The Mexican Revolution

Born in Detroit, Howard Francis Cline received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, where he specialized in Mexican history mainly under the direction of historian Clarence Haring. With a special interest in social and ethnic history, having spent a year working in the Mexican Department of Indian Affairs, Cline wrote his doctoral dissertation on social conflict in mid-nineteenth-century Yucatan. He then looked at the larger sweep of Mexican history and the critical decades of the mid-twentieth century. His books on these latter topics were standard reading for a generation of students of Mexican history after World War II and contributed to the growing appreciation in the United States of the importance of Mexico and its history. Like Frank Tannenbaum, Cline did much to make the Mexican revolution understandable to a U.S. audience.

From 1952 until his death, Cline served as director of the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress. He also was a prime mover in the 1967 Conference on Latin American History. In this role he inaugurated the publication of various invaluable reference works, including his own two-volume edited survey of Mexican historical studies.

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