as a rete bucata (a net full of holes) in Italo Calvino’s essay ‘Ricordo di una battaglia’ (1974); the wry construction of a playful narratorial persona in the service of grim seriousness in Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That (1929, rev. 1957); the cold anatomisation of death in Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (1920); or the painstaking attention to topographical detail and the layering of multiple character focalisations, the routing of the action through one or more actors’ apprehending gazes, in Émile Zola’s novel-as-history La débâcle (1892).

The introduction sets out the key questions which the book addresses. First: what happens to language in times of civil conflict? Second: can the historian speak of timeless moral values? It then introduces the reader to the ancient texts the book addresses, and the figure of paradiastole, through which they address these questions. It goes on to contrast their reflections with Skinner’s and Nietzsche’s understanding of transvaluation. It finishes with some reflections on method.

The epilogue reflects on the reception of the ancient tradition explored in this book, but also reflects more widely on the values of genealogical and comparative approaches to intellectual history. It ends with a brief reflection on the relevance of this book’s argument for today.

Race has been one of the most consequential ideas in modern history, and the aims of this book are to better understand its intellectual genesis and proliferation. The introduction sets out the key themes of the volume and serves as a prelude to the geographical and temporal spread of the following chapters. Although the idea of ‘race’ emerged in European vernaculars in the late middle ages, we trace lines of continuity in its understanding and usage from the eighteenth century to the present. By juxtaposing discrete case studies of how race was conceptualised in different places over this period we hope to shed light on how the intellectual category of race that we have inherited was constructed, while showing connections between ideas and experience.

This chapter characterizes the five central themes that emerged from and unite the contributions to this book. It clarifies how the contributors characterized a defining conundrum of Black poetry, traces its intellectual interventions and its communal sensibilites, identifies its innovative origins and emphasis on syncretism, and captures its artistic beauties. And it clarifies how the contributors characterize the growing influence of African American poets in determining the terms of literary value in US literary culture. It verifies the expertise by which these essays validate African American poetry as a distincitve tradition and as an aspect of a US national tradition which it both critiques and enhances.

José María Samper (1828-1888) was born in the provincial town of Honda, Colombia. A prolific author, he combined his writing activities with politics, journalism, and teaching. In his earlier career, Samper became prominent within a young generation of radical liberals who advocated universal and direct suffrage, the separation of church and state, and the abolition of the standing army. In 1855, In what was perhaps one of the first usages of the expression “Latin American,” Samper proposed the formation of a federation of Spanish American republics to defend their emerging “democracies” and their interests from the ambitions of the European monarchies, the Brazilian Empire, and US expansionism (Reflexiones sobre la federación colombiana, 1855). “Colombia” was the name Samper gave to his proposed union. Later in his life, however, Samper tempered the radicalism of his youth and moved closer to the Conservative Party. Yet in the convention that adopted the 1886 centralist, “conservative” constitution, Samper’s interventions revealed that he continued defending key liberal principles. Samper’s selected passages in our volume come from his earlier liberal phase.

Andrés Bello (1781–1865) was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Early in his career he occupied various administrative positions in the government of the Captaincy General. In 1810, the newly inaugurated Junta of Caracas appointed him secretary of the commission sent to Great Britain to request support for the new government. He remained in London for nineteen years. He lived in Santiago for the remaining thirty-six years of his life, serving as government official, senator, and rector of University of Chile. He was in addition a poet, a literary critic, and a jurist. His most important works include Principios de derecho de jentes (1832), Gramática de la lengua castellana (1847), and the Civil Code of the Republic of Chile (1855). A towering intellectual figure in Spanish America, he has only recently been translated into English. The current selection concerns a specific development in Ecuador but involves a central principle of international relations where Bello took a strong position against foreign intervention, especially from emerging states that sought the political and military assistance of stronger ones. The polemical tone of the article is typical of the press debates in Chile in the 1840s.

