At times in intellectual life the appropriate response can only be to stand and applaud. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's foray into the world of eighteenth-century historiography provides us with one such moment. He draws on archival and library research in Spain, France, England, the United States, and Mexico to challenge and revise dominant understandings of eighteenth-century historical practice. In so doing, he recreates the various historiographical tendencies, debates, and innovations existing on both sides of the Atlantic during this era. One result is the demolition of the notion of a unitary—and, explicitly or implicitly in this formulation, primitive and backward—“Spanish mind.” However, Cañizares-Esguerra achieves far more than this as he leads us through an analysis of the various ways that the period's intellectuals, primarily in Spain and “Spanish” America, constructed knowledge about the pre-Colombian American past.