latin origin of essay

1590s, "trial, attempt, endeavor," also "short, discursive literary composition" (first attested in writings of Francis Bacon, probably in imitation of Montaigne), from French essai "trial, attempt, essay" (in Old French from 12c.), from Late Latin exagium "a weighing, a weight," from Latin exigere "drive out; require, exact; examine, try, test," from ex "out" (see ex- ) + agere "to set in motion, drive" (from PIE root *ag- "to drive, draw out or forth, move") apparently meaning here "to weigh." The suggestion is of unpolished writing. Compare assay , also examine .

"to put to proof, test the mettle of," late 15c., from French essaier , from essai "trial, attempt" (see essay (n.)). This sense has mostly gone with the divergent spelling assay . Meaning "to attempt" is from 1640s. Related: Essayed ; essaying .

Entries linking to essay

c. 1300, "to try, endeavor, strive; test the quality of," from Anglo-French assaier , from assai (n.), from Old French assai , variant of essai "trial" (see essay (n.)). Related: Assayed ; assaying .

c. 1300, "put (someone) to question in regard to knowledge, competence, or skill, inquire into qualifications or capabilities;" mid-14c., "inspect or survey (something) carefully, scrutinize, view or observe in all aspects with the purpose of forming a correct opinion or judgment," from Old French examiner "interrogate, question, torture," from Latin examinare "to test or try; consider, ponder," literally "to weigh," from examen "a means of weighing or testing," probably ultimately from exigere "demand, require, enforce," literally "to drive or force out," also "to finish, measure," from ex "out" (see ex- ) + agere "to set in motion, drive, drive forward; to do, perform" (from PIE root *ag- "to drive, draw out or forth, move"). Legal sense of "question or hear (a witness in court)" is from early 15c. Related: Examined ; examining .

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The History of Essay: Origin and Evolvement

These days, an essay is one of the key assignments at college. This particular task allows tutors to evaluate the student’s knowledge effectively. But it was not always a key assessment tool in the education sphere. So, when did an essay become so important for study purposes? And who invented the essay? According to Aldous Huxley, this particular literary piece can be used to describe almost everything. Essays have become very popular since the first day this type of paper was introduced. What is more, the first time the essay appeared in the far 16th century, it was a part of a self-portrayal done by Michel de Montaigne. The term essay was adopted from French “essayer”, which was adopted from Latin “exagere”. The last one means “to sort through”. In the far 16th century, the essay was mostly a form of a literary piece. Afterward, it has gained wider use in literature and study. It lost all its formality and has become quite a popular writing form. Besides, it has turned into quite a complicated study assignment. That is why many modern students need help writing an essay these days.

Difference Between Essay and Article

In contrast to an article that mostly has an informative purpose, an essay is more a literary paper. The “essay” concept can refer to practically any short piece of report or small composition. It can be a short story, some critical piece, etc. The essay differs from an article or other kinds of papers. Many prominent features distinguish essays from research papers, case studies, or reports. The essay paper has a standard structure in most cases. Sometimes, the layout can be a little bit creative. An article provides information on a certain topic. It has a mostly informative character and does not tend to deliver solutions or recommendations. Besides, it lacks a strict formatting style and outline. Still, it mostly refers to modern academic essays. In old times, essays had no defined format or structure. The origin of the essay does not affect its current usage. Now, it is an effective educational tool and one of the top college projects. Academic essays have an assigned structure and formatting style. You cannot ignore the provided requirements if you want to have a good grade. There are many strict rules to essays assigned at college. Students often check long tutorials to learn how to prepare a proper essay

Types of Essays and Its Characteristics

In the history of the essay, there were always different types of essays. First and foremost, essays were divided into formal and informal. Next, impersonal and familiar. Formal essays are mostly focused on the described topic. Informal essays are more personal and focused on the essayist.

Academic essays differ greatly with their wide variety of types and formats. You can count descriptive, argumentative, reflective, analytical, persuasive, narrative, expository essays’ types. The key types of academic essays include analytical, descriptive, persuasive, and critical.

Every of the mentioned types has its own essay format. They also differ by structure, length, main points to analyze, and purposes. In old times, writers were mostly concerned by the personal or impersonal tone of written composition. It takes more effort to learn all the types of academic essays these days. Besides, they all have a different focus and the final goal.

The most popular narrative essay is quite familiar to the one it was just a few centuries ago. In this paper, you tell the story and focus on a single idea. Such papers like argumentative or analytical essays are more like research papers. They require a thesis statement, strong arguments, and supporting evidence. You have to conduct research work. It is way more difficult than to tell a simple story. Still, even storytelling requires natural talents and a clever mind to be appreciated by readers.     

Essay Evolvement and Modern Use

The essay history describes the way the traditional essay was turned into a decent educational tool. First, the essay was a typical literary form of expression. Authors were mostly concerned to share their point of view about some ideas or themselves in the composition. It gained more personal coloring than any other paper in years.

Since being parted from a self-portrayal, this particular piece was mostly essayist-focused originally. Afterward, once the essay writers have figured out it can describe particularly everything, an essay has gained wider use. Not every modern essay writer knows how the term “essay” was created. Still, modern writers face even bigger challenges with these particular kinds of written papers.

The key reasons include a set of strict rules and requirements for academic essays. They force writers to come up only with the most interesting and unique ideas. Also, they make writers prepare papers formatted due to an assigned formatting style only. Besides, many types of essays require strong analytical abilities.

An analytical essay is like a research paper. It also requires all the elements of a research piece. Thus, the ability to conduct proper research work and provide a complex analysis is mandatory for a modern author as well.

Final Thoughts

Preparing an essay can take a lot of time and great effort these days. With lots of complex requirements and difficult writing instructions, students often need outside writing essay help to succeed.

A modern essay differs greatly from the one it was in the far 16th century. In the first years, this particular writing form was introduced, it was a part of self-portrayal. In many following years, it turned into one of the most popular compositions and the top college assignment.

Nowadays, there is probably not a single student who has never dealt with an essay. Therefore, knowing how it was created and who introduced it to the world can be quite interesting and surely very informative for everyone. Knowing history helps to recognize yourself in the world better. Knowledge can always be quite a driving force for every person.

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Definition of essay

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of essay  (Entry 2 of 2)

transitive verb

• composition

attempt , try , endeavor , essay , strive mean to make an effort to accomplish an end.

attempt stresses the initiation or beginning of an effort.

try is often close to attempt but may stress effort or experiment made in the hope of testing or proving something.

endeavor heightens the implications of exertion and difficulty.

essay implies difficulty but also suggests tentative trying or experimenting.

strive implies great exertion against great difficulty and specifically suggests persistent effort.

Examples of essay in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'essay.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Middle French essai , ultimately from Late Latin exagium act of weighing, from Latin ex- + agere to drive — more at agent

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 4

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 2

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Cite this entry.

“Essay.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/essay. Accessed 5 Apr. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of essay.

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Latin Terms and Abbreviations

What this handout is about.

In your college career, you will encounter the abbreviations e.g. and i.e. E.g. is a Latin abbreviation that means “for example” and often appears before lists. I.e. is another Latin abbreviation that means “in other words,” “namely,” or “which is to say.” Use e.g. when introducing a non-exhaustive list of examples and i.e. when rephrasing the exact same idea in different words. The rest of this handout explains these and many other Latin abbreviations you might see, such as etc., N.B, cf., sic, versus, circa, et al., ibid. and id., and more.

About Latin terms and abbreviations

Despite the fact that Latin is no longer the international language of scholars, bits and pieces of it can still be found scattered around. Some of these bits are very common and are even seen in non-academic writing, while others are much more obscure.

Simply knowing what an abbreviation stands for and how to translate the underlying Latin words does not necessarily tell you how the abbreviation is used in actual modern practice. These little remnants of Latin have had a long and colorful life separated from their original language and context.

There are a few generally accepted rules that apply to most Latin abbreviations. The major style manuals (MLA, APA and Chicago) agree that Latin abbreviations should be kept out of the main body of a text-that is, they should not appear in ordinary sentences within ordinary paragraphs. Certain abbreviations may be used in parentheses within the body of a text (etc., e.g., i.e.), but the rest should appear only in footnotes, endnotes, tables, and other forms of documentation. One notable exception: APA style allows writers to use the abbreviation et al. when discussing works with multiple authors and v. in the titles of court cases.

Except for N.B., none of the abbreviations we’re about to discuss need to be italicized or capitalized.

Why should you bother learning about Latin abbreviations?

While it’s perfectly acceptable to use English phrases instead of Latin abbreviations, there’s a reason why these abbreviations have survived and continue to be used today: they contain a lot of meaning in a very small package. It takes less time and fewer characters to write e.g. than “for example.” As an added bonus, using Latin abbreviations correctly can make your writing sound more sophisticated and scholarly.

Even if you decide that you don’t want to use Latin abbreviations in your own writing, you’re still going to encounter them in other texts. Knowing what these abbreviations mean and how they are used is crucial to understanding and interpreting these works.

The big three: etc., i.e., and e.g.

The average person could go through life never having to worry about most Latin abbreviations, but there are three that have become so widespread that they’re impossible to avoid: etc., i.e. and e.g. These are also the most often misused Latin abbreviations. Let’s take a look at each of them, what they mean and how they can be used.

The abbreviation etc. stands for et cetera, which translates literally as “and others” or “and the rest.” A more useful translation that can be substituted for etc. (especially when reading aloud) is “and so on.” It is used at the end of a list to indicate that there are more elements to the list that are being left out so that the list doesn’t become too long. For example:

All of the objects in our solar system (planets, comets, etc.) orbit the sun.

Many other examples could be included in a list of objects in our solar system (like asteroids and moons), but it would take too much space and time to list them all. Also, listing them all wouldn’t add much to the sentence-readers don’t need to know the identity of every object orbiting the sun in order to understand the sentence.

In lists where you use etc., be sure all the listed items are of the same kind. If you wrote the following sentence, your readers might have a hard time telling what “etc.” is substituting for because some of the items listed are objects, while others are people or activities:

I’m very interested in astronomy—planets, stargazing, Carl Sagan, etc.

When etc. is used at the end of a list, it should be preceded by a comma just like the other elements of the list. It should never have the word “and” before it: the Latin word et has already got that covered.

e.g. and i.e.

These are the two most often misused and confused Latin abbreviations-and for good reason. In any given sentence, it’s often not immediately clear how i.e. and e.g. are different. Both appear inside parentheses and offer extra information that helps explain what’s come before. There is, however, a very important and useful difference between these two abbreviations.

The abbreviation e.g. stands for exempli gratia, which translates literally as “for the sake of an example”-but you can really just cut out the stuff in the middle and read it as “for example.” It is used to give an example or set of examples to help clarify the preceding idea. In general, if you use e.g., you should provide one or two short examples. More can be used, but only if they are simple and can be expressed in a single word or short phrase. It isn’t necessary to use etc. at the end of a list following e.g.; it’s understood that there are more examples than those that you’ve given. You should not list all of the possible examples.

The abbreviation i.e. stands for id est, which translates literally as “that is.” Sometimes it might be more useful, however, to translate it as “what that means is” or “that is to say.” This abbreviation is used to clarify the preceding idea by restating it more simply or in different terms. Strictly speaking, what follows i.e. in parentheses should be equivalent to what comes before-you should be able to switch them without changing the meaning of the sentence. If this involves making a list, you should include all of the elements that make up that list. It might be useful to think of i.e. as representing an equal sign (=). This will help you remember that i.e. stands for a strict equivalence.

Let’s look at some examples of how to use i.e. and e.g. correctly:

YES: The rocky planets (e.g., Mercury) are closest to our sun.

NO: The rocky planets (i.e., Mercury) are closest to our sun.

Mercury is not equivalent to the rocky planets-they’re not the same thing. Mercury is just one example of a rocky planet, therefore e.g. is appropriate.

YES: The rocky planets (i.e., Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are closest to our sun.

YES: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars (i.e., the rocky planets) are closest to our sun.

NO: The rocky planets (e.g., Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) are closest to our sun.

Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are all of the examples of rocky planets in our solar system (they are a full and complete list, not just a few examples), so e.g. should not be used. Instead, use i.e. to show that the list of four planets is equivalent to the rocky planets-they refer to the same thing. Notice that switching the rocky planets and Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence.

In some instances, i.e. and e.g. may both be acceptable, but using one or the other will drastically change the meaning of the sentence. For example:

Farmer Brown sells his produce (e.g., apples, oranges, carrots) at the market.

Farmer Brown sells his produce (i.e., apples, oranges, carrots) at the market.

