Editor's Page

Barbara Weinstein, professor of history at the University of Maryland (and incidentally a senior editor of The Americas), delivered the luncheon address at the annual meeting of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) in Boston in January. The address was a humorous, but thoughtful, reflection on changing interpretations of Latin American historiography over the last twenty years. She posed the intriguing questions: does each historiographical shift necessarily mean a rejection of scholarship done within previous theoretical schools? If one sat comfortably under the tent of dependency theory, can one still enter the paradigm of postmodernism without experiencing cognitive dissonance? A member of the editorial boards of the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Latin American Research Review, as well as The Americas, and a member of the Radical History Review collective, Barbara Weinstein has ample opportunity to review and ponder current scholarship in Latin American studies.

After receiving her Ph.D. from Yale in 1980, Weinstein taught first at Vanderbilt University (1979-82) and then at the State University of New York, Stony Brook (1982 until 2000) where she served both as professor of history and director of women's studies. In 2000, she took a position in the history department at the University of Maryland. Her own work has been recognized through the receipt of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Campinas (São Paulo) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Other scholars have praised her innovative work on industrial workers, gender, and regionalism in nineteenth and twentieth century Brazil.

Her first book was The Amazonian Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (Stanford, 1983). Subsequently, she tackled another region of Brazil in her 1996 monograph, For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920-1964. (UNC, 1996). One reviewer predicted that the "study will recast interpretations of the roles of both industrialists and labor in the history of twentieth-century Brazil."¹ Her current research project is on São Paulo and the formation of Brazilian national identities. If Weinstein has felt buffeted at times by changing historical currents, she has also been a wave maker in her own right.

I hope our readers will enjoy Professor Barbara Weinstein's reflections on Latin American historical paradigms.

Judith Ewell, Editor

1 Susan Besse, review, Hispanic American Historical Review 78:1 (Feb. 1998), pp. 154-55.