Lawrence A. Clayton

Why nobody likes a prophet: Bartolomé de las Casas, a loud voice in the wilderness

Abstract This essay focuses on and analyzes the role of prophet that Bartolomé de las Casas (1485–1566) lived out in the conquest and settlement of the New World. Borrowing a great deal from a shorter essay written years ago by Stafford Poole on the history and nature of prophets, we examine how Las Casas’s life mirrored so many of the qualities and characteristics of the prophet, especially those of the Old Testament. It is part of our general argument that one can only truly understand the life of Las Casas, often described as the greatest defender of American Indians (the “indigenous” in today’s jargon), by placing him squarely within the Scriptural prophetic tradition that drove both is thinking and his actions. This is a “Critical Essay” and it was originally delivered as a public lecture.

Essays on Latin American Security: The Collected Writings of a Scholar-Implementer (review)

ate precipitating factors of the conflict the accusations of a “war-like Mexican attitude” (p. 59) that she sees still lurking in the works of modern historians such as David Pletcher or Gene Brack. Her approach emphasizes Mexico’s internal divisions, stressing how much they permitted both the United States and European powers to intervene in Mexican politics and take actions that ultimately “condemned Mexico to face its forceful neighbor alone” (p. 60). Too much of this book concerns itself with supplying new information about aspects of the war within the United States alone. Vázquez’s essay illustrates how much Dueling Eagles would have benefited from the inclusion of more articles by Mexican scholars and a more comprehensive engagement with reinterpretation. The reader longs for a more explicit presence of gender, race, popular culture, identity, and transnationalism, matters that have entered other recent scholarship on the war.