Of humble origins and mixed race, Bernardo Monteagudo (1789–1825) was born in Tucumán, in the River Plate (Argentina today). He graduated in law from the University of Chuquisaca and soon became involved in the wars of independence against Spain, first in Upper Peru and then in Buenos Aires, where he stood out for his radical republicanism, which he originally displayed as a polemicist in newspapers. Embroiled in the internal conflicts of the revolutionary movement in the River Plate, he was forced into exile in 1815. In 1817, he joined the army of José de San Martín, which drove the Spaniards out of Lima in 1821, when Peruvian independence was declared. Monteagudo became San Martín’s right hand and was practically in charge of governing Lima while San Martín continued the fight against the royalist forces elsewhere. Monteagudo’s authoritarian rule provoked wide resentment and, following two days of riots, he was expelled from the city in 1822. Written a year later as a defence of his actions in government, his Memoir offered a systematic examination of the conditions that, in his view, made democracy unworkable in Peru.

José Victorino Lastarria (1817–1888) was a Chilean writer and politician closely aligned with the opposition to the three consecutive governments of Joaquín Prieto (1831–1841), Manuel Bulnes (1841–1851), and Manuel Montt (1851–1861). A liberal, he later turned into a Comtean positivist. As a politician, he served in the Congress and later in government as diplomat and cabinet member. A prolific writer, he was the author of Recuerdos literarios (1878), one of the best, if biased, accounts of Chilean intellectual life in the nineteenth century. He was also the author of La América (1865), Lecciones de política positiva (1874), and numerous contributions to the press. The fragment included here is the introduction to his work on the legacies of the colonial past, which he presented at the first anniversary of the inauguration of the University of Chile (1844). He promoted a view of history that saw in the past the guidance for shaping the present and future, meaning specifically the demolition of colonial institutions and ideas. This presentation became a part of a significant debate on the writing of history in the 1840s.

Francisco Bilbao (1823–1865) was a Chilean writer and political activist educated at the Instituto Nacional. He rose to notoriety when he published an essay, the “Sociabilidad chilena” (1844), condemning the role of both the Catholic Church and the legacies of colonialism in Chile. He was brought to trial for violating the laws regulating press freedoms. As a result, he left Chile for Europe, where he established contact with Edgar Quinet and Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais and witnessed the European revolutions of 1848. Returning to Chile, he founded the Society of Equality in 1850 and participated in the uprising of April 1851, which led to his exile in Peru, Europe, and Argentina, where he died. His principal works, in addition to “Sociabilidad,” are La América en peligro (1862), and El evangelio americano (1864). The essay included here is representative of his views regarding the radical contradiction between Catholicism and republicanism, which was in turn an expression of his views on the struggle between despotism and freedom.

An anonymous and rarely cited text, Fe política de un colombiano was consulted by the editors at the John Carter Brown Library, whose catalogue attributes it to Eloy Valenzuela (1756–1834), a Catholic priest from Santander, Colombia. However, it is highly unlikely that Valenzuela, who was close to Simón Bolívar at the time of publication, penned a pamphlet which appeared to be criticizing (though not in explicit terms) the Convención de Ocaña, convened by Bolívar to replace the existing 1821 Constitution. The main message of the Fe política was against the concentration of power in the executive, then perceived to be Bolívar’s purpose in convening the Ocaña Convention. On April 1, 1826, the Gaceta de Colombia registered its publication stating that “the author … was born in one of the departments of the antigua Venezuela.” Its author might have been Javier Francisco Yanes (1776–1846), particularly as in his Manual político del venezolano, Yanes used the Fe política without attribution, in a book that is seemingly generous in acknowledging the work of others. But if the Gaceta de Colombia was right, this would rule out Yanes’ authorship as he was not born in Venezuela but in Cuba.

José Antonio Saco (1797–1879), a native of Bayamo in Cuba, studied philosophy under the notable Félix Varela and succeeded him in the philosophy chair at the University of Havana. He edited the journals El Mensajero Semanal and the Revista Bimestre Cubana, where his writing against the slave trade caused his exile in 1834 – he only returned to Cuba for a brief period in 1860–1861. He traveled extensively in Europe collecting the documentation for his Historia de la esclavitud (1875–1879). He was elected to the Cortes in Spain but, after 1837, Cuba was excluded from representation there. Saco also became conspicuous for his opposition to the annexation of Cuba to the United States. The current selection was written in the wake of Narciso López’s failed invasion of the island in 1851 and reveals a keen awareness of the international situation and the hard choices facing Cuba in the nineteenth century.

Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), was originally from the province of Tucumán, in today’s western Argentina. Alberdi was part of the Generation of 1837, a literary salon highly influenced by European Romanticism. The increasingly dictatorial rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas forced the group to go underground and eventually to exile in neighboring Uruguay. After the siege of Montevideo in 1843, Alberdi went to Europe and settled subsequently in Chile. As a writer and political commentator, Alberdi was instrumental in the overthrow of Rosas and in the promulgation of the Constitution of 1853. Under the rule of Justo José Urquiza as head of the Argentine Confederation, Alberdi became a diplomatic representative in Europe. His most important work is Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la república Argentina, which as the title indicates became the leading draft of the Constitution of 1853. Due to his experience in Europe, he was also a keen observer of international affairs. The selection included in this volume represents a strong argument in favor of a community of nations whose principal aim was the eradication of war, which he considered as a crime against humanity.

Miguel Antonio Caro (1843–1909) was notable among the most systematic conservative thinkers in Spanish America. He was born in Bogota in a socially prestigious and politically influential family. Caro rose to prominence for his scholarly work on grammar, his translations of Virgil, and, above all, for his defense of the Catholic Church and his critical stand against the radical governments that ruled the country after 1861. He was appointed to his first public post in 1880, as director of the National Library, by the then president, Rafael Núñez, a liberal who broke with the radicals to lead the Regeneración Movement in Colombia. Caro became the closest ally of Núñez, and one of the main architects of the 1886 Constitution. Caro succeeded Núñez after his death (1894) in the presidency of the country. His vast intellectual production, however, preceded his rise to power, including a critical study of Bentham’s utilitarianism. In 1871, he founded El Tradicionista, a newspaper whose pages advocated the protection of the Catholic Church by the Colombian state, and where his series of articles against religious tolerance, the basis of Caro’s piece in our volume, were first published.

Justo Arosemena (1817–1896), better known today as the “father of Panamanian nationalism,” was one of the most notable constitutionalist jurists in nineteenth-century Spanish America. In 1855, Arosemena published El Estado Federal de Panamá at a time when New Granada (Colombia today), of which Panama was part, was following a radical federalist trajectory – that year, he was elected as the first president of the Federal State of Panama. As a leading figure from one of the nine states that formed the Estados Unidos de Colombia in 1863, Arosemena’s voice carried weight. In the following years, he was appointed to several diplomatic posts to represent Colombia in the United States and in other Latin American countries. His credentials as a constitutionalist of hemispheric dimensions were marked by the publication of his Constituciones políticas de la América Meridional (1870), expanded and reedited in 1878 as Estudios constitucionales sobre los gobiernos de América Latina, from which we have selected the passages for our volume.

Lucas Alamán (1792–1853) was a Mexican intellectual and statesman born in Guanajuato, where he witnessed the massacre of Spaniards during Miguel Hidalgo’s revolt in 1810, an event that would forever mark his conservative thinking. He studied at the Colegio de Minas in Mexico City, continuing his education in Freiburg and Göttingen. Alamán occupied several government positions, most importantly at the Ministry of Foreign Relations, until his death in 1853. He was the author of the Disertaciones sobre la historia de la República Mexicana, from which the editors have taken the current selections, and Historia de México desde los primeros movimientos que prepararon la Independencia en el año de 1808 hasta la época presente (1849–1852).

Francisco García Calderón (1883–1953) was one of the most prestigious Spanish American intellectuals during the first decades of the twentieth century, when he was considered “the best interpreter of the continent’s realities.” A Peruvian national, he was born in Valparaíso while his father (then provisional president of Peru) was held prisoner by the Chilean government following the negotiations that ended the War of the Pacific. The family returned to Peru in 1889, and settled in Lima, where García Calderón grew up. He studied philosophy and letters at the Universidad de San Marcos, graduating in 1903. He soon rose to prominence among a new generation of intellectuals, particularly when the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó wrote the prologue of his first book De litteris (1904). In 1906, he moved with his mother and siblings to Paris, where he spent the next four decades of his life. His book Les démocraties latines de l’Amérique was first published in French with a preface by the French president Raymond Poincaré, in 1912. While some fragments of the book appeared in Spanish in 1951, the full first Spanish version was published by the Biblioteca Ayacucho in Caracas in 1979.