In the first sentence, the use of e.g. tells the reader that Farmer Brown sells many different types of produce, including apples oranges and carrots. The information contained in the parentheses provides a few examples to help clarify the meaning of produce. In the second sentence, the use of i.e. tells the reader that Farmer Brown sells only apples, oranges and carrots -nothing else. The information contained in the parentheses tells the reader that, as far as Farmer Brown is concerned, apples, oranges and carrots are what constitute produce-they are equivalent.

Other useful abbreviations

While etc., e.g. and i.e. are perhaps the most important Latin abbreviations for you to get acquainted with, there are other less common abbreviations that you may find useful in certain situations.

The abbreviation N.B. stands for nota bene, which literally translates as “note well,” although in practice you can read it as “pay attention.” It is used in endnotes or footnotes to call the reader’s attention to a particularly important piece of information-such as a key assumption of or exception to an argument-that is nevertheless not crucial enough to be included in the main body of the paper. Also, notice that N.B. is the only Latin abbreviation that should be capitalized.

Example: N.B.: While all of the study participants were interviewed about their prior medical histories, researchers did not have access to their medical records to confirm the accuracy of self-reported data.

The abbreviation cf. stands for the Latin word confer which means “compare.” It is primarily used in endnotes or footnotes to point readers to works that the author recommends referencing in comparison with the work at hand. Therefore, it might be more useful to read cf. as “but compare this to.” It is generally preceded by citations of works that are sources for the author’s argument and then followed by one or two examples of works that somehow differ from or depart from the argument. Although it is not strictly necessary to explain how these works are different, you might find it useful to include a short phrase for the benefit of your reader.

Example: 2. Jones 1992, Smith 2003; cf. on methodology Harris 2005.

Although it is not an abbreviation, sic is included here because it is one of the more frequently used Latin terms. The word sic means “thus” or “so” and is used in quotations to indicate that any strange aspects of a piece of text, such as errors in of grammar, spelling, or word choice, are part of the original text and not a typo. Therefore, it could be more appropriately translated as “yes, that’s actually what it says.” Depending on the style you’re using, sic is italicized and placed in brackets after the word or phrase it identifies (as in APA and Chicago), or it is simply placed in parentheses after the entire quote (as in MLA). Consult the most recent edition of the appropriate style handbook to ensure that you’re using the proper format.

versus (vs. or v.)

You have probably seen the term versus or one of its abbreviation, vs. or v., in the names of court cases (for example, “Smith v. the State of North Carolina”). Versus translates as “against” or “as opposed to.” Versus is used to express conflict or comparison. You may see it in the main body of academic texts, in phrases such as “man versus nature,” “measured in kilograms versus pounds,” or “protectionism versus free trade.” Versus and its abbreviations also appear frequently in the titles of books and articles.

Circa, which translates as “around” or “approximately,” usually appears with dates. You may see it abbreviated as c. or ca. (or, more rarely, as cca. or cir.). It indicates that a number or value is approximate, not exact. For example, you might see sentences like “the construction of Stonehenge began circa 3000 BCE.” More rarely, you may see circa in reference to measurements of amounts, such as “circa $45,000” or “c. 1.5 mL.” Your meaning will often be clearer to readers if you stick with English in the main body of your text and save “c.” for things in parentheses and notes. So, for example, you might write “the construction of Stonehenge began around 3000 BCE” or “when Stonehenge began to be constructed (c. 3000 BCE).”

Citation shortcuts

The abbreviations in this section are used primarily in notes and bibliographic entries in order to save space. It is important to understand these abbreviations not only so that you can correctly interpret bibliographic citations, but also so that your citations can be accessible to your readers.

The Latin abbreviation et al. stands for et alii which translates as “and other people.” It is like etc., but it is used only for people. You will generally see et al. used in bibliographical entries for books, articles, or other publications that have several authors (usually four or more) in order to save space. In such cases, the name of the first author will be given in full and then followed by et al. As with etc., there is no need to include ‘and’ before et al., but do notice that unlike etc. there is a space (and no period) after et in this abbreviation.

ibid. and id.

The abbreviation ibid. stands for the Latin word ibidem, which means “in the same place.” It is used in endnotes or footnotes when you cite the same source and page number(s) two or more times. If you cite the same source but a different page number, you can use ibid. followed by a comma and the page number(s). Also, note that ibid. is capitalized when it begins a note. For example:

• 1. Barsby, 99-101.
• 3. Ibid., 97.

Although it is becoming less common, you may encounter the abbreviation id. used in a way similar to ibid. The abbreviation id. stands for idem, which means “the same person.” It is used in place of ibid. when the same author is cited but not the same page number. In such instances, ibid. is only used to repeat the preceding citation exactly. For example:

• 3. Id., 97.

Like sic, passim is not an abbreviation, but it is included here as a Latin term commonly used to save space in bibliographic entries. The Latin word passim means “here and there” or “throughout.” It is used when a particular word, phrase or idea is not restricted to just a few pages of a work, but occurs in many different places. Using passim is not a way to avoid providing specific citations—instead, it indicates to the reader that the information being cited occurs frequently in the work and that they may want to use the table of contents or index to find specific examples.

Abbreviation obscurity

While you may occasionally encounter the following abbreviations in your academic career, they are becoming increasingly rare. There is no need for you to attempt to incorporate them into your own writing. Instead, use short English phrases; it will be easier for you to write and for your reader to understand!

loc. cit. and op. cit.

The abbreviations loc. cit. and op. cit. are old forms used in bibliographic citations similar to ibid. and id. above. The abbreviation loc. cit. stands for loco citato, which translates as “in the place cited,” whereas op. cit. stands for opere citato which translates as “in the work cited.” Generally, loc. cit. is used to refer to the same work and page number(s) as the previous citation, while op. cit. refers only to the same work and may or may not be followed by page numbers. In all modern style manuals, ibid. is preferred to loc. cit. and op. cit.

inf. and sup.

The abbreviations inf. and sup. stand for the words infra and supra, which translate as “below” and “above” respectively. They are used to indicate that information will be more fully explained or cited elsewhere. If the information has already appeared in an earlier note, sup. is used. If the information will appear in a later note (where a more complete citation or explanation is perhaps more appropriate), inf. is used. In general, you can replace both of these abbreviations with “see below” and “see above” without any change in meaning.

viz. and sc.

The abbreviation viz. stands for the Latin contraction videlicet which translates literally as “it is permitted to see,” but a more useful translation is “namely” or “that is to say.” It is used to clarify something by elaborating on it, giving a detailed description of it, or providing a complete list. In this sense, viz. is similar to i.e., although viz. tends to emphasize the precision and exactness of what follows and is thus a stronger version of i.e. It is generally acceptable to use i.e. instead of viz.

The similar abbreviation sc. stands for the Latin contraction scilicet which translates literally as “it is permitted to know,” but a more useful translation is “namely” or “as if to say.” It is often used to provide a clarification, remove an ambiguity, or supply an omitted word. Like viz., sc. is a more specific version of i.e. and stresses the clarity of what follows. As with viz., it is generally acceptable to use i.e. rather than sc.

The abbreviation q.v. stands for quod vide, which translates literally as “which see,” although in practice it means something more like “for which see elsewhere.” It is used in notes after a word or phrase to indicate that more information can be found about the topic somewhere else in the current work. Because q.v. is generally used in reference books or similar works, page numbers are not included after it. The reader is expected to know how to locate this information without further assistance. Since there is always the possibility that the reader won’t be able to find the information cited by q.v., it’s better to use a simple English phrase such as “for more on this topic, see pages 72-3” or “a detailed definition appears on page 16.” Such phrases are immediately comprehensible to the reader (who may not even know what q.v. means) and remove any ambiguity about where additional information is located.

The abbreviation s.v. stands for sub verbo, which translates as “under the word.” It is used when citing a specific entry in a dictionary or encyclopedia. The word or phrase following the abbreviation should correspond exactly to the heading in the dictionary or encyclopedia so that the reader can find the precise entry being indicated. Since s.v. is no longer recognizable to most modern readers, it is better to use a simple English phrase such as “see the Oxford English Dictionary; look under grape” or something similar.

We hope that this handout will be useful to you as you decipher the Latin terms and abbreviations in your reading and perhaps begin to use them in your own writing!

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Latin and Italic Historical Linguistics

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Duenos Inscription (Old Latin)

The Duenos inscription, as recorded by Heinrich Dressel (conventionally dated to 6th or early 5th c. BCE )

Courtesy Wikipedia

Introduction

Latin belongs to the Indo-European language family, specifically to the Italic branch of Indo-European. In the early first millennium BCE, Latin was one of many languages spoken on the Italian Peninsula, which hosted several other ancient Italic dialects as well as Ancient Greek (spoken in Greek colonies along the southern coast) and an influential non-Indo-European language known as Etruscan. Using evidence from Latin and its ancient Italic relatives, linguists group Italic into two sub-branches: Latino-Faliscan, comprising Latin and Faliscan, and Osco-Umbrian (also known as Sabellic ), including Oscan, Umbrian, South Picene, and several other minor Italic dialects.

Originally Latin was spoken in the Latium region (modern Lazio), mainly along the Tiber river, where Roman civilization first emerged. With the rise of Rome and its military conquest of Italy from the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE, Latin eventually spread throughout the Italian Peninsula and became the dominant language. By comparison with Latin, the other Italic languages are poorly attested and are thought to have become extinct by the Imperial Period.

The following centuries would see Latin spread further due to Roman expansion into southern Europe and the surrounding Mediterranean region. Latin was spoken across the Empire, and in a number of Roman territories, such as Gaul (modern France) and the Iberian Peninsula, Latin all but replaced the local languages, much as it had in Italy. But with the decline of Rome and collapse of Roman civilization by the middle of the first millennium C.E., the unifying effect of the Empire on Latin was weakened and lost. From a late version of spoken Latin known as Proto-Romance , regional dialects began to emerge in the early Middle Ages in southern and western European areas of the former Empire; eventually these developed into the Romance languages of today, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Rumanian.

The Harvard collection is rich in materials for the study of Latin and other ancient Italic dialects.   Among its holdings are numerous handbooks, grammars, lexica, and primary materials for the study of Latin and Italic historical linguistics. Of further value are the many dissertations, scholarly journals, and online resources available to the Harvard community.

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Latin American Essay: Literary Constructions of Cultural Identity

• Freddy Chachagua The College of The Bahamas

Author Biography

Freddy chachagua, the college of the bahamas.

Ainsa, F. (1986). ldentidad cultural de Iberoamerica en su narrativa. Gredos.

Anderson Imbert, E. (1965). Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana, Vol. 1. (5th ed.). Fonda de Cultura Economica.

Arguedas, J. M. (1990). No soy un aculturado. In E.-M. Fell (Ed.), El zorrode arriba y el zorro de abajo (pp. 256-58). Tave.

Aullón de Haro, Pedro. (1987). EI ensayo filosofico actual. In Pedro Aullón de Haro (Ed.), Los generos ensayisticos en el siglo XX (pp. 94-111). Taurus.

Chachagua, F. (1998). Jose Marti. In T. Chevalier (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the essay (pp. 535-37). FitzRoy Dearborn.

Chanady, A. B. (1994). Latin American imagined communities and the postmodern challenge. In A. B. Chanady (Ed.), Latin American identity and constructions of difference (pp. ix-xvi). University of Minnesota Press.

De Grandis, R. (1997). Incursiones en torno a hibridacion: Una propuesta para discusion De la mediacion linguistica de Bajtin a la mediacion simbolica de Garcia Canclini. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 23(46), 37-51. https://doi.org/10.2307/4530925

Eley, G. (1994). Nations, publics, and political cultures: Placing Habermas in the nineteenth century. In N. B. Dirks, G. Eley & S. B. Ortner (Eds.), Culture/power/history (pp. 297-335). Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691228006-013

Garcia Canclini, N. (1990) Culturas hibridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Grijalbo.

Garcia- Pinto, M. (1986). La identidad cultural de la vanguardia en Latinoamérica. In S. Yurkievich (Ed.), Identidad cultural de Iberoamérica en su literatura (pp. 102-110). Alhambra.

Gates, H. L. (1987). Authority, (white) power and the (black) critic; It's all Greek to me. Cultural Critique, (7), 19-46. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354149

Lagmanovich, D. (1984). Hacia una teoría del ensayo hispanoamericano. In I. Levy & J. Loveluck (Eds.), Simposio El ensayo Hispanoamericano, enero 29-31, 1981, University of South Carolina (pp. 13-28).

Martí Jose. (1973). Nuestra America. (2nd ed.). Ariel.

