This book examines the study of natural history in the Spanish empire in the years 1750-1850. During this period, Spain made strenuous efforts to survey, inventory and exploit the natural productions of her overseas possessions, orchestrating a serries of scientific expeditions and cultivating and displaying American fauna and flora in metropolitan gardens and museums. This book assesses the cultural significance of natural history, emphasising the figurative and utilitarian value with which eighteenth-century Spaniards invested natural objects, from globetrotting elephants to three-legged chickens. It considers how the creation, legitimisation and dissemination of scientific knowledge reflected broader questions of imperial power and national identity. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Spanish and Latin American History, the History of Science and Imperial Culture

"This book provides very important evidence that changes in institutional attitudes toward manual language can be traced to broader changes in the accepted conceptions of the nature of language. . . . [It] will prove to be a milestone in the developing discipline of deaf history."--Harlan Lane, author of The Mask of Benevolence

The book presents the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, what is and how it has developed over time, since it was founded in 1983. The Institute is today an eminently technical and at the same time autonomous body of the Mexican State.Beyond a chronology of events, this book raises two needs that have marked the Institute's evolution: the first, to properly measure the many components of reality, whether social, economic or natural; and the second, decisive for the public's trust and whose absence would invalidate the purposes of the previous need, to preserve the information from any consideration, other than strictly professional, in all stages of its production and dissemination.This work conveys INEGI's transcendence as an indispensable institution for the country to respond to the fundamental question, common to all human beings: to know and understand the reality of their environment.

This intriguing study of Mexico's participation in world's fairs from 1889 to 1929 explores Mexico's self-presentation at these fairs as a reflection of the country's drive toward nationalization and a modernized image. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo contrasts Mexico's presence at the 1889 Paris fair—where its display was the largest and most expensive Mexico has ever mounted—with Mexico's presence after the 1910 Mexican Revolution at fairs in Rio de Janeiro in 1922 and Seville in 1929. Rather than seeing the revolution as a sharp break, Tenorio-Trillo points to important continuities between the pre- and post-revolution periods. He also discusses how, internationally, the character of world's fairs was radically transformed during this time, from the Eiffel Tower prototype, encapsulating a wondrous symbolic universe, to the Disneyland model of commodified entertainment. Drawing on cultural, intellectual, urban, literary, social, and art histories, Tenorio-Trillo's thorough and imaginative study presents a broad cultural history of Mexico from 1880 to 1930, set within the context of the origins of Western nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Following WWII, the authoritarian and morally austere dictatorship of General Francisco Franco's Spain became the playground for millions of carefree tourists from Europe's prosperous democracies. This book chronicles how this helped to strengthen Franco's regime and economic and political standing.