Bienvenidos: Welcome online students!

I hope you find this a congenial learning space--a place to explore Latin America's culture, history, and politics. I've taken pains to design the online reader, documents, visuals, and activities to maximize your learning. However, if something is unclear, let me know asap! Also if you hit a snag, let me know. I have to throw literally hundreds of e-switches to mobilize this learning lab. And I do make mistakes. So if a quiz won't open or you have other issues, let me know.

Now a few words about our online learning environment, Latin America: An Interactive History Lab. Most of you are familiar with laboratories as the places natural scientists do their work. They conduct research in a variety of disciplines and give students hands-on experience in the labs. Instead of the natural sciences, our lab focuses on Latin American history. We use the same idea of a teaching and learning lab to present more than three hundred historical documents, paintings, maps, and photographs of people, places, and artifacts reflecting five centuries of Latin American history. Unlike the physical research apparatus and measuring devices common in the natural sciences, our lab includes mostly written documents. In the history lab, you work as an apprentice historian, guided by your course instructor. You focus on the materials of historical study and the skills and concepts of historical thinking to help you understand the past, including your own.

I, Rich Slatta, Professor of History, created and directf this history lab. I'vetaught at North Carolina State University since 1980. I first visited Latin America in 1969 as a Peace Corps volunteer. I trained on the island of Puerto Rico, worked in a squatter settlement outside Panama City, Panama, and traveled widely throughout Central and South America. Since earning my doctorate in Latin American history in 1980, I've researched and taught about the region, writing ten books and hundreds of articles and reviews. I have also taught study abroad classes in London and Prague. This collection of research materials is my way of sharing what I've learned and enjoyed about Latin American history and culture with you.

We use the idea of a teaching and learning lab to explore historical documents, paintings, maps, photographs of people, places, and artifacts that tell the story of five centuries of Latin American history. Our lab has much in common with a historical archive, a building that houses primary sources, that is, eyewitness accounts and other historical documents from past times and places.

Archives constitute the most important location where historians do their work. Archives are where historians, including you, engage in a dialogue with the voices of the past. Historians like you ask questions from those people in the past, and they answer through the primary sources. Yes, sometimes their answers are incomplete and difficult to understand, but that's one of the many challenges and rewards of historical inquiry--deciphering the meaning of those old voices. The General Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, for example, houses the most important documents covering Spanish colonial activities in Latin America, from the fifteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.

As I said, historians engage people of the past in dialogue using a wide variety of materials created in times past. You will engage in deep reading of the documents, often "reading between the lines" instead of taking things at face value. We read critically, and we compare what we find in different documents.

Through the research and winnowing process, combing various sources of evidence, we try to come up with the best explanation of past events, what historians call an interpretation. Once you've gathered a credible mass of primary sources, you construct your interpretation of events, guided by questions posed by your instructor. You write up that interpretation and provide supporting evidence that you share with your instructor and fellow students. Yes, students learn from and teach one another. You will also learn to evaluate (access) the historical interpretations of others and learn to self-assess your own work--vital cognitive skills for lifelong learning.

In natural science labs, science students design experiments and strive to create explanations of experimental outcomes. Historians, indeed scholars in all disciplines, also engage in the social construction of knowledge. What does this mean? It means you will gather many pieces of historical evidence and try to fit them together, something like a jigsaw puzzle. Many of your assignments will ask you to construct an understanding, an interpretation, of a problem or event in the past. Yes, initially, it's difficult and sometimes confusing. Also, unlike the science lab, we cannot replicate experiments or past events. History events are unique and took place in the past, so we face special challenges in our lab.

Once you've constructed your understanding of the past, how do you check it for accuracy? How do you put the events you've researched into a meaningful context? Here we turn from primary sources, original eyewitness accounts, to secondary scholarly sources written after the fact. We add other scholars and researchers to our dialogue, looking at their writings, which we call historiography, and comparing their conclusions with own. We read scholarly monographs, both books and articles. Before such monographs get published, they are reviewed by anonymous referees, other experts in a specific field of history. Those referees try to insure the research and interpretation are sound and well-grounded in archival documents. We have you compare your work with that of expert historians to help guide you toward reaching better-reasoned interpretations.

Finally, you need to communicate your historical findings with other students. Instead of meeting in a student lounge or conference room, we will communicate online. You will write a variety of historical interpretations and complete other active-learning assignments. You will read and comment on one another's work and receive helpful feedback from your instructor and/or teaching assistants. We will collectively continue the ongoing historical discussion, listening to voices of the past, voices of other scholars, and contributing our own voices to the conversation.

Once again, welcome to Latin America: An Interactive History Lab. I hope you relish your work as a historian as much as I have over the past four decades. With this inquiry approach, your instructor does not give you right answers to memorize. We give you challenging questions so that you can work out your own answers. That's how real historians work, and that is also how we solve real-world problems that confront us. Enjoy making history!