Mead Jr., Robert G. (1956). Breve historia del ensayo hispanoamericano. Ediciones de Andrea.

Sacoto, Antonio. (1981). El indio en el ensayo de fa America espanola. Casa de la cultura.

Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. (1991). Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (8th ed.). Porrua.

Vega, I. G. (1945). Comentarios reales de los Incas. Emece.

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What Does Latinx Mean?

Understand the meaning so you can add this inclusive term to your vocabulary.

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Latinx, a gender neutral alternative to Latina and Latino, is a term that has recently gained a presence in popular culture. The term is used to describe the diverse group of people who have roots in Latin America. Because the Spanish language classifies most words as masculine or feminine, the term Latinx emerged out of an act of solidarity to include LGBTQIA+ folks who may not want to be classified as male or female. Latinx is an intersectional term that aims to include all people of Latin American descent.

“Latinx is an inclusive term that can collectively refer to people who identify within and outside the gender binary,” say Alan Aja, a professor in the Puerto Rican and Latin Studies department at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Maria Scharrón-del Río, a professor in the School Counseling Program at the same institution.

What is the origin of the word Latinx?

The term Latinx emerged from the Spanish-speaking queer community to challenge the gender binary, explain Aja and Scharrón-del Río. While the exact origin of the term is unclear, its use can be traced back to online queer community forums. Some researchers have found early uses of the “x” in place of the gendered “o” and “a” dating back to the late '90s. The term became recently popularized, however, after the devastating Pulse Massacre in 2016, the mass shooting that occurred at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

“We found that after the Pulse Massacre, Latinx was thrust into larger use,” say Aja and Scharrón-del Río. “Perhaps as an act of resistance, solidarity and visibility of non-binary gender identities as the LGBTQ+ [community] was being attacked.”

What are the differences between the terms Latino, Latina and Hispanic?

Because Spanish is a language with grammatical gender, certain words are used to describe men and others are used to describe women. “Latino and Latina are gendered variants of Latinx,” explains Eve Rosenfeld, a Ph.D. candidate in Psychology at the University at Buffalo who researches identity invalidation in Black and white Latinxs. “Latino encompasses male-only groups of Latinx individuals, as well as mixed-gender groups of Latinx individuals. Latina encompasses female-only groups of Latinx individuals.”

Some say the use of Latina and Latino, however, can be exclusionary and inequitable. “Using these gendered terms ignores those with genders that fall outside of the male-female binary. Additionally, the gendered terms center men over women,” says Rosenfeld.

Yael Rosenstock Gonzalez, an author and identity coach, breaks it down for non-Spanish speakers. “An English equivalent of Latino is the use of ‘mankind’ to refer to all humans,” she says. “While ‘mankind’ is understood to include women and potentially other genders, the name is inherently masculine.”

How do you pronounce Latinx? How do you use it in a sentence?

Latinx is most commonly pronounced “Latin-EX.” It is also sometimes pronounced “la-TEE-nex” or “La-TEENKS.”

Here are the different ways you can use the term in a sentence, explains Rosenfeld:

• It can be used as an adjective: Latinx Americans, Latinx members of the LGBT+ community
• It can also be used as a noun: Latinxs in academia often deal with microaggressions and discrimination.
• It can be used singularly (I am a Latinx woman) or plurally (Latinxs are the fastest growing population in higher education).
• It can describe individuals (I identify as Latinx) and groups (Latinxs living in Southern California).

Why do some people have an issue with the term Latinx?

While Latinx is a word created with inclusivity in mind, not everyone supports its use . Some people think that Latinx is an elitist term that is mostly used in academic settings. It has also been called out as a form of “linguistic imperialism,” meaning some think the term Latinx represents English policing the Spanish language in a way that doesn’t correspond with its grammar or conventional way of speaking. Because Latinx doesn’t sound like other words in Spanish, it could also potentially alienate non-English speaking people of Latin American descent.

Rosenstock Gonzalez offers an alternative: the term “Latine” (pronounced La-TEEN or Latin-EH). She says, “The use of ‘e’ does not have gendered associations. For example Latine, elles, todes, amigues — all of which would be easier to incorporate into the Spanish sounds that already exist and is therefore an easier sell to Spanish speakers.”

While a single word may never perfectly describe such a diverse and rich culture, using intentional language counts. “The use of Latinx and Latine is an act of solidarity and resistance against the violence that racist, sexist, heterosexist, classist, xenophobic, ableist and other oppressive structures inflict in our communities,” say Aja and Scharrón-del Río.

Natalia Sylvester, author of the YA novel Running about a Latinx teen whose father is running for president, says, “The term Latinx may not be a perfect one, but the willingness to change (and more importantly, to listen to the LGBTQ community on this) is vital.”

How can I be an ally to Latinx people?

Given the escalating violence enacted against Latinx people, allies must step up to the plate. To start, employ the language they ask you to use. Then, listen, align and act.

“To be an ally to Latinx people is to first and foremost acknowledge the term’s legitimacy and respect someone’s choice to use it, even if you choose not to,” says Nicholas Patino, a photographer and community leader based in Miami.

Rosenfeld offers an imperative: “The most important thing to do as an ally is to listen, non-defensively,” she says. “Support our causes. Fight against ICE. Dismantle your own racism. Don't invalidate our identities, even if our appearance diverges from your expectations. Don't assume things about us based on our identity. Not all of us are immigrants. Not all of us speak Spanish. We are extremely diverse. Recognize that diversity. Center your allyship around our voices.”

More on Hispanic Heritage Month

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Online Introduction to Latin America

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History, Diversity, and Community in Texts, Images, and Sounds

William H. Beezley

The Online Introduction to Latin America  provides a primer that explores this fascinating region, demonstrating its absorbing histories of empires, colonies, enclaves, and nations; its vast diversity of peoples, landscapes, animals, plants, and cultures; and its multitudinous communities of nations, ethnicities, and localities. This syllabus offers a guide to readings and additional sources from the standard text Modern Latin America, Eighth Edition (Oxford, 2013), written by Thomas E. Skidmore, Peter H. Smith, and James N. Green.  The syllabus further explores the region’s diversity by drawing on video episodes from In the Americas with David Yetman (American Public Broadcasting),  and audio recordings and descriptions that deliver the sounds of it all, with links to musical selections from Oxford Music Online  (subscription required) ,  the Smithsonian Latino Center ,  and the UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music .  These major sources are augmented with specific essays from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History , additional videos and podcasts, and supplemental recordings. 

Each lesson follows the sixteen-chapter outline of the Modern Latin America text. Besides featuring the organizing principles offered by the text, the marvelous diversity depicted in the videos, and the sounds reproduced in the recordings, this Online Introduction places emphasis on the various communities that Latin Americans have built from shared nationality and ethnicity. Lessons also include two optional sections: “Added Dimensions,” which offer more complete political and economic information than what is available in the Modern Latin America text, and “For the Curious,” which illustrates the rich diversity, character, and heritage of Latin America. Successfully completing the Online Introduction will provide a bountiful source of information, experiences, and reactions, giving users valuable context for understanding the region.

For students using the Online Introduction as a course, or for individuals who belong to discussion groups about Latin America, each lesson includes a “Learner’s Practicum” that provides specific assignments suitable for individual study or collaborative work.

Part 1: Introduction to Latin America

READ Modern Latin America , Chapter 1: “Why Latin America?” pp. 3–15.

• Give particular attention to the section called “Ideas and Themes,” pp. 12–14.

       Added Dimension  “ State of Biodiversity in Latin America and the Caribbean ,” Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean (ROLAC) (2010).

For the Curious   Mary Kalin T. Arroyo et al., “ Biodiversity in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Assessment of Knowledge, Research Scope, and Priority Areas ,” in Science for a Better Life: Developing Regional  Scientific Programs in Priority Areas for Latin America and the Caribbean, Volume 1 (2010); Laura Tlaiye, “ Expanding Financing for Biodiversity Conservation: Experiences from Latin America and the Caribbean ,” World  Bank Occasional Paper Series (2012).

WATCH   In the Americas with David Yetman

• Episode 301, “ ABC Islands: The Dutch Legacy in the Caribbean .”
• Episode 502, “ Trinidad and Tobago: Where East Meets West .” 
• Episode 603, “The Dominican Republic: Nation on a Divided Island” (episode forthcoming).

These video episodes of In the Americas demonstrate that the Caribbean region offers a microcosm of Latin America, with a megacity and rural life (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic), ethnic and cultural diversity (Trinidad and Tobago), African ethnic and cultural influences (throughout the region), populations from outside Spain and Portugal (the Dutch islands), and biotic diversity (throughout the episodes).

LISTEN and VIEW   The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Folkways, and the Smithsonian Latino Center have created a virtual exhibition featuring the diversity of Latin American and Latino music.

• “ Música Del Pueblo: A Virtual Exhibition of Latino Roots Music and Culture in the United States and Latin America ,” Smithsonian Latino Center and Smithsonian Folkways.

LEARNER’S PRACTICUM   For each lesson, please consider what the topic and sources mean to you, what information they provide, what new ideas they stimulate. Then, write at least 500 words or display in digital form your judgments with careful analysis and thoughtful revision, in one of the following formats: 

• An essay as a formal report.
• A personal blog that you may continue throughout the course.  This will enable you to write, if you choose, in a more informal style, and you can quickly review your thinking from various lessons. 
• An e-mail addressed to a friend or family member about your intellectual journey through Latin America. This format can allow you to adopt a friendly style and to write in the first person.
• Digital response : Using an online digital program such as 123D ,   SketchUp , Mapbox , Piktochart , StoryMap , or Moovly (all are available to users free of charge), create an interactive response, such as an interactive map of human, musical, or natural diversity, or an infographic that uses chronological and spatial changes to demonstrate relationships, or an animated example of the theme. This may be developed over several or all of the lessons. 

CONSIDER, WRITE, or CREATE

(Choose one of the following. Remember, you can devise a digital response to any of these exercises)

• Which of the themes discussed by the authors of the text, and alluded to by the host of the video episodes, seems the most relevant to providing an understanding of the region? Give specific examples that  demonstrate why it is appealing, and identify at least three reasons why it seems interesting, significant, and appropriate.  
• After reading, watching, listening, and thinking, do you believe the region is too diverse to be called Latin America? Why might the label be inappropriate? Do you have other suggestions?  Why is it accurate enough to serve? Use examples to support your conclusion.
• What surprised you about the introductory material on Latin America?  What five questions did this surprise inspire? What are supporting examples? Are there contradictory ones?
• Which of the themes seem most intriguing for a discussion with friends or family about Latin American diversity and identity? Give three reasons with examples that account for this conclusion.  

Part 2: Colonial Foundations

READ    Modern Latin America , Chapter 2: “The Colonial Foundations,” pp. 16–44.

     Added Dimension Interview with Terence D’Altroy by Peter Tyson. “ Rise of the Inca ,” NOVA (WGBH Educational Foundation, 2007).

• Episode 103, “ The Pride of Guatemala: Tikal of the Mayas. ” 
• Episode 204, “ Two Millennia of Mayas: Guatemala’s Cultural Legacy. ”

Read the “ Introduction to Latin American Music ” on  Oxford Music Online . Themes include 1. The conquest and the colonial period; 2. Indigenous music before and after the conquest; 3. Mestizo musics; 4. African-derived music; and 5. Iberian influences. 

Listen to the associated recordings described in this selection by choosing three musical performances representing indigenous, Afro-colonial, and Spanish music of the period. Recommendations include “ Hanacpachap cussicuinin ,”  “ Xicochi, xicochi ,” bata drumming and Orisha rhythms , música guajira , and the Gavotte in B Minor by J. S. Bach.

Listen to Bernard Gordillo’s Music of Spanish Colonial Latin America and Luann Johnson’s A Baroque Christmas in the New World . 

For the Curious  Examine and listen to the music discussed in Mexico: Music of Pre-Columbian Origin .  This collection surveys the archive of indigenous Mexican records housed at the National Indigenous Institute, (Instituto Nacional Indigena—INI). Its focus is the musical traditions that have remained intact since pre-Columbian times.

LEARNER’S PRACTICUM

CONSIDER, WRITE, OR CREATE

(Remember, you can devise a digital response to any of these exercises.)

