Book Description

Excerpt from Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the Lives of Their Liberators Years ago, while an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, I was seized with a desire to study the history and politics of Hispanic America, the vast region inhabited by the wayward children of Spain and Portugal. The first fruit of this desire was an essay upon that knight-errant of Venezuela, Francisco de Miranda, who championed the independence of the Spanish colonies from the motherland. My study of Miranda's romantic career naturally aroused within me an interest in the lives of his South-American compatriots, Bolivar and San Martin. One day, while browsing in the library of Yale University, I stumbled across some musty and forgotten manuscripts pertaining to Agustin de Iturbide: that incident stimulated my interest in the movement which separated New Spain from Old Spain. From time to time other influences have aided me to form the mold of the present volume, which, in a series of lives, tells the story of the movements that separated most of the Spanish colonies in America - the Spanish-American colonies as I have uniformly designated them - from the motherland. For criticisms concerning these biographies I am indebted to Professor W. F. Dodd, now of the University of Chicago, and Professor E. B. Greene, of the University of Illinois, both of whom read the entire manuscript. The collecting of source material for these biographical studies has been attended by no small difficulty. Although in recent years a number of libraries in the United States have been purchasing books upon Hispanic-American history, yet in few, if any, cases have complete collections been made of the learned publications, books, and pamphlets concerning any special epoch of Spanish-American history. In the preparation of this volume, it has consequently been necessary for me to use many libraries. For courtesies extended to me I am especially indebted to the University of Illinois Library, the British Museum, the National Library of Spain, and the National Libraries of Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina, as well as the Mitre Museum at Buenos Aires. In various ways my labors have been aided by scholars in America and Europe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."