I heart Prescott

First, I have to commend Forrest for his outstanding introduction, and steal from Washington Irving's playbook as described by Prescott's introduction.  Like Irving, I will not attempt to re-tread Forrest's ground and instead,I will attempt to dig a little deeper on some of the points raised by Forrest and others.

Like Prescott, I will start by presenting some of my own biases.  I had the pleasure of taking a course this summer on early modern atlantic history.  Of course, the conquest of the Americas was a prominent focus of the course and one of the articles we read focused explicitly on Prescott and his impact on the historical scholarship.  (The article is available here.)  We also read John Elliot's, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830, which, though nowhere close to the detail of Prescott, provided an updated and more comprehensive history of the conquest of the America's, including a brief but inciteful discussion of Cortez, thus I approached this book with some recent fore-knowledge.

Many of the blog posts have rightly highlighted a significant degree of biases held by Prescott, but I think the characterization of the biases are perhaps mis-represented.  Prescott was not so much euro-centric as he was biased by American (United States) exceptionalism, and its protestant, liberal, democratic origins.  Prescott's exceptionally popular works, including History of the Conquest of Mexico, were popular not so much because of what they said about the Spanish conquest of Mexio, but rather, why the United States had so rapidly surpassed the Spanish empire in its success.  They represented a form of comparative history, though the comparison was indirect in that it juxtaposed catholic, absolutist, declining Spain against protestant, democratic, rising America through the lens of of Spain's conquest of the Americas.  That being said, while Prescott approached this work with an intended outcome, he was confident that the historical record would speak for itself and provides us with a relatively objective and accurate history of the conquest.

Prescott's romantic narrative writing style was extremely engaging and I could easily find myself treating this book like a "summer read", able to immerse myself in a literary work of "faction".  It is important to remember that Prescott's explicit goal was to make his historiographical works interesting and to appeal to a wide audience, thus requiring his writing to take on a degree of flare to build upon the sources available and to fill in the gaps that existed.  Graded against this intent, I give the work a solid A.

As a historian I was particularly drawn to Prescott's foot-noting.  While many of them were used to document where he drew specific facts or observations, at other points throughout the book he made an exhaustive effort to provide a very detailed description not only of the specific sources, but the motivations of those sources, and his own interpretation of the strength and weakness of those sources.  Two examples that stand out are p. 45-47 and p.666-672.

While these in-depth explanations are never sufficient to justify overt racism, stereotypes or mis-use of facts, they do allow us a more perfect understanding of the author's context, his use of the available sources and his logic for some of the "choices" he made in interpreting conflicting sources and filling gaps.  This approach is particularly important given the amount of time elapsed since the events being presented (in this case 300+ years) and the limited availability and perspective of the sources from which this historiography is drawn.  A particularly strong example of this is the paragraph that starts at the end of p.43 and ends at the top of p.44.  A second example is the closing chapter paragraph on p. 324.

I do not disagree with others critiques that the book contained many stereotypes and biases.  However, I did not find that Prescott was as guilty of negative stereotypes of the native populations as other posts haves asserted.  In fact, I found Prescott remarkably balanced in his portrayal of the native populations and was quite surprised that on occasion he contrasted them favorably when compared to other past civilization, and on at least one occasion against modern-day (post-colonial) Mexicans as he did on p. 44-45.

In regards to the question of silences, speaking specifically of Prescott and this work, I believe he did a notable job to ensure that readers could trace his historiographical steps and realize that the availability of sources were imperfect and one-sided.  In doing so, he created opportunities for others to improve on the work and perhaps bring voices to those silenced through the sources available and selected by Prescott.  I will say that I was disappointed to learn in the intro that we were denied perhaps a different perspective because of Washington Irving's gentlemanly acquiescence to Prescott.  I hope that one of the positive outcomes of the "professionalization" of the historical enterprise is the welcome diversity of voices.