• Did music make the conquest more than military victories and forced conversions? Or did music provide a method of resistance against European domination? Or did it serve in both ways, even in some cases for the same individuals? 
• How do the video episodes demonstrate the character of Maya culture and its legacy, or the Inca culture and its legacy?
• Were there characteristics of the Maya or Inca civilizations that contributed to the manner of Spanish conquest? What characteristics of Maya or Inca culture contributed to Spanish and European awe for these societies?  Does the survival of the Maya or Inca cultures demonstrate that the conquest was only superficial and little more than cursory political domination?
• What did the colonizing peoples bring to the Americas? What did the Americas send back to Spain, Portugal, and Europe?
• How did the conquest and colonial years change European understanding of the world? Did it increase understanding of diversity, or did it hinder thinking about the world’s fantastic features?

Part 3: Mexico: The Taming of a Revolution

READ   Modern Latin America , Chapter 3: “Mexico: The Taming of a Revolution,” pp. 47–78.

     Added Dimension  Jürgen Buchenau, “ The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1946 ,”  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History.

WATCH   In the Americas with David Yetman 

• Episode 109, “ The Cry for Mexican Independence. ”
• Episode 201, “ Tultepec: Mexico’s Skyrocket Central .”
• Episode 503, “ Mexico City’s Markets: a Millennium of Trade .”

LISTEN   Oxford Music Online entry “ Latin America ”. 

Section I: “Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean,” and Section III: “Afro-American Music.” Watch and listen to “ A Mexican Sound: A Documentary about Mexico's Mountain Music ,” directed by Roy Germano (2013), and “ Mexico: Days of Struggle ,” by Judith Reyes (1973), courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways. Be certain to download the liner notes. 

For the Curious   Mexican life has been recorded in numerous collections of photographs. For additional information about one such collection available online, see Jonathan Saxon,“ Digital Resource: Getty Research Institute Digital Exhibitions and Portals for Mexico ,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History.

(Remember, you can devise a digital response to any of these exercises)

• Explanations of the course of Mexican history examine the intense regionalism of the nation, the intervention of foreign powers such as France and the United States, corruption of the political system, and the asymmetry of wealth and poverty, among other arguments. Based on the readings, videos, and audio material, discuss in some form the dimensions of Mexico’s history.
• Mexico is regarded as a Roman Catholic society. Discuss the role of the church in the nation’s history, with specific examples. 
• Fireworks, music, and markets festoon everyday Mexican life. Consider whether these and other aspects of popular culture reflect the national history and culture. If you conclude they do not, what do they     represent? 
• Consider the title of the text chapter, “The Taming of a Revolution,” and discuss whether it adequately describes the sequence of Mexican history. 
• An alternative question for the curious who consulted the Getty Research Collection: select and write an analysis of one the photographs from this portal.  (For the inexperienced, Jonathan Saxon’s detailed instructions on how to do this are included in the Appendix).  

Part 4: Central America: Within the U.S. Orbit

READ   Modern Latin America , Chapter 4: “Central America: Within the U.S. Orbit,” pp. 79–111.

      Added Dimension “ Augusto C. Sandino ,” available at Vianica.com.

• Episode 207, “ Panama: A City and a Canal .” 
• Episode 307, “ Nicaragua: Land of the Shaking Earth Emerges .” 
• Episode 401, “ Reefs, Ruins, and Revivals:  Belize’s Melting Pot .” 
• Episode 601, “Costa Rica” (episode forthcoming).

LISTEN   Oxford Music Online entry “ Latin America ” 

Section III: “Afro-American Music,” subsection 1. Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Listen to “ Songs and Dances of Honduras ,” and download the liner notes; listen to “ Music of the Miskito Indians of Honduras and Nicaragua ,” and download the liner notes. 

For the Curious   “ The Pros and Cons of Ecotourism in Costa Rica ” by Julie Dasenbrock, in TED Case Studies (2002). 

• Discuss the positive, negative, and at times counterproductive results of U.S. individuals and influences on the countries of Central America.
• Discuss how the sources (reading, listening, and viewing) illustrate the diversity of Central America. 
• Can social media contribute to mobilization of political or environmental groups in Central America? If so, how?
• Julie Dasenbrok wrote the TED essay on ecotourism in 2002. After reading it carefully, search for more recently published articleson ecotourism, and discuss how to revise this essay. Are the major conclusions, both pros and cons, still valid?
• How can the legacy of coffee, bananas, and Sandino in Central America be represented in a mosaic infographic? 

Part 5: Cuba: Key Colony, Socialist State

READ   Modern Latin America , Chapter 5: “Cuba: Key Colony, Socialist State,” pp. 112–142.

     Added Dimension  The Castro Speech Database , available from the LLILAS Benson Digital Collections, the University of Texas, provides full texts in English-language translation of speeches, interviews, and press conferences by Fidel Castro This archive stores the records of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS),  the government agency that monitored broadcast and print media around the world. There are more than 2,000 texts covering the 37 years from1959 to 1996. For an introduction to this and other digital sources in this library, see Kent Norsworthy, “ Digital Resources: The Digital Initiatives of LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, University of Texas at Austin ,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History .

• Episode 602, “Cuba: Havana,” (episode forthcoming).
• Episode 603, “Cuba: The East of the Island,” (episode forthcoming). 

LISTEN   “ History of Cuban Music ” from the World Music Network  

For the Curious  “ Rumberas y Vedettes .”  Jennifer Molina wrote, directed and produced this program about  Cuban women (mostly from Havana) who briefly became stars in cabarets and Mexican films during the 1940s and 1950s. The women had a significant, but understated influence in Cuban popular culture. The genre of the Vedettes/Rumberas ended with the Cuban revolution (2013).

• Randomly select five speeches by Fidel Castro from different dates, and determine if they contain common themes (a revolutionary discourse, you might say). How does Castro demonstrate knowledge of both domestic problems and international politics? Discuss these themes. 
• How do the videos show the effects of the U.S. embargo of Cuba?
• Describe the diversity and international appeal of Cuban culture, especially through its music.
• Discuss Cuban-United States relationships prior to the 1959 revolution.
• Develop a Cuban map with points that can be clicked to provide historical, cultural, revolutionary, or biodiversity information.

Part 6: The Andes (Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador): Soldiers, Oligarchs, and Indians

READ   Modern Latin America , Chapter 6: “The Andes (Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador): Soldiers, Oligarchs, and Indians,” pp. 143–183.

     Added Dimension “ Shining Path, Tupac Amaru (Peru, leftists) ” by Kathryn Gregory, Council on Foreign Relations (2009).

• Episode 106, “ Peru: A Train to the Clouds .”
• Episode 110, “ Peru: People of the Altiplano .”
• Episode 604, “Ecuador: Amazonian Region” (episode forthcoming).

Oxford Music Online entry “ Latin America .” 

Section IV. “Urban Popular Music,” subsection 2. “Specific Genres,” (ii) The urbanization of the huayno.”

Listen to “ Perú: Lista de Canciones ,” Bolivian Music Performance by Los Masis, and Traditional Music of Peru, Vol. 6: The Ayacucho Region ; download the liner notes.

For the Curious  “ The Great Peruvian Guano Bonanza: Rise, Fall, and Legacy .”

LEARNER’S PRACTICUM 

• Discuss how food, clothing, hats, and music define Andean communities.
• Discuss the effects and costs of wars on the Andean nations.
• Describe some of the common traits that compose an Andean culture within these three nations.
• Discuss the raw products exports from the Andean region and the markets for them.
• Create a digital infographic that provides the history of rebellion and of ethnic rights in the Andes.

Part 7: Colombia: Civility and Violence

READ   Modern Latin America , Chapter 7: “Colombia: Civility and Violence,” pp. 184–211.

     Added Dimension Óscar Parra, “ Digital Resources: Massacres and the Evolution of the Colombian War, ” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History .

  WATCH In the Americas with David Yetman 

• Episode 303, “ Colombia: Capital and Coffee .”
• Episode 407, “ Bogota to the Amazon: A Trip across Colombia .”
• Episode 508, “ Cartagena and a Hidden Palenque .”

LISTEN   “ Music of Colombia ,” courtesy of Wikipedia

 This article has examples of regional styles of music embedded in it. Listen to samples at Music of Colombia Various Artists . These recordings were made in 1951 by Dr. Andrew H. Whiteford in Popayán, in southwestern Colombia. 

For the Curious   A fantastic project of the National Library in Bogotá is entitled “ Cartografía de Prácticas musicales en Colombia ” (Cartography of Musical Practices in Colombia). The website is in Spanish, but even   those who cannot read Spanish can click to see and hear different regional musical genres of the nation. (Select specific music practices—e.g., “traditional,” “festivals,” etc.—using tabs on the introductory page. By   clicking, you will be re-directed to a map, and then double click on a specific spot featured on the map; this will take you to a different window in which you can listen to regional varieties and genres).

• Evaluate how political, economic, and cultural activities demonstrate the intense regionalism of Colombia. 
• Read this report on Colombia as one of the world’s five mega-diverse countries .  What surprises you the most about this report? Now compare this plant and animal diversity with the regionalism identified in the other selections on Colombia, and write about the relationship. 
• How do you evaluate Colombia’s political and economic violence in comparison with achievements in music (Shakira, Juanes, and Vallenato), literature (Gabriel García Márquez), television (“Beti la fea”—“Ugly Betty”) and international beauty pageants? 
• Show how you can add biodiversity, or political or economic regionalism, to the music maps.
• Is the violence (with the number of persons murdered) in Colombia interpreted differently than the murders and disappearances of persons in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala?  If so, how and why? 

Part 8:  Venezuela: The Perils of Prosperity

READ   Modern Latin America , Chapter 8: “Venezuela: The Perils of Prosperity,” pp. 212–235.

      Added Dimension “ Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's Firebrand Dictator ” by  Christopher Minster in About Education (2016).

WATCH   Venezuela Vacation Travel Video Guide from Expoza Travel.

LISTEN   Oxford Music Online entry “ Bolivaran Republic of Venezuela ” 

Under "Selected recordings" listen to: Música folklórica de Venezuela , coll. I. Aretz, A. Fernaud and L.F. Ramón y Rivera, rec. 1959–68, OCORA 78 (c1975) [incl. disc notes]; Tierra de Cacao : Afro-Venezuelan music and dance , PAN 20363D (1999) [incl. disc notes by B. Duysens].

For the Curious See video and podcasts of Afrovenezuelan music .

• The authors of the text conclude that Hugo Chávez had a great resemblance to Venezuela’s nineteenth-century caudillos. How can you support this conclusion or dispute it?
• The Chávez regime claimed “discernibly positive effects” (p. 234). What does the list reveal about the programs of previous regimes in the Petro era? Discuss this, if possible, in terms of different governments. 
• How did oil define Venezuela, in both the domestic and the international imagination, and in terms of its culture?
• Discuss the Orinoco river system in Venezuelan history.
• How can the industria petrolera be presented through digital media to illustrate its significance to Venezuela?

Part 9: Argentina: Progress, Stalemate, Discord

READ   Modern Latin America , Chapter 9: “Argentina: Progress, Stalemate, Discord,” pp. 236–267.

      Added Dimension View the documentary “ Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo ” with Susana Muñoz (1986).

• Episode 404, “ From the Steppes to the Lakes .”
• Episode 408, “ Gift from the Andes, Mendoza Argentina and Its Wines .”

LISTEN Oxford Music Online entries Tango and Tango (ii)

At the website for “ Todo Tango ,” listen to the music and read about the history, stars, and songs of Tango. 

For the Curious  " The History of Tango " and its world popularity, (includes video and music inserts); Timothy Wilson and Mara Favoretto, “ Rock Nacional in Argentina during the Dictatorship ,”   Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History.

  LEARNER’S PRACTICUM

• Discuss the government of Juan Peróőn and indicate the role of Evita in his regime.
• Describe tango and soccer (this will require some Internet research) as the axis of Argentine culture, and how they represent the nation’s history. 
• Evaluate the history of the military in the nation’s history. Is it possible to discuss the military as a monolithic institution, or is it necessary to refer to the military within different contexts?
• Discuss the impact, with specific examples, of how Italian immigration helped to shape Argentine culture.
• Use digital means to represent the Pampas in Argentine history and culture. 

Part 10: Chile: Repression and Democracy

READ Modern Latin America , Chapter 10: “Chile: Repression and Democracy,” pp. 268–295.

      Added Dimension Watch “ Arpilleras of Chile: Stitching the Truth ,” with Marjorie Agosin; read Scraps of Life: Chilean Arpilleras: Chilean Women and the Pinochet Dictatorship (various editions).

WATCH   In the Americas with David Yetman.

• Episode 108: “ Chiloé and Chilotes: Proud Islanders of Chile .”
• Episode 202: “In the Shadow of the Volcanoes: Chile’s Melting Pot.”

