This special issue comprising articles on Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico is devoted to museums established over the long nineteenth century in Spanish and Portuguese America. It features a variety of museums: from national to provincial, from monumental to one-room shows, from general to those devoted to a single subject, from lost to still existing. Awide variety of institutions in North, Central, and South America are examined in a century that witnessed the last reforms of the Iberian empires, the impact of Napoleonic politics on the Atlantic world, the long processes inaugurated by the wars of Revolution and Independence, the establishment of the Brazilian empire, and the convoluted configuration of the new Latin American Republics. The contributions cover a period that begins with the establishment of new general museums in Mexico (1825) and Bogota (1823). Miruna Achim, in her article, calls this moment ‘the trial years’. A complete continental survey would also have included studies of museums founded in Rio de Janeiro (1818), Buenos Aires (1823), Santiago de Chile (1823), Lima (1826), and Charleston (in South Carolina), all of which faced the same difficulties. A number of the following articles remark, in fact, on the ephemeral character of those creations. Institutional accounts and current historiography have tended to make a connection with later, surviving establishments. From a historiographical point of view, however, one may ask whether it is legitimate to insist on these connections, which tend to canonize a notion of permanence attaching to present-day museums. The period covered in this volume finishes with the establishment late in the nineteenth century of museums devoted to art, history, or natural history in Sao Paulo, Salvador in Bahia, Amazonas, La Plata, and Buenos Aires. By discussing all these institutions in one place, we want to address historiographical problems that museum history journal, Vol. 9 No. 1, January, 2016, 3–12

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填图：西班牙和葡萄牙美洲的 19 世纪博物馆

这期特刊包括关于阿根廷、巴西、哥伦比亚、危地马拉和墨西哥的文章，专门介绍 19 世纪在西班牙和葡萄牙美洲建立的博物馆。它拥有各种博物馆：从国家博物馆到省级博物馆，从纪念性展览到单间展览，从一般展览到致力于单一主题的展览，从已失传到仍然存在。在见证了伊比利亚帝国最后一次改革、拿破仑政治对大西洋世界的影响、革命和独立战争开始的漫长过程、巴西帝国的建立，以及新拉丁美洲共和国的复杂结构。这些贡献涵盖了从在墨西哥（1825 年）和波哥大（1823 年）建立新的综合博物馆开始的时期。Miruna Achim 在她的文章中将这一时刻称为“试验年”。一项完整的大陆调查还包括对在里约热内卢（1818 年）、布宜诺斯艾利斯（1823 年）、智利圣地亚哥（1823 年）、利马（1826 年）和查尔斯顿（南卡罗来纳州）建立的博物馆的研究，所有这些博物馆都面临着同样的困难。事实上，以下许多文章都评论了这些创作的短暂特征。机构账户和当前的历史编纂倾向于与后来幸存的机构建立联系。然而，从史学的角度来看，人们可能会问坚持这些联系是否合法，这些联系往往使当今博物馆的永久性概念成为经典。本卷所涵盖的时期结束于 19 世纪后期在圣保罗、巴伊亚的萨尔瓦多、亚马逊、拉普拉塔和布宜诺斯艾利斯建立的致力于艺术、历史或自然历史的博物馆。通过在一个地方讨论所有这些机构，我们希望解决博物馆历史期刊，卷。9 No. 1, 2016年1月, 3-12