Benjamin Keen (1913–2002) was an American historian specializing in thehistory of colonial Latin America.[1]
Keen received his PhD fromYale and taught atAmherst College,West Virginia University, andJersey State College before joiningNorthern Illinois University in 1965. He retired in 1981. In 1985 he received the Distinguished Service Award of theConference on Latin American History.[1]
His first work wasLatin American Civilization: History and Society: 1492 to the Present, first published in 1955 and appearing in its seventh edition in 2000. Another textbook published in six editions was hisA History of Latin America. InAztec Image in Western Thought he documents how Western intellectuals have changed their views of theAztec culture since the first years of conquest and until modern times. He also examined how Western historiography have interpretedChristopher Columbus andBartolomé de Las Casas since the fifteenth century. He also published translations of the chronicle of the 16th-century Spanish judgeAlonso de Zorita inLife and Labor in Ancient Mexico: The Brief and Summary Relation of the Lords of New Spain and ofFernando Columbus’The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus.[1]
He was also known as a debater of historiography, and participated in a famous exchange with historianLewis Hanke beginning in the late 1960s where he accused the latter of having gone too far in his debunking of theSpanish Black Legend - the historiographic tradition exaggerating the cruelty of the Spanish Colonial empire - and instead having participated in the creation of a White Legend.[2]
Keen was married to Betty from 1937 to her death in 1996. The couple raised four children. He died on November 1, 2002, inSanta Fe, New Mexico.[1]