LISTEN   Oxford Music Online entry “ Chile .” 

Martina and Maria Eugenia Diaz, “ Songs of Chile ,”  2004 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings / 1957 Folkways Records (download liner notes); " Chile: Cueca " with Olga Guzman and Juan Negret (1974).

For the Curious “ La Nueva Canción : The New Song Movement in South America ,” with videos and music; Oxford Music Online entry “ Jara, Victor .” 

• Why did Chileans become known as the “Yankees of South America?”
• Use an image of an arpillera to create an interactive representation of the military regime’s repression of opponents or suspected opponents to the government.
• Discuss how music captured popular views of the Chilean people.
• Describe the different geographic zones and how they contributed to Chile’s national history.
• How has the Pinochet regime become a major example of efforts to correct, place on trial the guilty, and create an appropriate memory of Human Rights abuses in Latin America. 

Part 11: Brazil: The Awakening Giant

READ   Modern Latin America , Chapter 11: “Brazil: The Awakening Giant,” pp. 296–340.

       Added Dimension Politics of the Amazon Rainforest: “ About the Amazon ,” and " Look at This: Rain Forest Was Here " from National Public Radio.

  WATCH   In the Americas with David Yetman

• Episode 102, “ In the Mouth of the Amazon .”  
• Episode 105, “ Brazil: The Diamond Range .”
• Episode 208, “ Bahia: Brazil’s African Connection .”
• Episode 302, “ Bahian Reconcavo of Brazil: Quilombos, Candomblé, and the Mata Atlântica .”

LISTEN   Oxford Music Online entry “ Brazil .” 

Listen to Luiz Bonfá ’s album Solo in Rio 1959 and download the liner notes. Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways.

For the Curious Brazilian Popular Music , in three parts: Part I. The Roots of Brazilian Music discusses the three major contributions to Brazilian culture (Indian, Portuguese, and African);  Part II. From the eighteenth-   century "música de barbeiros" (barber music) to the choro; Part III. A Brief History of Carnival and Its Music. For DVDs, check this site and the Sheila Thomson Collection of Brazilian Culture at Florida International University. 

• Discuss the role of the Afro-Brazilian population in the nation’s history.
• How can the Amazon River and Rainforest be represented in a digital medium?
• Discuss regionalism in Brazilian history.
• Discuss the regime of Getulio Vargas and how it changed the nation’s history.
• How did the 2016 Olympic Games illustrate the successes and problems of contemporary Brazil?

Part 12: Strategies for Economic Development

READ   Modern Latin America , Chapter 12: “Strategies for Economic Development,” pp. 343–369.

      Added Dimension “Colombia Takes Lead in Latin American Biodiversity Offsetting.”

• Episode 203, “ The Rainforest Nisei: Japanese Immigrants in the Amazon .” 
• Episode 504, “ Brazil’s Pernambuco: The Forgotten Interior .” 
• Episode 410, “ Favelas & Samba: Brazil .”

LISTEN “ 1776 Podcast: Emerging Entrepreneurship in Latin America ;” University of Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson School of  Public Affairs, “ Inspiring Social Entrepreneurs ,” Episode 26, “Interview with Mark Clayton Hand, Venture Partner, UnLtd USA and Adjunct Professor of Social Entrepreneurship."

For the Curious  View Dan Duncan’s “Carioca Entrepreneurs: Masters of the Micro Economy,” (selected clips are translated, and all of the interviews are transcribed). Available from the Center for Latin American Studies, University of Arizona .

• Discuss how the micro-entrepreneurs in Rio reflect or understand a sense of their local community. 
• Import-substitution industrialization on its face seems to be a logical policy for economic development. Discuss its successes and its ultimate failure in Latin America. 
• Is there a relationship between biodiversity and entrepreneurial success?  Give examples.
• How can programs to alleviate or to eradicate social inequality and asymmetrical distribution of income be modeled using digital programming?

Part 13: Dynamics of Political Transformation

READ Modern Latin America, Chapter 13: “Dynamics of Political Transformation,” pp. 370–395.

      Added Dimension “ Latin America’s Digital Divide ,” from Latin American Science, and “ Gaping Digital Divide Remains in Latin America .”

WATCH   The “ Democratizing Mexico’s Politics ” series of video interviews with Mexican political leaders, conducted by Roderic Ai Camp, on the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History website.

LISTEN   “ Uruguay: ¡A desalambrar! Tear Down the Fences! ” (2004) Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and download liner notes.

For the Curious Social Media and Political Mobilization: “ Mexican Presidential Elections: ‘Yo Soy 132’ Movement Shows How Social Media Has Changed Politics ,” courtesy of Policy Mic.

• Search the Internet for more up-to-date reports on the issue of the digital divide, and discuss what has changed from the readings listed in the section “Added Dimension.” What solutions are now being proposed? 
• Discuss the use of music for political mobilization and opposition to repressive regimes. (Read Timothy Wilson and Mara Favoretto’s essay “ Rock Nacional in Argentina during the Dictatorship ” in the Oxford  Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History ).
• Can you find other examples of the use of social media for mobilization? Give examples and discuss the success of the efforts. 
• Discuss the justifications used by political leaders for what the authors of the Modern Latin America text call “illiberal democracy.”
• How have leaders used popular culture, including music, to create populist regimes of both the right and left side of politics?

Part 14: Culture and Society

READ   Modern Latin America , Chapter 14: “Culture and Society,” pp. 396–430

WATCH In the Americas with David Yetman 

• Episode 101, “ Day of the Dead: A Mexican Celebration .”
• Episode 308, “ Pernambuco: Brazil’s Other Carnival .”

  LISTEN   “ In Brazil, Soccer Is a Way of Life ” reported by Melissa Block, NPR (2013).

For the Curious MTV Tres (stylized as tr3´s)

• Discuss the religious (especially Roman Catholic) inflection in Latin American culture. Your analysis  might consider the difference between formal and popular faith, expressed in music, instruments, meaning, and celebrations, and in popular groups such as the Folias de Reinos in Brazil, or the marujada, that combine and celebrate Portuguese maritime feats and the confrontation of Christians and Moors in which black performers dress in the white navy uniforms of Brazil. 
• Sport has a tremendous presence in Latin America (soccer, baseball, boxing, and professional women’s wrestling).  Compare the conclusions of the reading on Brazilian soccer with a reading on another sport (such as April Yoder, “ Dominican Baseball and Latin American Pluralism, 1969–1974 ,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History ).
• Use the Getty Research Institute portal to select a painting or group of paintings, and perform a visual analysis as described in the exercise for photographs. 
• Watch one of the movies from the Mexican Golden Age (these are available in numerous locations with subtitles), and discuss how the director and the actors provide the viewers with aspects of Mexican culture. For example, watch the classic “Vamanos con Pancho Villa!” available on YouTube . 
• Have developers used various Latin American cultures and stereotypes in their video games?  How successful are these games at presenting Latin American manners and mannerisms? 

Part 15: Latin America in the World Arena, 1800s–1980s

READ Modern Latin America , Chapter 15: “Latin America in the World Arena, 1800s–1980s,” pp. 431–459.

       Added Dimension The Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive Project. LLILAS Benson at the University of Texas is part of the collaborative venture that, in December 2011, resulted in the public launch of  the digital archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN). This is an essential resource available for family members of those who were disappeared, legal authorities, human rights activists, and scholars interested in Guatemala’s era of military repression from 1960 to 1996.For an introduction to this and other digital sources, see Kent Norsworthy, “ Digital Resources: The Digital Initiatives of LLILAS Benson   Latin American Studies and Collections, University of Texas at Austin ,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History .

WATCH   The Modern Latin America text does not consider specifically environmental questions. Watch the In the Americas with David Yetman episodes for Brazil: 

• Episode 505, “ The Mata Atlantica: Brazil’s Other Rainforest .”
• Episode 305, “ Brazil’s Land of Sand .”

LISTEN   Sounds of the Cold War: “ Radio Moscow and the Western Hemisphere ,” (2004).  Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. 

For the Curious  Music, since the Cold War, has served to express political and social opinions, especially when other media have been closed because of censorship or repressive policies. For both this and the following chapter, listen to and watch the videos of the following performances: Mexican musical group Maná’s song “Cuando los angeles lloran;” Sting, “They Dance Alone;” Charly Garica and Serú Girán of Rock       Nacional Argentino. Listen to “ Brazil: Songs of Protest ” Zelia Barbosa MON00717, Smithsonian folkways (download liner notes).  For a discussion of music as a voice against political repression, see Timothy Wilson and Mara Favoretto, “ Rock Nacional in Argentina during the Dictatorship ,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History .

• Discuss the U.S. and Soviet efforts to shape attitudes in Latin America during the Cold War. 
• Discuss the interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine by U.S. presidents to justify their policies in Latin America. How did these policies assist the U.S. government in its efforts to consolidate its influence in the  region? 
• Review the Radio Moscow broadcasts to Latin America. What are the common themes of the programs? How do they attempt to give a persuasive interpretation?
• Select one of the musical selections from this lesson and write about it in historical context. 
• Discuss ways to make a digital presentation of information from the Guatemalan police archives. 

Part 16:  Latin America in the World Arena, 1990s–Present

READ Modern Latin America , Chapter 16: “Latin America in the World Arena, 1990s–Present,” pp. 460–485.  

      Added Dimension Administering justice for victims of the wholesale desecration of Human Rights has become an essential feature of contemporary Latin American society and politics.   The Human Rights Documentation Initiative at the LLILAS Benson at the University of Texas at Austin provides one of the most significant archives for the struggle for Human Rights around the world. It includes records   from Latin America, preserved in many cases with Latin American partners. For an introduction to this and other digital sources in this library, see Kent Norsworthy, “ Digital Resources: The Digital Initiatives of LLILAS   Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, University of Texas at Austin ,” O xford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History . 

WATCH “ Charting a New Course on Cuba ” (includes embedded video); “ The U.S.-Cuba Thaw .” 

LISTEN   “ Rio 2016 Olympic preparations damned as ‘worst ever’ by the International Olympic Committee ,” with embedded video.              

For the Curious Communities in Transnational migrations: Christian Krohn-Hansen, “ The Dominican Colmado from Santo Domingo to New York ,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History ; visit the website for El Museo del Barrio in New York. 

• Describe the new relationship between the United States and Cuba.. Does it suggest changes for all of Latin America?
• Discuss how families from different Latin American nations with members in the United States, Europe, or other countries have created transnational families and communities.
• Discuss human rights as one principle that must be included in the United States’ diplomatic relationships with Latin American countries. 
• Migration into the United States across the border with Mexico has created numerous issues of violence and crime. Read “ Violence and Migration on the Arizona-Sonora Border ” by Jeremy Slack and Scott Whiteford, and discuss this issue.
• Imagine and describe a digital program to represent the diversity of Latin America. 

Primary Source Research Analysis of Photographs 7

What is a primary source? Primary sources provide firsthand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation. They are created by witnesses or recorders who experienced the events or conditions being documented. Often these sources are created at the time when the events or conditions are occurring, but primary sources can also include autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories recorded later. Primary sources are characterized by their content, no matter if they appear, in micro?lm/micro?che, in digital format, or in published format. 8

Steps for Finding an Image on the Getty Portal

• Go to the Getty Research Institute’s online exhibition, Mexico: From Empire to Revolution .
• Click on the “History” tab on the left side of the screen. 
• Scroll through the images under the “Empire & Nation” tab or the “Revolution” tab displayed on the left side of the screen. 
• Each numbered tab under these headings will display a series of images at the top of the screen.
• Click on any thumbnail image to view a larger version of that image. 
• Copy and paste the following information into your Word document: Image, Citation information, URL (web address) 

What Your Assignment Should Include 

• Cover page. 
• Page with image and citation information. 
• 3. 1½ – 2 page primary source analysis.

ANALYSIS OF PRIMARY SOURCE 

Think about the significance of the primary source. Ask yourself the following questions to generate ideas for your analysis of the primary source. Is the photograph tied to a specific person, event, or theme? Why do you think the photograph was produced? Who was the intended audience? What can you learn from examining the photograph? How does the source assist you in developing an understanding of a particular topic covered in the course? Is there any text in the image? Why is the image important? Is there a person in the photograph? If so, how old might they be? What is the significance of their clothing, items they may have, or their surroundings? What questions might you have about the image (who, what, when, why, or how)? All analysis information must be answered in paragraph form. 1½ - 2 pages.

1. Thomas E. Skidmore, Peter H. Smith, and James N. Green, Modern Latin America, Eighth Edition (New York: Oxford, 2013).

