Collecting and preserving historical memory: Andrés Lamas and the Historia de la Conquista of Pedro Lozano

This article studies the discovery and circulation of the various manuscripts of the Jesuit Pedro Lozano’s Historia de la Conquista del Paraguay, Río de la Plata y Tucumán, its editing process and its first readings at local and regional level. This examination aims to reveal the characteristics associated with the collecting and bibliophilic practices of the American intelligentsia during the second half of the nineteenth century, while at the same time discovering within them the leading role of the Uruguayan diplomat and historian Andrés Lamas as a facilitating agent for the circulation of historical materials and a decisive figure in the publicity of Lozano’s text. Thus, the work exhibits the complex functioning of a collector’s trade that comprises a dense relational network of transnational, scope oriented towards the preservation and valuation of documentation on the American past in order to save it and offer it to future generations of historians for the re-writing of history.