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Social History and the Study of "Great Men"? The Hispanic American Historical Review, William Spence Robertson (1872-1956), and the Disciplinary Debate About Biography

The rise of social history in the sixties sparked heated debate while rejecting biography on behalf of a deeper forms of explanation, especially in the socio-economic realm (base) conceptualized in structural and systemic terms. This article will test the accuracy of social history’s criticism of the U.S. scholarly community associated with Hispanic American Historical Review —HAHR— from its formative years (1910- 1920) through its consolidation in the forties. It does so by examining the historical scholarship of William Spence Robertson, a HAHR founder who wrote authoritative biographical monographs on Francisco de Miranda (1929) and Mexico’s Iturbide (1952). While offering an interpretation of HAHR as a U.S. disciplinary journal, it asks if Robertson’s professional production is best understood as an expression of a prevailing “great man theory of history” while exploring the evolving reception of his work at mid-century. It ends by offering a critique of the theoretical underpinnings of the anti-biographical disposition of so many historians even today and explores how it derives from a combination of certain formulations of Marxism with structuralist, and post-structuralist doxa.