2. David Yetman, In the Americas with David Yetman (Tucson, AZ: The Southwest Center, University of Arizona and American Public Broadcasting: 2016).

3. Deane Root et al., eds., Grove Music Online (New York: Oxford, 2016).

4.   The Smithsonian Latino Center . Capital Gallery, 600 Maryland Ave., SW, Suite 7042 MRC 512, Washington, DC 20024. July 11, 2016. 

5. “ UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music ,” Smithsonian Folkways, accessed July 11, 2016.

6. William H. Beezley, ed., Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (New York: Oxford, 2016).

7. An exercise developed by Jonathan Saxon, Antelope Valley College, CA. Used with permission.

8. primarysources.yale.edu  

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Latin American History. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 05 April 2024

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Translation of "essay" into Latin

thesis, progymnasma, meditatio are the top translations of "essay" into Latin. Sample translated sentence: He delivered lectures and wrote essays in a simple language, along with the statistics from original and authentic sources and documents, so that common man can also understand. ↔ Postea et alios doctores acquisivit; ipse libere fontes scriptos, originales et conversos, cognoscebat.

A written composition of moderate length exploring a particular issue or subject. [..]

English-Latin dictionary

Progymnasma.

written composition

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University Interscholastic League

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Latino History Essay Competition

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Founded in 2011 as an event sponsored by The University of Texas at Austin, the Latino History Essay Competition has found a new home with UIL Academics beginning with the 2012-2013 school year. In its initial year the competition was open to students in South Texas; beginning with 2012-2013 the competition was opened to students statewide.

Competition Theme

Historical and cultural legacies of latinos in texas history.

Essays should focus on a prominent or relatively unknown Latino individual, organization or movement in Texas history. How has the subject of the essay positively and significantly influenced today's Latino communities?

Entry Deadline

February 14, 2024 .

Entries will be submitted electronically. All essays received on or before February 14, 2024, that meet the basic requirements of the competition will be entered for judging.

General Guidelines

• Essay with a word count between 1,500 and 2,500 words.

• Research paper format - MLA format or APA format recommended

• Source citations and bibliography required

• Essays should display original research; use of primary sources and interviews strongly encouraged

Competition Structure and Awards

• Any student in grades 9-12 who attends a UIL member high school is eligible to enter

• Open division structure - all entries that meet basic requirements will be included in essay judging

• Judges will evaluate each entry and provide comments that will be returned to contestants

• Judges will nominate essays to be considered as state finalists

• A selection committee will determine state finalists from among the nominees

• All state finalists will be invited to attend Academic State Meet in May, where state awards will be presented

• All state finalists will become eligible to apply for Texas Interscholastic League Foundation scholarships

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Latin America: The History of Changes Essay

Introduction.

There are several changes that Latin America has experienced overtime like any other region in the world. The changes have occurred despite the challenges of corruption, inadequate resources, and violence among other detrimental issues.

Changes At Different Periods Of Time

The changes at different periods of time have been divided into eight periods that have contributed to Latin America’s history. The periods include:

The pre-colonial period, discovery and conquest period, colonial period, piracy age period, the period of independence from Spain, nineteenth century period, twentieth century period, and the modern period. The discussion of the periods enables one to have a deep understanding of the changes in Latin America since time immemorial.

The pre-colonial period

This is the period before 1492. Not much of the history of this period is known because during that specific period, less documentation of events occurred. The little history that exists reveals that many cultures existed and only a few cultures ruled and exercised their religions. All the other cultures adhered to the religion of undertaking agricultural activities, going for war, and worshiping.

Discovery and Conquest

This started in the year 1492. As depicted by the name of the period, many discoveries occurred as there was much sailing. In 1553, the cultures that used to dominate were civilized as a result of the discoveries.

Conquests also occurred in form of resistance to the European domination. Latin Americans, Spain, and Portugal who were the dominant populations resisted the rule of Europeans despite the powerful weapons used by the Europeans and their ruthlessness.

The colonial period

Latin America was tired of wars and other adverse calamities. The period of colonialism took place from around 1492 to around 1810. That period brought many changes and advancements to the current Latin America.

The original cultures were weakened and forbidden due to the low populations. Exploitation of the Latin Americans was rampant. Their powers were neglected by all means and their history was restructured. Latin Americans therefore fought for their identities and are doing so to the current times.

Piracy period

The period was dominated by piracy as a way of life. European powers were too much. The period occurred in the year 1700 to 1725. The conditions in this period gave residents a golden opportunity for piracy. Many pirates were killed and therefore, most people did not opt for it as a way of earning a living unless when the golden opportunity presented itself. The pirates had set rules to guide them.

The rules included honesty and accountability and the rules guided their activities. The consequence of not abiding by their rules was countered with punishment in the form of one being ostracized from the group. The pirates were made up of all social classes.

The period of Independence from Spain

The period occurred when Spain was invaded by Napoleon and conquered. Latin America got independence between 1810 and 1825 because of its strong leadership then. During this period, Spain was weak because it had divided itself into colonies.

Nineteenth century period

In 1824, Latin America gained independence. It passed through several challenges of learning and adjustment to govern itself. Wars occurred as the people adjusted in their attempts to enhance prosperity (Edwards, 12).All the nations in Latin America experienced war except Argentina which had adopted its own constitution invented by Juan Bautista.

He was a critical and creative thinker of the period. He enabled Argentina to be stable and peaceful during the time of conflicts and during other related struggles. The nations that borrowed his ideologies enshrined in the Argentinean Constitution also became stable.

Twentieth century period

Many revolutions occurred. The most prominent war during this period was the “Thousand days war”. The war took place in Columbia from the year 1899 to the year 1902. The root cause of the war was the existence of both the liberals and the conservatives.

The individuals with liberal ideologies supported the changes that accompanied the independence while the conservative individuals rejected the changes brought about by the independence. The conflicts brought about some adverse effects in the all the nations of Latin America. Many people died. Rivalry, violence, and hatred dominated the nations of Latin America during this period.

Modern period

The period had several revolutions in the key sectors of industrialization, education, health care, and land reforms. Many industries came in to existence and the few that existed began to enhance their operations (Rangel, 4).

The education and health sectors improved in their operations to include both the poor and the rich residents. The revolution made the sectors affordable, accessible, culturally acceptable, and sensitive to needs of the nation. Modernization in the form of transportation and infrastructure also advanced.

In conclusion, the changes that have taken place in Latin America are responsible for the rapid development of Latin America. The development in the domains of the economy, society, politics, and law is attributed to the continued inventions by the people of Latin America and their aggressive attempts to fight for their existence.

Works Cited

Edwards, Sebastian . Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism , Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press, 2010.Print.

Rangel, Carlos. The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States , New York, USA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.Print.

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IvyPanda. (2022, April 26). Latin America: The History of Changes. https://ivypanda.com/essays/latin-american-history/

"Latin America: The History of Changes." IvyPanda , 26 Apr. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/latin-american-history/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Latin America: The History of Changes'. 26 April.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Latin America: The History of Changes." April 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/latin-american-history/.

1. IvyPanda . "Latin America: The History of Changes." April 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/latin-american-history/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Latin America: The History of Changes." April 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/latin-american-history/.

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From inspiring music to vibrant paintings, Latino art has influenced American society through a range of creative art forms. 

Latino Musicians

Many music legends are part of the Latino community. Latin music has had a long presence in the United States and has brought many unique sounds and styles that are widely popular, like salsa and reggaeton. From rock to hip hop, Latino musicians have transcended boundaries and often showcase traditional Latin rhythms and sounds in their music. Latino musicians who have left a mark on pop culture include:

Explore the Smithsonian collections to learn more about groundbreaking Latino musicians. 

Latino Art and Artists

Latino art embraces a captivating and diverse range of styles, including the creation of colorful paintings and murals, vibrant glass, and unique pottery. This dynamic group of artists often blends ancestral traditions with contemporary artistic styles to craft pieces that share their stories and spotlight issues important to their communities. Some of the Latina and Latino artists who have helped to expand the art scene in the United States with work that resonates across cultures include:

Judith “Judy” Baca 

As someone who experienced the Chicano Movement, an era of Mexican American civil rights activism, Judy Baca knows how art can be a tool to empower communities. Through murals, monuments, paintings, sculptures, and more, Baca shares the stories of people who have contributed to U.S. history yet are often excluded from its retellings.

Antonio Sotomayor

Known primarily for his imaginative murals and paintings, Bolivian-born artist Antonio Sotomayor was a great contributor to growing the popularity of Latino Art in the United States.

The de la Torre Brothers

Mixed Media artists and brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre collaborate to develop pieces that feature a blend of cultural influences. In their childhood, the brothers moved with their family from Mexico to the United States, and their work often draws from their resulting multifaceted views of the world. The brothers work in a variety of mediums, including blown glass, cast resin and lenticular prints.

Ana Mendieta

A Cuban-American performance artist, Ana Mendieta created a range of artistic works that drew from her experience of exile and displacement. She used photography, film, video, drawing, and more to craft groundbreaking and transformational pieces.

Rafael López

Through his illustrations, López brings vibrant and diverse characters to children’s books. In 2022 he created portraits for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino and taught workshops as the first Guest Artist of the Smithsonian Postal Museum . His light installation hangs in our gallery's General Motors Learning Lounge .

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Get to know more about the diverse Latino artists who have pushed the boundaries of artistic expression.

Latino Actors

Why were Trump’s bond documents rejected – and has this impacted his civil fraud appeal?

D ocuments for Donald Trump ’s $175m bond in his New York civil fraud case were rejected and “returned for correction” to the former president due to missing financial information.

A docket appeared on the New York County Supreme Court website on Wednesday, detailing that a “Bond/Undertaking” had been “returned for correction”.

The court said that the reason for the rejection was that some of the documentation filed on behalf of the Republican presidential candidate failed to include a current financial statement, power of attorney or list an attorney-in-fact.

The blunder was first spotted by New York attorney Jeffrey K Levine, who posted a screenshot of the court’s explanation for the rejection, which read: “The court has returned the documents listed below for the following reasons: Please include a current financial statement and Power of Attorney.

“Additionally, please list the name of the Attorney-in-Fact under the signature line on the Undertaking. Please use the ‘Refile Document’ link for Doc. No. 1707 to resubmit the corrected filing. Thank you and have a great day.”

Mr Levine added a comment of his own : “175 million reasons why 1 mistake should not have been made, much less 3!”

On Thursday, Mr Trump resubmitted the documents with the proper information in order for his bond to be accepted.

While there was speculation that it would include some of the former president’s financial records, the missing information actually related to Knight Speciality Insurance Co, which is underwriting the bond, as first noted by MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin.

The former president posted his $175m bond this week after he was handed an extraordinary lifeline by a New York appeals court, enabling him to pay only a portion of the total $464m judgment against him as bond and granting him a 10-day extension to the original deadline in which to do it.

That came after Judge Arthur Engoron concluded a three-month trial on 16 February by ruling that Mr Trump was liable for a decade-long scheme that saw the value of Trump Organization assets routinely inflated in order to obtain favourable loans from banks and insurers. The former president was ordered to pay $354m in fines and a further $110m plus in interest within 30 days.

As the interest ticked ever-upwards at 9 per cent or $120,000 a day, the exact total he owed by the time the original deadline day of 25 March arrived was closer to $468.1m, with Mr Trump’s lawyers complaining in the interim that he had been unable to find a surety company willing to stump up the cash – after approaching more than 30 – given the sheer scale of the money involved.

After the panel of New York Appellate Division judges intervened to offer the candidate a major concession, he was finally able to raise the money for his bond with the help of California’s Knight Specialty Insurance Company .

The company’s owner Don Hankey is a prolific Republican donor whose Axos Bank has refinanced several property loans for Mr Trump in recent years.

What the $175m bond really buys the candidate is time – several months in fact, as his appeal against the fraud judgement will not take place until September at the earliest , when the court’s autumn term commences.

That, however, does bring the matter uncomfortably close to Election Day on 5 November – a period when many of the candidate’s other legal entanglements likewise threaten to come to a head.

In addition to running for the presidency, Mr Trump is also battling four criminal cases in Washington DC, New York, Georgia and Florida, chewing up an estimated $230,000 per day in legal expenses and struggling to fund time to accommodate both court dates and campaign commitments, a problem that could become ever-more convoluted as the year progresses.

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Windows Onto History The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997)

By Thom Sliwowski

Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy.

April 3, 2024

Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum getting defenestrated, which triggered the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), detail of an 1889 illustration from the Finnish magazine Kyläkirjaston Kuvalehti — Source .

