This book examines why several American literary and intellectual icons found themselves to be pioneering scholars and lifelong students of the Hispanic world.  The author asserts that these gifted Americans focused on the Hispanic world that they might shape their own country’s identity after Independence and the War 1812, a crucial time for the young republic, and that they found inspiration in a most unlikely place: the seat of the collapsing Spanish empire.

Product Description: Natives of the Iberian Peninsula and the twenty countries of Latin America, as well as their kinsfolk who've immigrated to the United States and around the world, share a common quality or identity characterized as la hispanidad. Or do they?In this lively, provocative book, two distinguished intellectuals, a cultural critic and a historian, engage in a series of probing conversations in which they try to discern the nature of la hispanidad and debate whether any such shared identity binds the world's nearly half billion people who are "Hispanic...read more