The Flourishing of Argentine Histiography After the 1983 Return to Democracy

The return to democracy in Argentina in 1983 catalyzed an unprecedented flourishing of historical writing and academic renewal. Universities experienced a significant turnover in personnel, with a new generation of professors determined to raise scholarly standards. Job opportunities multiplied due to a dramatic increase in both national and private universities, supported by state funding from the scientific institution CONICET. For the first time, high-quality historical research was produced not only in traditional centers like Buenos Aires and Córdoba but in new universities across the nation. Regular academic congresses fostered national exchange of ideas, and despite recurring economic crises, the field saw a sustained surge in both the quantity and quality of output.

Many influential historians shaping this renaissance had experienced exile, exposing them to the full spectrum of Western historical thought. Consequently, all major global trends—from social history to postmodernism—found expression in Argentina, albeit with distinct local interpretations. The Internet later greatly facilitated this continuous transnational exchange of ideas. These profound shifts in historiography gradually filtered into secondary education textbooks, modernizing the teaching of history for new generations. This period was fundamentally defined by a deliberate move away from the ideological constraints of the dictatorship era.

A defining development was the emergence of the "new political history" in the 1980s, which flourished throughout the 1990s. While aware of foreign trends, it was deeply rooted in the democratic transition and a critical examination of Argentina’s political past. Historians sought to understand the systemic failures that led to the 1976 military coup while identifying salvageable democratic elements in the political culture. Groups like PEHESA had earlier called for a recovery of the nation’s "reusable political past." This new approach innovatively combined political analysis with social, cultural, and intellectual history, often focusing on sub-national units for greater analytical depth.

Seminal works exemplify this methodological shift. Hilda Sabato meticulously analyzed the electoral process and civic culture in 1860s Buenos Aires, revealing how public opinion functioned amidst pervasive fraud. Gardenia Vidal provided a detailed study of the Radical Party in Córdoba, exploring patronage networks and factional support after the establishment of fair male suffrage. Mariano Plotkin combined cultural and political history to examine how the Peronist regime used cultural tools to build legitimacy. Meanwhile, Ariel de la Fuente employed folklore and other sources to understand popular allegiance to nineteenth-century caudillos in provinces like La Rioja.

One of the most significant historiographical revisions concerned the rural economy of the pampas during the late colonial and early independence periods. Traditional views depicted a landscape dominated by non-capitalist large grazing estates that controlled society. This was challenged by pioneering work from Tulio Halperín Donghi in the 1960s-70s on the ranching frontier and individual estates, and by Carlos Sempat Assadourian’s analysis of regional trade networks. After 1983, historians, utilizing new sources like estate records and death inventories, painted a far more complex picture of a capitalist economy where farming and ranching coexisted alongside estates of varied sizes, largely dispelling the mythical stereotype of the gaucho.

Recent decades have seen Argentine historians actively engage with global trends, from the linguistic turn and gender studies to the history of private life and postmodernism. The pinnacle of this eclectic, collaborative scholarship is the ten-volume Nueva Historia Argentina. This collective work breaks from the traditional single-narrative model, featuring chapters by specialists on diverse topics, including health, architecture, and urban growth, which would have been absent from earlier national histories. This project symbolizes the field’s maturation and thematic diversification.

Despite this progress, structural challenges persist. Libraries and archives remain underfunded, and academic journals continually struggle for survival. A significant number of Argentine historians now work abroad for economic rather than political reasons, yet the constant intellectual exchange prevents isolation. From its mid-20th century state, Argentine historiography has undergone a remarkable transformation. Since the 1980s, its output has been both high-quality and impressively voluminous, with a healthy decentralization away from the capital. While future scholarly debates and new agendas are inevitable, the trajectory of Argentine historical writing provides substantial grounds for scholarly optimism.