It was the spring of 1618 and Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor and past King of Bohemia, had devised a plan that would prove calamitous. Seeking to reverse the concessions granted a decade prior by his brother and predecessor, Rudolf II, he tasked his deputies with reigning in the rights of Bohemian Protestants. But these Protestants lived in a tradition of religious dissidence preceding Martin Luther by a century: they were accustomed to a degree of autonomous rule and religious freedom uncommon elsewhere in Habsburg realms. When Matthias’ deputies halted the construction of chapels in Klostergrab and Braunau, Protestants, noblemen, and free burghers found themselves united in their indignation. Ordinarily, these groups had few interests in common. At the time, they could not see — as subsequent historians, painters, and poets would — that they were already becoming Czech, and were about to take part in what, centuries later, would be retrospectively recast as a kind of idiosyncratic national ritual. Nor could Matthias and his advisors see that the Holy Roman Empire was standing before a historical precipice. Keen to meddle in local affairs, Matthias was shrewd enough to act through his zealous deputies. And it was to them that the gravity of this situation would first become apparent.

Two Catholic deputies, Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum, had grown notorious for openly disavowing the Majestätsbrief : Rudolf II’s 1609 liberal guarantee of religious tolerance. When a Protestant assembly spurned by the shuttered chapels in Klostergrab and Braunau attracted a massive crowd, Martinice and Slavata began to worry. And when the count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, elected defender of the Protestant faith, called for their execution, they realized it was already too late. The Catholic deputies had overplayed their hand; the mood among the infuriated townspeople was rising to a fever pitch. A large crowd followed the Protestant nobles to Hradčany Castle. They poured inside and to the upper floors, cornering Martinice and Slavata in a tower chamber. Shouting at, threatening, and then grabbing the deputies, they chucked Martinice out the window first. Slavata, meanwhile, held onto the ledge, begging for the Virgin’s intercession. In one final push, the crowd expelled him from the castle window as well. Only the deputies’ secretary remained. Shaking with fear, he clung to the prominent Protestant nobleman Joachim von Schlick for protection, but the defenestrators, as they would come to be called, peeled him off Schlick and tossed him out the window too.

Exuberant, the Protestant rebels mocked these appeals to the Virgin Mary. But when two of them leaned out the window to heap more insults down upon their oppressors, what they saw left them flummoxed. Martinice and Slavata were alive, as was their secretary, and the three were already getting up to reach for a ladder extended by allies from a lower window in the castle. How the Catholic deputies survived this forty-foot fall was a mystery that has turned the defenestration into an object lesson in framing. Catholic propagandists insisted that the Virgin Mary had saved them: Slavata’s prayer for intercession worked, effecting a miracle that legitimated their cause. Protestant pamphleteers, on the other hand, noted that a pile of trash and human shit directly below the window had broken their fall. They may have survived, but only to remind others how loathsome was their attempt to quash local rights. 1

Words seem inadequate to the task of describing something so outlandish, and yet “defenestration” comes close. This word is grammatically a compound nominalization — and a flagrantly Latinate one at that. “Fenestrate”, the verb ostensibly at its root, only appears a couple centuries later, carrying two unrelated technical usages in the fields of surgery and botany. From this we can surmise that “defenestration” was a linguistic artifact constructed intentionally. Perhaps it meant to lampoon the Latin of Bohemia’s Catholic rulers: in Czech it is simply “defenestrace”, a rare Latinate word in that language. The humor here derives from the fact that a form of free fall carries a name as clunky as the doctrines and mores of the Catholic rule it sought to swiftly overturn.

Woodcut from a 1618 German pamphlet depicting Martinice and Slavata’s fall — Source .

Almost immediately, the task of illustrating the defenestration became paramount. A 1618 Catholic Flugblatt (or pamphlet) depicts Martinice and Slavata falling onto a courtyard paved with stones. An accompanying caption renders the event as legend: thanks to the Virgin’s intercession, the deputies’ lives were saved and they took refuge in a nearby cloister. Foolhardy political revolt is here transfigured into a leap of faith that furnishes its own proof: they were, after all, still alive when this image was printed. Regrettably, opposing Protestant pamphlets, depicting the pile of excrement that broke their fall, are harder to come by.

Miracle or mere coincidence, the defenestration catalyzed a broader Bohemian uprising: the first eruption of what would become the Thirty Years’ War. News of the Prague defenestration traveled across Europe within the year; its images proliferated in contemporary pamphlets, fliers, and compendia of recent events. Centuries later, the act of defenestration would serve as a touchstone of Czech national identity and of Prague’s municipal history. But first it would be represented and re-invoked so many times that this concrete, historical event gradually became abstracted into a figure of thought.

We find the seeds of this abstraction in an engraving that was printed in the Theatrum Europaeum : a German historical chronicle published by Matthäus Merian in the mid-seventeenth century. Here, partisan framings are eschewed in favor of neutral representation. Within the castle, men are hoisting the Catholic deputies to the windowsills while their secretary awaits his turn in the center of the image. The focus on him as the engraving’s central figure suggests the perennial question that haunts all news about violent revolts: who will be next?

Engraving of the Second Defenestration of Prague (1618) by Matthäus Merian for the first volume of Theatrum Europaeum (1662) — Source .

Of course, the 1618 defenestration would not be the last one to take place in Prague — but neither was it the first. Two centuries earlier, Jan Hus, a wildly popular theologian, inveighed against the Church, denouncing its political authority and its system of monetary indulgences. He also called for Mass to be celebrated not in Latin but in the local tongue, which was then named Bohemian but which we would now call Czech. To this end, Hus wrote his Orthografia Bohemica (1406–1412): the first dictionary of the Czech language, in which he invented the haček and the vowel-length markers, which make Czech spelling unique among European languages. This religious reformer and fervent grammarian was subsequently arrested, found guilty of heresy, and burned at the stake in 1415. By making him into a martyr, the Church had all but guaranteed Hus’ legacy. 2 And his followers cemented this legacy by revolting. In 1419, they stormed the Novoměstská radnice, Prague’s “New Town Hall”, and threw three municipal consuls and seven citizens out of a window.

With this violent spectacle, Hus’ followers, who would come to be known as Hussites, won the right to rule themselves and to worship as they chose. They retained this right until 1483, when King Vladislaus II stormed Prague and reestablished Catholic rule. Another defenestration followed, as these proto-Protestants tossed the Burgomeister and the corpses of seven town counselors out of various halls across the city. Again the spectacle worked: a religious reconciliation at the 1485 Peace of Kutná Hora established the Hussite and Roman Catholic faiths as equal before the law. Were the two defenestrations that opened and closed the Hussite Wars decisive for their outcome, or merely incidental? One could be forgiven for thinking that the act of defenestration, as violent as it is theatrical, seemed to carry some magical efficacy.

A compelling ritual is one thing, but lasting historical efficacy is something else entirely. The Bohemian Revolt that followed the 1618 defenestration was decisively suppressed only two years later, in a battle on the outskirts of Prague between the Bohemian Confederation and the Holy Roman Empire. The 1620 Battle of White Mountain slammed shut the window of possibility for Czech self-determination, inaugurating a period of harsh Germanization lasting almost two centuries. Germanophone Catholic agents of the Empire suppressed the language and burned Czech books, under the pretext of a Counter-Reformation strategy aimed at stamping out the Hussite confession once and for all.

No surprise, then, that when the Czech National Revival broke out in the early nineteenth century, it was led largely by radical lexicographers and philologists. Josef Dobrovský published a Czech grammar in 1809, and Josef Jungmann a five-volume Czech-German dictionary over the years 1834–1839. 3 Together the two Josefs set down the medium in which Czech culture could flourish: poetry, painting, and history writing — all fueled by the heady currents of Romanticism — elaborated Czech-ness, making a nation out of the language’s speakers. The wave crested in 1848 with the eruption of the June Revolution in Prague. But this uprising, too, eventually failed.

The most enduring artifact of the Czech National Revival was a sense of historical consciousness that recast the Prague defenestrations as national revolts avant la lettre. Aberrant curios no longer, the early modern defenestrations found new life as links in a chain that led directly to the 1848 Spring of Nations. The visual archive from the nineteenth century appears like an anchor line plunging into the abyss of the past. It is here we find the earliest depictions of the fifteenth-century Hussite defenestrations, such as an engraving from the Česko-Moravská Kronika of 1872. Written by Karel Vladislav Zap, a writer and pedagogue best known for popularizing Czech history, this book aimed to instruct the Czechs about who they were. Defenestration came to be at this point a national shibboleth: because they had thrown their enemies from castle windows, the reasoning seems to go, these Hussite rebels were, in fact, ancestors of the nationalists that we are today. To be Czech meant not only to speak the language, but also to be aware of defenestration’s significance.

The 1483 defenestration of Prague, as imagined in Karel Vladislav Zap’s Česko-Moravská Kronika (1872) — Source .

More than any other defenestration, it was the 1618 instance that captured the imagination of Romantic revolutionaries agitating for the Czech cause. A somewhat earlier painting, from 1844 by Karel Svoboda, stages this defenestration with all the trappings of the nineteenth-century Czech National Revival. Open books and reams of paper litter the left foreground, invoking the work of the lexicographers who codified the language. A toppled chair suggests authority overturned — a motif that later painters will repeat — and the open window looks to be smashed in a curious way. Though this is a historical painting, its call to revolutionary violence is rendered here in the present tense.

Karel Svoboda, Defenestration at the Prague Council in 1618 , 1848 — Source .

Depictions like these elevated and abstracted the historical event of defenestration into something more significant than a milestone. Historical change might be called a “watershed” or a “turning point”, but certain events forge their own metaphors. The 1789 Storming of the Bastille evokes the tumult of the French Revolution, and the 1989 Fall of communism suggests the collapse of a system that turned out to be remarkably flimsy. “Defenestration” does something similar: for nineteenth-century Czech nationalists, these events (and how they model historical change) took on a poetic significance. Some historians surmise that the 1618 Protestant crowd was deliberately reenacting the earlier defenestrations; Czech nationalists certainly thought so, placing the Hussite and Protestant defenestrations in a line of succession that became a tradition and a figure for thinking about history. 4

The apogee of painterly depictions of the 1618 event came a half-century later, in two paintings by Václav Brožík from 1890 and 1891. In the first, Pražská defenestrace roku 1618 , the line of action moves leftward as the dynamic image expresses the eruption of affect that, for Brožík, defines this act. Martinice is halfway out the window while Slavata, stupefied, is being dragged the same direction. Their secretary is pinned to the desk among some papers, while in the foreground, under the window, lies a toppled chair. A throne overthrown, this chair perhaps embodies the anti-monarchic energy that nineteenth-century nationalists ascribed to the Protestant rebels fighting for political autonomy. The energy in this painting implies hydraulic forces at work: it is as if the upswell of revolutionary emotion tends naturally, automatically to the window, which is at once a release valve and an opening onto the future. If to look out a window is to imagine political possibility — the painting seems to say — then to throw somebody out a window is to make history happen.

Václav Brožík, The Prague Defenestration of 1618 , 1890 — Source .

Brožík’s 1891 painting depicts the defenestration’s aftermath, showing how even the most ardent collective revolts can be stymied. In the adjacent room, exhausted on a chair, one of the escaped Catholic deputies recovers from their terrifying ordeal: miraculous or odious, the defenestration they survived nevertheless shook them to their cores. Among the crowd one finds some characters from the previous painting, including Count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, in red. This crowd is kept at bay by the Princess Polyxena of Lobkowitz, a politically-active figure who played a significant role in the Bohemian Counter-Reformation. All the way to the right, an empty chair with a scepter laid atop it invokes monarchical authority preserved. Princess Polyxena single-handedly stands between the Protestant rebels and the accomplishment of their task, representing the forces that stood in the way of Bohemian self-determination and Czech national consciousness. However, by placing her at the center of the painting — and in this powerful pose: index finger pointing downward, face stern — Brožík created a far more ambiguous scene. Here, at least, it could go both ways: perhaps Polyxena was right to protect these artifacts of divine intercession.

Václav Brožík’s 1891 painting, depicting Polyxena of Lobkowitz safeguarding Catholic officials after their 1618 defenestration — Source .

Already a figure for representing historical change, defenestration became the emblem of a uniquely Czech form of fatalism during the twentieth century. Writers took it up, elaborating and unfolding its significance, and made this idea into an object of obsession. The word’s curious meaning in this century is the strange son of its nineteenth-century usage: to grasp its significance we must briefly retrace its paternity.

