Imprints on empire

Henry Wagner, Spain's North America, and a world of books

Colston, Stephen Allyn

Henry Raup Wagner (1862-1957) was a prolific scholar who examined Spain’s possessions and claims to empire in North America from a panoramic perspective that extended geographically and chronologically from Central Mexico in the sixteenth century to the Alaskan coast in the eighteenth. Because Wagner constructed his many studies with features
that he drew from both rare book librarianship and the discipline of history, his imposing corpus of work defies rigid disciplinary categorization. Based on unpublished correspondence and other manuscripts from libraries throughout the United States, Imprints on Empire is the first biographical study to interpret in any substantial way Henry Wagner’s evolution as an important scholar of Colonial Spanish North America within the intellectual and cultural settings he labored for more than three decades. Appendices of previously unpublished materials include a voluminous study Wagner developed over a period of twenty years on early European (principally Spanish) accounts about Spain’s discovery and conquest of Aztec Mexico.