4 - Central America

Summary

A comparison of Lázaro Lamadrid, ‘A survey of the historiography of Guatemala since 1821: Part I – The nineteenth century’, TA, 8/2 (1951), 189–202; W. J. Griffith, ‘The historiography of Central America since 1830’, HAHR, 40/4 (1960), 548–69; and R. L. Woodward, Jr., ‘The historiography of modern Central America since 1960’, HAHR, 67/3 (1987), 461–96, reflects the rapid growth of historical publication on Central America in the second half of the twentieth century. For publications since c. 1970 in particular, see the extensive bibliographical essay in R. L. Woodward, Jr., Central America, a Nation Divided, 2nd ed. (New York, 1985), 278–312.

While earlier general works continue to have utility, Woodward, Central America, Ciro Cardoso and Héctor Pérez, Centroamérica y la economía occidental (1530–1930) (San José, C.R., 1977), and James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (London, 1988) incorporate much of the recent scholarship on the first half-century of independence. Edelberto Torres Rivas, Interpretatión del desarrollo social centroamericano (San José, C.R., 1971) has provided much of the inspiration for serious recent historical research in the social sciences in Central America. Histories of individual states that reflect recent scholarship on the nineteenth century include Narda Dobson, A History of Belize (London, 1973); O. N. Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore, 1977); Héctor Lindo–Fuentes, Weak Foundations: The Economy of El Salvador in the Nineteenth Century, 1821–1898 (Berkeley, 1991); David Luna, Manual de historia económica (San Salvador, 1971); and E. Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798–1858 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).