{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025283347863993024, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0026155187445510027, 'mean_word_length': 5.428571428571429, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Press Censorship in Jacobean England (review)

from John Locke and Adam Smith to Cornelius de Pauw and William Robertson, called for a new philosophical perspective elicited from a new art of reading. Only Alexander von Humboldt, with his own arsthand experience and philosophy of America (its “Orientalism”), would dissent from his peers. Cañizares-Esguerra balances the strident criticisms with contemporaneous trends and scholarship in Spain, the Andes, and New Spain. Not to be eclipsed by their European counterparts, the Spaniards responded by establishing the Royal Academy of History, gathering all of their sources about the Americas into the Archivo de Indies, launching numerous scientiac expeditions, and reporting defensively about them. Not to be outdone, Spanish creoles in the Americas responded just as aggressively, as they examined and reanalyzed all that was at hand. Indigenous sources were reconsidered; etymology, philology, and circumstance of production all received due regard. Native knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, and political systems were the sources necessary to know America really, not the philosophical ruminations of armchair intellectuals in Europe. Oddly, seldom, if ever, did authors in any one of these three zones of contention form a cohort to coordinate their andings. Rather, the theories and histories conoict and not infrequently border on the absurd. Yet, all of the activity in each area was important in its time. For example, we learn much more about the travails of Lorenzo Boturini on both sides of the Atlantic and of Juan Bautista Muñoz, royal cosmographer, who advocated his own version of Spanish-American history, or exiled creole Jesuits in faraway Italy who remained among the staunchest of patriots. Cañizares-Esguerra’s masterful history of the writing about the Americas in the eighteenth century seems exhaustive and instructive. But more careful attention to Nahuatl spellings and deanitions would have been helpful, and exactly which of the Nahua intellectuals, don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (279) or don Christóbal del Castillo (299) had the ancient annals right? Unfortunately, the index furnishes little about the wealth of information contained in this compelling, eminently readable work.