Historical Dictionary of Argentina ed. by Bernardo A. Duggan and Colin Lewis (review)

For someone who has spent over fifty years conducting research in Argentina and utilizing that research in teaching and scholarly publiations, to spend time perusing this Dictionary is tantamount to releasing a sugar-dependent child unsupervised in a place like the Café Las Violetas. The satisfaction is immense: the pleasure of reading extensive, accurate, and well-written entries on the most important figures and events of Argentina history

Originally published in 1978, the Dictionary is arranged conventionally by entry in alphabetical order, with abundant cross-references between entries. It is stated that entries are current as of October 2017. There are extensive appendices, including maps, a general historical chronology, a list of heads of state, and a survey of statistics for the provinces of the country. In addition to the intellectual pleasure to be derived from examining the Dictionary in an aleatory and interconnected fashion (that is, pursuing cross-references), a masterful compilatin of this sort is of inestimable value to those of us working in cultural studies as a source of fact-checking and a reliable source for completing incomplete information about individuals and events.

No compilation of this sort is without its limitation, which include, as compared with consulting the internet, changing information and the most recent events. For example, in the face of the recent Presidential elections in Argentina, the Dictionary cannot help but be out of date. But that is the trade-off for the confidence that one can have in the work of established scholars and a reputable publisher as opposed to the anonymous research (and often inadequate research) available on internet.

For example, one significant difference is the way in which one can rely on the published work for accuracy in the representation of Spanish and particularly Spanish names, with the published work having gone through a process of copyediting that one simply cannot rely on having been the case with entries found on the internet (obviously, scholarly works posted on the internet are a significant exception).

One might disagree with some of the editorial decisions of the Dictionary—for example, I do not agree in listing Cristina Fernández de Kirchner under Kirchner, rather than under Fernández de Kirchner. The latter is her legal name, and the Argentine press, for example, typically respects that fact (the way in which some editorial and press sources may refer to her simply as Cristina is a cultural matter that stands apart from bibliographic criteria). Or the fact that Fernando de la Rúa is listed under De la Rúa rather than under Rúa (see Library of Congress and OCLC WorldCat as name authorities). Equally, it is quite irregular to list El Gauchito Gil under “El” rather than under “Gauchito.” One assumes in these cases that the editors have made a concession to a presumed ignorance on the part of the American user of naming/linguistic conventions. But a note to this effect can be helpful—e.g., specifiying that initial articles are “stop” words and are discounted in indexing; that “de” or “del” etc. is part of a surname only if it is capitalized (e.g., Julio De Vido). In the case of Argentina, this needs to extend to Italian names as well: thus, Di Tella, Guido is correctly listed under “Di.” However, the editors are satisfyingly consistent, which cannot be said of internet sources, whose hands, in addition to anonymous, are random and unreliable as regards linguistic consistency.

This is an outstanding scholarly source and certainly a most important source of historical information. Any scholar should be grateful for the contribution it can make to the historical accuracy of critical writing.