William Lytle Schurz
William Lytle Schurz | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Historian |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Ph.D., 1915 |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Academic work | |
Sub-discipline | Latin America specialist |
| Institutions | American Institute for Foreign Trade |
William Lytle Schurz (November 25, 1886 – July 26, 1962) was an American academic, government official, and businessperson who specialized in the history of Spanish conquests including Latin America. He was known for his research on the Manila galleon trade network.
Early life
Schurz was born in South Lebanon, Ohio, on November 25, 1886. He attended the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with a Ph.D. in 1915. Studying under Herbert Eugene Bolton, he consulted the General Archive of the Indies in Seville for his research.[1]
Career
He taught Latin American history at the University of Michigan from 1915 to 1918 before he became an adviser to Edward M. House and started a career in public service.[2]
Under the aegis of the United States Department of Commerce, Schurz served as commercial attaché to the U.S. embassy in Brazil from 1920 to 1926.[2] He served on a 1923 commission to explore the possibility of U.S. rubber production and unsuccessfully lobbied Harvey S. Firestone of the eponymous tire company to invest in South America.[3] The Ford Motor Company created the Fordlândia plantation as a result of these efforts.[2]
He later advised the Republic of Cuba, worked with U.S. export companies, and returned to public service before joining the American Institute for Foreign Trade from 1946 until his death.[2] Now the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, Schurz served as its president for a time and was fondly remembered.[4] He died in Glendale, Arizona, on July 26, 1962.[1]
Scholarship
Schurz's 1939 book, The Manila Galleon, was the first study of trade links between Acapulco and Manila during the Spanish colonial era. It received high praise in The New York Times on publication[5] and remains a foundational work.[6][7]
He coined the term The Spanish Lake in 1922 to describe Spain's sixteenth-century dominance of the Pacific Ocean. Oskar Spate adopted this term for his three-volume work on the region, and the language continued to be interrogated within Pacific historiography into the 2020s.[8]
In 1954, he published This New World: The Civilization of Latin America based on his courses at the American Institute for Foreign Trade.
Writing in The Hispanic American Historical Review, John A. Crow noted that Schurz had once traveled 25,000 miles along the Amazon Basin and had spent years training other specialists. In Crow's estimation, "Mr. Schurz rightly deserves the title of 'Dean of Latin Americanists'."[9]
His 1961 Brazil: The Infinite Country again drew on extensive firsthand experience and background knowledge to educate Americans on what was still an understudied subject.[10]
Writings
Books
- The Manila Galleon
- This New World
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Rippy, J. Fred (1963). "William Lytle Schurz, 1886-1962". Journal of Inter-American Studies. 5 (1): v–vi. doi:10.1017/S0885311800003227. ISSN 0885-3118.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Herring, Hubert (1963-08-01). "William Lytle Schurz (1886-1962)". Hispanic American Historical Review. 43 (3): 409–410. doi:10.1215/00182168-43.3.409. ISSN 0018-2168.
- ↑ Grandin, Greg (2009). Fordlandia: the rise and fall of Henry Ford's forgotten jungle city (1st ed.). New York: Metropolitan Books. pp. 82–3. ISBN 978-0-8050-8236-4.
- ↑ Faller, Mary Beth. "In war and peace, Thunderbird School is all business | ASU News". ASU News. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
- ↑ Thompson, Ralph (1939-04-24). "BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Manila Galleon" Trade and Toll The Best Silks". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
- ↑ Engstrand, Iris H. W. (1997-07-01). "Seekers of the "Northern Mystery": European Exploration of California and the Pacific". California History. 76 (2–3): 78. doi:10.2307/25161663. ISSN 0162-2897.
...but little has been done on the important Manila galleon trade, with the standard work remaining William Lytle Schurz's study of 1939.
- ↑ Paganussi, Caroline (1 January 2026). "From Manila to Bologna and Beyond: The Maritime Trajectory of an Eighteenth-Century Philippine Bamboo Container". Eighteenth-Century Life. 50 (1): 105. doi:10.1215/00982601-12206955.
The most authoritative source on the Manila galleon trade remains William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: EP Dutton, 1939).
- ↑ Buschmann, Rainer F.; David Manzano Cosano (2023). "Iberian Conceptions of the Pacific". In Jones, Ryan Tucker; Matsuda, Matt K. (eds.). The Cambridge history of the Pacific Ocean: Volume 1, The Pacific Ocean to 1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 635-7. ISBN 1108539270.
- ↑ Crow, John A. (1 November 1954). "This New World: The Civilization of Latin America". Hispanic American Historical Review. 34 (4): 537–538. doi:10.1215/00182168-34.4.537.
- ↑ Wagley, Charles (1 September 1962). "Brazil: The Infinite Country, by William Lytle Schurz". Political Science Quarterly. 77 (3): 462–464. doi:10.2307/2146340.
External links
- William Lytle Schurz at the Arizona Memory Project
- Pages with syntax highlighting errors
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- 1886 births
- 1962 deaths
- American male non-fiction writers
- University of California, Berkeley alumni
- 20th-century American historians
- Historians of Latin America
- Latin Americanists
- Writers from Ohio
- Historians from Ohio
- University of Michigan people
- Arizona State University people
- Historians of the Spanish Empire