Germán Arciniegas facts for kids

Germán Arciniegas Angueyra (December 6, 1900 - November 29, 1999) was a Colombian historian, writer, and journalist. He was known for supporting education and culture. He also spoke out strongly against dictatorships. A dictatorship is a government where one person or a small group has total power. Arciniegas worked as a college professor. He also held important government jobs, like Minister of Education and ambassador to several countries.

Family Life

Germán Arciniegas was the son of Rafael Arciniegas Tavera, a farmer, and Aurora Angueyra Figueredo. He had three brothers and four sisters. His father died young, which made things hard for his mother to support the family.

His great-grandfather on his mother's side was Perucho Figueredo. Perucho was a Cuban freedom fighter. He wrote La Bayamesa, which is Cuba's national anthem. Perucho's two daughters had to leave Cuba when he was executed. Luz, the younger daughter, married a Cuban engineer. They moved to Colombia to help build a railroad. Germán's mother was born there, in the middle of the jungle.

Early Years and Student Activism

When he was eighteen, Germán Arciniegas started studying law. He went to the National University of Colombia. Even before this, he had already started two magazines: Año Quinto (1916) and Voz de la Juventud (1917). While he was a student, he also created and managed the magazine Universidad (1921).

He worked with many famous people on these magazines. One person, José Juan Tablada, even brought the Japanese poetry style called haiku into Spanish literature through Universidad. Arciniegas loved journalism. He started and managed many cultural magazines throughout his life. In 1928, he joined El Tiempo, a daily newspaper in Bogotá. He managed the editorial section and wrote a weekly column. By 1937, he became the general manager.

With help from Carlos Pellicer, Arciniegas started the Federation of Colombian Students. This group was against the influence of the Jesuit order in universities. They held student carnivals that sometimes turned into protests. At one student rally, a bullet barely missed his head.

Their actions helped to weaken the Conservative Party's control over the government. In 1933, this led to important university changes. Students gained the right to choose their own rectors (leaders of the university). They also got a representative in the legislature to speak for them. Arciniegas held this position for a while. He believed that students were the main force behind all political and intellectual changes throughout history.

This idea led to his first book, El Estudiante de la Mesa Redonda (The Student of the Round Table, 1932). In this book, he described history as a "tavern." He imagined students sitting at a table, sharing their stories and laughing at others.

Later Career and Public Service

Germán Arciniegas continued to fight for students' rights. He served briefly as Minister of Education in 1942 and again from 1945 to 1946. During this time, he founded the Caro and Cuervo Institute. He also moved the Colombian National Museum to its current location, which used to be a prison.

During World War II, Arciniegas supported helping and sheltering refugees. This was different from Luis López de Mesa, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs. López de Mesa had forbidden Jewish people from entering Colombia. Because of these strong conservative ideas in the 1940s, Arciniegas felt his family was in danger. He moved to the United States. He took a job teaching at Columbia University in New York. He lived there for ten years, from 1947 to 1957.

While in New York, he wrote his most important book, Entre la Libertad y el Miedo (Between Freedom and Fear, 1952). This book looked at a difficult time in Latin America. Seven dictators were in power at the same time. Arciniegas also criticized the U.S. State Department for being too friendly with these dictators. Because of this, he was stopped and questioned several times after returning from trips abroad. His book was banned in at least ten countries. General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who was the President of Colombia, even accused Arciniegas of being a Communist. He ordered all of Arciniegas's books to be burned. Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, put Arciniegas on a list of people he wanted to harm.

Arciniegas worked to combine indigenous (native) and European cultures. This idea guided all his diplomatic and political work. He served as a vice consul in London (1929). He was also a chancellor at the Colombian embassy in Argentina (1940). Later, he became an Ambassador to Italy (1959), Israel (1962), Venezuela (1966), and the Holy See (1976). In all these roles, he promoted the art and culture of America. For him, "America" meant everything from Alaska to Patagonia. From 1960 to 1965, Arciniegas edited Cuadernos, a Spanish language magazine.

In 1992, he was chosen to lead the National Commission for the Celebration of the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of the Discovery of America. However, the First Lady at the time, Ana Milena Muñoz de Gaviria, removed him. She took over the commission herself, which caused a lot of discussion.

Honors and Awards

• Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1962)
• Maria Moors Cabot Prize (1963)
• Alfonso Reyes International Prize (1994)
• Honorary member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (1949).
• Doctor Honoris Causa at the Faculty of Humanities and Education of the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña (UNPHU, 1984).

Selected Works

English Books

• The Knight of El Dorado: The Tale of Don Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and His Conquest of New Granada, translated by Mildred Adams, Viking Press (1942)
• Germans in the Conquest of America: A Sixteenth-Century Venture, translated by Ángel Flores, Macmillan (1943)
• The State of Latin-America: Twenty Nations Between Freedom and Fear, translated by Harriet de Onís, Knopf (1952)
• Latin-America: A Cultural History, translated by Joan MacLean, Knopf (1967)
• Amerigo and the New World : The Life & Times of Amerigo Vespucci, translated by Harriet de Onís, Octagon (1978) ISBN: 0-374-90280-1
• America in Europe: A History of the New World in Reverse, translated by Gabriela Arciniegas and Victoria Arana, Harcourt (1986) ISBN: 0-15-105555-6
• Caribbean: Sea of the New World, translated by Harriet de Onís, Markus Wiener (2003) ISBN: 1-55876-312-0

Spanish Books

• El Estudiante de la Mesa Redonda, Ercilla (1937)
• Los Comuneros, Editorial ABC (1938)
• Este Pueblo de América, Fondo de Cultura Economica (1945)
• América Mágica. Los Hombres y los Meses, Sudamericana (1961)
• América Mágica. Las Mujeres y las Horas, Sudamericana (1961)

See also

In Spanish: Germán Arciniegas para niños