The Teacher of Latin-American History in the United States finds himself seriously handicapped by the lack of impartial and fair textbooks on this increasingly important subject. Most of the authors, either through lack of contact with the sources of information and original documents, or just because the trends begun by the “New American School of History” mentioned by Charles F. Lummis some fifty years ago, have not yet reached them, still cling tenaciously to the errors of the “Black Legend.” Their pet source still is the now much discredited and entirely unreliable Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas. They still take their cues from his much translated Brevísima Historia de la Destrucción de las Indias. Seldom do they even mention any of the many saintly bishops and missionaries who opposed him in the great debate of the early colonial times.

The Bravery and Daring of the Portuguese is evident in the history of the discovery, exploration and colonization of Brazil. Many of them sold everything they possessed and then set off across the ocean with their “household and family,” facing storms and the assaults of pirates, and were often shipwrecked or eaten by the cannibalistic Indians on the shores where they expected to be safe.

Although it has not attempted such large undertakings as general histories of Central America, the twentieth century has been more productive than the previous one and has also surpassed it in quality. It opens with the Historia de la Medicina en Guatemala by Francisco Asturias (1902), based on documents existing in the Archives of the Faculty of Medicine.