The nineteenth-century has been something of a vortex for Spanish American historians. From the collapse of the Empire in 1808 to 1810 until the consolidation of conservative agro-export regimes by the century's end, the dominant features of the region's historiographic landscape have been revolution, civil war, personalist “tyrants,” and bouts of ethnic uprising unmatched since the first century of Conquest. When Latin American historians, such as Lucás Alamán in Mexico or Bartolomé Mitre in Argentina, sat down at mid-century to write national narratives for their emerging republics, their histories were veiled stories of incompletion, failed promise, and unfinished aspirations.