Of all the heroes of the Czech national cause, none looms larger than Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Born into a working-class Moravian family, he pursued philosophy in Vienna and Leipzig, studying under Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. He wrote a habilitation thesis on the sociology of suicide: a topic that would prove eerily prescient. A scientific and progressive thinker, he married the American Charlotte Garrigue after meeting her in Leipzig, taking her surname as his second name. In 1918, after a lifetime spent championing the Czech cause, including during speeches given at the Treaty of Versailles, Tomáš Masaryk found himself elected president of the newly independent Czechoslovakia.

Masaryk served as a widely beloved president until his death in 1935. Three years later, Hitler’s Third Reich would annex the Sudetenland: those border-regions of interwar Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. So began the Second World War in Bohemia. If the 1618 defenestration spurred the Thirty Years’ War, what came to be known as the Fourth Defenestration of Prague concluded this one. The beginning of the end was heralded by the Soviet liberation of Prague in 1945. The Czech and Slovak Communist Parties, already popular in the 1946 elections, staged a coup d’état in February of 1948. They had reason to eliminate their opponents, and they soon set their sights on Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Jan Masaryk.

The son of Tomáš Masaryk, Jan had served as minister plenipotentiary for the new nation in London since 1925. In 1940, with his country swallowed up by the Third Reich, he was appointed foreign minister of the Czechoslovak government in exile. A reluctant supporter of Stalin, he traveled to Moscow in April, 1945, to agree on Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy. (He had signed a twenty-five-year alliance with the Soviet leader two years prior.) With increasing disappointment, he observed the postwar developments in Prague until, on March 10, 1948, Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard of the foreign ministry wearing only his pajamas. He had fallen from his bathroom window. The official cause of death was listed as suicide, but in the popular imagination this event came to be called the Fourth Defenestration of Prague.

Photograph by Walter Sanders of an unidentified woman overlooking Jan Masaryk’s 1948 funeral in the courtyard of Czernin Palace, where he also fell to his death — Source (not public domain).

The Czechoslovak authorities were quick to wrap up their investigation into Masaryk’s death, having determined that it was a suicide. But the case would be reopened, incredibly enough, half a century later. In 2004, the Prague Police enlisted forensic expert Jiři Straus to reexamine the evidence, and Straus found that Masaryk, “a heavy[set] man and certainly no athlete . . . would have landed much closer to the building if he had jumped.” 5 Because he had fallen so far away from the Foreign Ministry, he must have been pushed. This official finding confirmed what most Czechs had already suspected: no suicide, Masaryk had been murdered on Stalin’s orders.

While defenestrations both real and suggested continued to proliferate throughout the twentieth century after Masaryk’s death, many of them carry a dubious, autotelic quality: writers would pine to be defenestrated, but their desire comes to undo the act’s ritual efficacy. Can defenestration occur without the element of surprise, or without political rivals to carry it out? Is it possible to autodefenestrate? By fixating on the window, writers sprung the frames of what we could call traditional defenestration.

In a recently published academic journal article on the subject, Hana Pichova counted in Kafka’s notebooks at least ten instances of “falling, jumping, or being forcibly thrown from windows”, adding that though such “thoughts occupied the writer more than fleetingly”, they only occupied him so long as he remained in Prague. 6 Bohumil Hrabal, the pilsner-drinking bard of postwar Prague, was fixated enough on open windows and falling out of them that he wrote, in the spring of 1989, a text enigmatically entitled “The Magic Flute”, in which he assembles his own compendium of historical and literary defenestrations. This was far from the first time he wrote about defenestration, but never had he mustered such depressive pathos. The text meditates on the stymied protests in Prague, on the self-immolation of the student Jan Palach, and on the hopelessness of existence under the communist order, which would incidentally collapse just six months later.

Hrabal mentions the early twentieth century poet Konstantin Biebl, who “jumped out of the window, but [who] first, and this was a long time before, . . . had Štyrský paint him a picture, of a man falling backwards out of a window, just like turning the page of a book.” 7 This painting has unfortunately been lost to history, but Hrabal’s description of it prefigures his own end. Eight years later, in 1997, while in a hospital, Hrabal leaned out his window far enough to plummet to his death. He had said over the days prior that he really wanted to feed the pigeons. Could it be said that his obsession with defenestration was what killed him?

It is almost as if, by the twentieth century, the collective attention accorded to defenestration wound the coils of reason too tightly: in becoming an object of literary fixation, it came to occasion a kind of melancholy rumination, one that eats the fruit it bears for the mind. Already a violent form of political murder, the act took on a character even darker and more sinister. Nevertheless, retracing its history reveals a trajectory at least as astounding as the competing claims of Protestant and Catholic pamphleteers after 1618. Here we have concrete historical events that congeal first into an evocative image, then into a figure of thought for historical change in the Czech style, and finally into a style of suicide. But maybe it is simply a trick of historical perspective that makes it possible to excavate defenestration in this way: the early modern defenestrators were probably not reenacting anything, nor were nineteenth-century Romantic painters necessarily aware that they were instantiating a metaphor for historical shifts. There is something off-putting, even suffocating about trying to concoct a grand theory of defenestration. One is compelled to throw open the window, let in some fresh air, perhaps lean out to get a better look . . .

Notes Show Notes

• This historical account I take from C.V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2005).
• His lovable charm is imprinted in his very name, which in Czech means “goose”.
• James Naughton, “Czech Literature, 1774 TO 1918” (2002). Available here .
• See Stephen Jay Gould, “This View of Life: The Diet of Worms and the Defenestrations of Prague”, Natural History 9 (1996).
• Rob Cameron, “Police close case on 1948 death of Jan Masaryk - murder, not suicide”, Radio Prague International (June 1, 2004). Available here .
• Hana Pichova, “‘The Magic Flute’ as an Ode to Defenestration: On the Twentieth Anniversary of Bohumil Hrabal’s Death”, in Slavic and East European Journal , vol. 61, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 331–42.
• Bohumil Hrabal, “The Magic Flute”, in Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka , trans. James Naughton (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 1998), 9–22.

Public Domain Works

• Wikimedia Commons
• Internet Archive

Further Reading

In these letters written to April Gifford (Dubenka) between 1989 and 1991 but never sent, Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) chronicles the momentous events of those years as seen, more often than not, from the windows of his favourite pubs. In his palavering, stream-of-conscious style that has marked him as one of the major writers and innovators of postwar European literature, Hrabal gives a humorous and at times moving account of life in Prague under Nazi occupation, Communism, and the brief euphoria following the revolution of 1989 when anything seemed possible, even pink tanks.

Europe in 1618 was riven between Protestants and Catholics, Bourbon and Hapsburg — as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless principalities. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with relentless abandon, drawing powers from Spain to Sweden into a nightmarish world of famine, disease, and seemingly unstoppable destruction.

The Public Domain Review receives a small percentage commission from sales made via the links to Bookshop.org (10%) and Amazon (4.5%). Thanks for supporting the project! For more recommended books, see all our “ Further Reading ” books, and browse our dedicated Bookshop.org stores for US and UK readers.

Thom Sliwowski holds a PhD in comparative literature and critical theory from UC Berkeley. He writes about history, Eastern Europe, and the body, and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and in Sidecar . He lives in Berlin.

The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

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Antiquarian Book Fair: From Sylvia Plath’s Papers to Vintage Matchbooks

This year’s New York International Antiquarian Book Fair features plenty of quirky items amid the high-ticket treasures. (Poison books, anyone?)

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By Jennifer Schuessler

For those who love a chance to inspect stunning decorative bindings and rare volumes (or just ogle the people who can afford them), the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is an unmissable date on the spring calendar.

This year’s edition, through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, will bring nearly 200 dealers from 15 countries. And there will be no shortage of high-ticket treasures, like Sydney Parkinson’s richly illustrated “Account of a Voyage to the South Seas” from 1773 ($57,000) and the first complete, large-scale photographic atlas of the moon, published between 1896 and 1910 ($68,000).

The fair is also the place to get an up-close look at all manner of pulp novels, letters, posters, pamphlets, menus, fliers and other items (mostly) on paper, many of them affordable to browsers on a budget.

Here’s a sampling of some of the more intriguing items on offer, from 19th-century “poison books” to early-20th-century Chinese restaurant matchbooks to a choice relic of 1990s MTV.

Handle With Care

Ready for some bibliotoxicology? Honey & Wax Booksellers , based in Brooklyn, is offering a collection of “poison books” — volumes bound in cloth and paper containing arsenic, which was widely used in the mid-19th-centuryas a decorative bright-green tint. To date, the Poison Books Project has identified nearly 300 surviving examples. The volumes at the fair, priced between $150 and $450, include titles ranging from the innocuous (“Emily and Clara’s Trip to Niagara Falls,” circa 1861) to the vaguely sinister (“The Amulet,” circa 1854). Each comes with nitrile gloves and polyethylene bags, the listing says, “for safe handling of these beautiful but dangerous books.”

‘By Sylvia’

Type Punch Matrix , a dealer in Washington, D.C., is offering what it calls a mini-exhibition of two dozen items relating to the poet Sylvia Plath, much of which, it says, has never been seen by the public. The collection, most of which came from a Plath family friend, includes a signed contract from her first publication, a 1950 story in Seventeen magazine ($10,000), and a handwritten unpublished juvenile poem, “The Snowflake Star” ($45,000), signed “By Sylvia.” There’s also an annotated course reading list from Smith College (including a note about an upcoming blind date) and a copy of Karl Jaspers’s book “Tragedy Is Not Enough,” with the marginal note “cf. August 1953” — an apparent reference to the mental breakdown that inspired Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar.”

Faux Fairies

Between 1917 and 1920, two young cousins in the small Yorkshire village of Cottingley played around with a family camera, creating whimsical fairy scenes using hatpins and paper cutouts. But after their mother brought them to the Theosophical Society in the nearby city of Bradford, members already immersed in theories about the unseen world began earnestly debating the scenes’ authenticity, thus starting one of the more bizarre hoaxes in 20th-century British history.

Even Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes (and an ardent spiritualist ), was taken in, writing in the magazine The Strand that the photos, if proven real, would “jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud” and “make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life.” Some believers remained into the 1980s, when one of the surviving cousins finally revealed how they had created the images. Burnside Rare Books from Portland, Ore., is offering a complete set of the five photographs for (no fooling) $28,000.

A scrapbook on offer from the Vermont bookseller Marc Selvaggio gives a glimpse inside the social whirl of Gilded Age New York as enjoyed by Leonard Chenery, a retired naval captain who seemingly never encountered an invitation he didn’t just accept but also lovingly preserve.

Created between 1881 and 1900, the book ($4,500) contains more than 373 menus, programs, invitations, dance cards and other ephemera from some of the city’s most prestigious clubs and grandest commemorative occasions. There are items from enduring stalwarts like the Lotos Club and the Metropolitan Club, as well as vanished outfits like the Thirteen Club , which sought to dispel superstitions by requiring guests to walk under ladders, partake of 13-course dinners, spill salt and otherwise taunt fate. Many items are annotated with lists of guests, speakers, conversation topics and other historical breadcrumbs.

Chop Suey History

The humble matchbook was patented in 1892, and within a few years it became a ubiquitous form of marketing for all kinds of businesses. A collection of more than 3,000 from Chinese restaurants across the United States and Canada ($16,000), offered by Daniel/Oliver in Brooklyn, delivers a pocket-size history lesson in both cultural history and graphic design. By 1929, according to the listing, there were Chinese restaurants in nearly all of the 50 most populous cities in the United States, most of them low-cost venues serving Americanized dishes like chop suey and chow mein. Many of the matchbooks, dating from the 1920s to the 1970s, use a now-familiar stereotypical typeface meant to evoke Chinese calligraphy, which is in fact traceable to a font created in 1883 in Cleveland.

Yo! MTV Writes

In 1981, MTV aired its first video, for “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. But long after starting the revolution, the channel still clung to some analog traditions. B&B Rare Books in Manhattan is offering a guest book from MTV’s television studio in London in the late 1990s ($12,500), signed by acts both famous (Foo Fighters, ‘N Sync, Marilyn Manson) and forgotten (like Ultimate Kaos, a boy band created by Simon Cowell). It was a time, the listing notes, when all genres of music were jumbled together, and when MTV still broadcast videos. On one page, Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty writes: “There is a dead man in my bathroom.” On another, a doodle by the band Hanson comes with the commandment sacred to every headbanger (and rare book lover?): “Rock on!”

An earlier version of a caption with this article misstated the title of Sydney Parkinson’s richly illustrated book from 1773. It is “Account of a Voyage to the South Seas,” not “A Journal of the Voyage to the South Seas.”

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Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

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