Richard Morse and Latin America: Circulation of Ideas, Multiple Knowledge and Urban Cultural History (1960-1970)

Abstract

It can be said that Richard Morse (1922-2001) dedicated his career to the study of Latin American cities. Since his 1952 PhD thesis at Columbia, about the history of the city of São Paulo – published in English in 1958 as From Community to Metropolis: A Biography of São Paulo –, he wrote articles and organized balances on urban themes. In this trajectory, begun in Princeton in the late 1940s and reaching its peak at Yale in the 1970s, Morse had important partnerships and produced relevant essays. He contributed to animate the debate about the Latin American cities, and more than that, to the consolidation of a field of studies. This paper explores the knowledge mobilized by the American historian in his texts of the 1960s and 1970s, recovering references and illuminating his perspective, which we would call Urban Cultural History.