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This book, based on years of research, including extensive work in Guatemalan archives, illuminates the social, political, and cultural life of Guatemala and Central America during the nineteenth century through the lens of the University of San Carlos, Guatemala, the period's only institution of higher learning in Guatemala and the most prestigious one on the Central American isthmus. The major issues addressed include the relationships between institution-building and state formation; between the university and the development of a national and regional identity; and between modernism and Catholicism (still a central tension in the region's culture), including the discursive process of constructing an ideology that fused elements from the Enlightenment and the tradition of scholasticism. This book contributes to a growing body of revisionism by challenging a flawed liberal historiographical narrative that demarcates changes during the period along the lines of political transitions and insisting that this era be viewed within a broader context of fluidity and continuity in the region's history.
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"This meticulously researched and well-written account of the third oldest university in the Western Hemisphere during the nineteenth century offers substantial enlightenment on not only the history of a key institution in Central American history, but also on the political, cultural, and social history of the early national period. It is a model of scholarship and should be in every library collection with a focus of interest in Latin American history. Pattridge's account is one of very few objective histories of Latin American universities in English. It also essentially adds a third volume to John Tate Lanning's two volumes on the colonial history of the University of San Carlos." (Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Professor of History, Emeritus, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana)
