The legacy of the North American historian Harry Kelsey arrives at the University of Malaga | Leisure and culture

Malaga

The General Foundation of the University of Malaga, through the Center for Ibero-American and Transatlantic Studies FGUMA-UMA has received a collection of research material dedicated to studies on the Atlantic world belonging to the prestigious North American historian Harry Kelsey, according to the UMA in a statement this Wednesday.

The legacy includes documents from the modern era in general, although there is also material linked to the role of the Spanish crown. The donation comes from Kelsey’s son, Matthew Vincent Kelsey, and UMA Professor of Ancient History Fernando Wulff has contributed significantly to its achievement. This documentation clearly increases the information sources for researchers who need to study the subject to which it refers.

This documentary collection, which has been called ‘Harry Kelsey Legacy’, is made up of files from the explorer Francis Drake, the navigator John Hawkins, slides from the sailor and explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, circumnavigation maps, files on the Mission San Luis Rey de France and Mission San Juan Capistrano, plus research correspondence, and several issues of the quarterly magazine of the history of cartography Caert Thresoor, Terrae Incognitae, and Catholic Historical Reviewamong many other documents.

Interest for historians

Diego Vera, director of FGUMA; Juan Antonio García Galindo, director of the CEIT, and professor Wulff have received this material and have expressed their satisfaction at having obtained a documentary archive of this magnitude for the University of Malaga. “It is a great contribution and we hope that it can be organized and cataloged to make it available to any researcher.”

Kelsey received his doctorate in History in 1965 from the University of Denver and spent his career as historian of the State of Colorado, executive director of the Michigan Historical Commission, and chief curator of History at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

He was also a Mead Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library and an adjunct professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. In the 20 years he worked at the Natural History Museum he created many of the exhibits that still exist. He received numerous awards and honors for his research and writing, including the Award of Merit, from the American Association for State and Local History for Frontier Capitalist (1971); the Bolton Prize, from the Western History Association (1986), and the Martin Ridge Award for Distinguished Research and Writing in the History of California (2004), among others. He is the author of several biographies of explorers and travelers and has published various titles, including Frontier Capitalist: The Life of John Evans, State Historical Society of Colorado(1969), The Doctrine and Confessionary of Juan Cortés (1979), Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo (1986), Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate(1998), Sir John Hawkins: The Queen’s Slave Trader (2003), Philip of Spain, King of England (2012) and The First Circumnavigators (2016).

His most recent book was published in 2023 and is a translation of a 500-year-old Spanish manuscript, which tells in the first person one of the sailors who accompanied Magellan in his attempt to circumnavigate the world, which the European discovery of Philippines among many other meetings. His best-known work was Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate, which was widely reviewed, both in academic journals and mainstream publications, including major British newspapers. His work was widely read and erudite, with extensive footnotes documenting his years of research in little-seen European archives.

For its part, the CEIT is a center specialized in the Ibero-American and transatlantic world, with which Spain maintains historical relations, and within whose scope the greatest number of its past and present interrelations occur. This center also arises from the experience of the Aula María Zambrano de Estudios Transatlánticos (AMZET), which has been carrying out intense training, research and dissemination activity in this field since 2012.