University of New Mexico Press Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Synoptic Methods and Practices (Religions of the Americas Series)

Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America teaches imaginative and distinctive approaches to the practice of history through a series of essays on colonial Latin America. It demonstrates ways of making sense of the past through approaches that aggregate more than they dissect and suggest more than they conclude. Sidestepping more conventional approaches that divide content by subject, source, or historiographical “turn,” the editors seek to take readers beyond these divisions and deep into the process of historical interpretation. The essays in this volume focus on what questions to ask, what sources can reveal, what stories historians can tell, and how a single source can be interpreted in many ways. Review Both students and seasoned scholars will benefit from a careful reading of this innovative volume.--Susan Deans-Smith, author of Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers: The Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico About the Author Karen Melvin is a professor of history and a member of the Latin American Studies Program at Bates College. She is the author of Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain and a series of essays on global Catholicism.Sylvia Sellers-García is an associate professor of history at Boston College. She is the author of Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery. Her current research focuses on social violence in the eighteenth century. Along with Melvin, she is a principal investigator and cofounder of Reading the Inquisition, an online collection of transcribed and translated Inquisition cases.