German Arciniegas: guardian of our distinct history.

• Author: Ambrus, Steven
• Position: Colombian historian - Interview

I have lived my whole life obsessed with trying to understand the New World, that world which is a creation of man," says the Colombian historian and essayist German Arciniegas.

"Why did the Spaniards, the English, the French, the Germans, and the Russians come to the New World? To create a new society when they could not tolerate the injustices and failures of Europe. The history of America is original and distinct; America is something different, and I want to live to one hundred to see how America is doing and where it is going."

Now ninety-seven and blind, the writer honored universally as "Man of the Americas" is still honing his vision of his contradictory continent. Despite their slip-ups on the road to democracy, Arciniegas seeks to unite the region's nations by making them conscious of their destiny as a democratic bastion with "another history, novel, fable."

That mission, in epic "biographies" of the Americas, has earned Arciniegas distinction. With more than fifty published books of history and essay, he is one of the continent's most important writers. Authors ranging from renowned Austrian biographer Stefan Zweig to the Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges have hailed him for his color and lucidity.

"Arciniegas propels the fulfillment of the American being, free from all inferiority complexes, free from the need to imitate European models, conscious of the complexity of his heritage," wrote the Spanish critic Consuelo Trivino Anzola, in the prologue to Arciniegas's own America Was Born Between Books, published last year.

"Perhaps Americans like Arciniegas and [Mexican writer, Octavio] Paz saw in the essay the possibility of being themselves ... of recognizing themselves in the mirror of history," Trivino continued.

Arciniegas is notorious for being a uniquely proud, almost imperious American. He has been contentious, cantankerous, and even arrogant in touting the singular American destiny. The discovery of the Americas, he argues, is the most important event since the birth of Christ, a volcanic, cataclysmic happening, which has changed the way Western cultures think of themselves. He insists the discovery of the New World allowed thinkers to prove that the world is round, to place the planet in the solar system, to develop democratic political systems and religious freedoms.

Unparalleled intellectual and creative gifts were released as a result, he emphasizes. Where the common man in Europe felt repressed by privileged social classes and monarchies, the millions who emigrated to America were allowed to develop their potential fully within representative institutions. The mix of liberated Europeans with Indians and blacks created unequaled innovations in political thought, art, science, economics, and culture.

Arciniegas pulls no punches: America demolished class, social and racial barriers; America's example changed the world.

"Suffice it to say that before the existence of a new continent was revealed, science was unable to come to any positive conclusion regarding the structure of the cosmos," he writes in America in Europe: A History of the New World in Reverse, published in 1975.

"Everything from the time of the revelation of America on back seems to us today as fictional as a novel, as mythical as a painting. With America, the modern world begins. Scientific progress begins, philosophy thrives. By means of America, Europe acquires a new dimension and emerges from its shadows."

Latin American intellectuals still grin with glee recalling the historian's knock-down, drag-out assault on the Italian essayist Giovanni Papini, who wrote a series of pamphlets in 1947 arguing that the Western Hemisphere had been an experience in failure. Taking a note from the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Papini argued that the experience of...