Born in Cuzco, Peru, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess, Garcilaso de la Vega is often considered the first spokesperson for the South American mestizo. Garcilaso spent much of his youth listening to stories of the culture and glories of his mother's civilization and the heroics of his father's conquering comrades. At age 20, after the death of his parents, he moved to Spain, where he spent the rest of his life. In Spain, he served for a time in the Spanish army, was ordained a priest, and wrote on a variety of subjects. His account of Hernando de Soto's travels in Florida, The Florida of the Inca (1605), set the stage for his more personal interest in the pre-Hispanic… history of his homeland of Peru. This interest culminated in his masterpiece, Royal Commentaries of the Incas (1609), in which he movingly describes the Incan Empire and its conquest by Spain. A mestizo, Garcilaso wrote a mestizo history in the Royal Commentaries, both praising and criticizing his parents' peoples. His desire to know and understand the past in order to know one's self and one's present reflected a serious historical consciousness and made Garcilaso one of several sixteenth-century chroniclers whose writings began a long Latin American narrative tradition. Their work, with its factual as well as emotional content, continues to enrich the work of students of the Euro-American encounter. Garcilaso was also among the first to appreciate that bicultural encounter from the perspective of the conquered indigenous populations.
A native of Great Britain, Oxford-educated Arnold J. Toynbee was a prolific scholar who had a varied and interesting political and academic career. He served in the British foreign office during both world wars and was a delegate to the 1919 Paris Peace Congress. From 1925 to 1955, he held the position of director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and was professor of history at the University of London during approximately the same time. Toynbee was always a controversial historian who made sweeping generalizations about history that were often criticized by other scholars. Of himself, he wrote:"What I am trying to do is explain to Western people that they are only… a small minority of the world---the great world is Asia and Africa---outside the West." Among Toynbee's publications are East to West: A Journey round the World (1958), a collection of world portraits of contemporary affairs and conditions in ancient settings, and Between Oxus and Jumna (1961), an unsurpassed travel guide to a little-known, rugged area encompassing Afghanistan, western Pakistan, and northwest India. But his major work is without doubt his A Study of History (1934--1961), his investigation into the growth and decay of civilizations, which took him 40 years of steady labor. In this work Toynbee examines all of recorded history and concludes that each civilization is subject to a cycle of early struggle, growth, and then decline. Rather than revise all the volumes of this monumental work, he decided to correct errors and refute his critics, in the twelfth volume of the set, Reconsiderations (1961) At age 80, Toynbee was still going strong and continuing to work a seven-day week."I suppose that one day I might stop, and if I stopped I might suddenly crumple," he said. "It is very important to keep going."