There are not many general works on the cultural history of colonial Spanish America. However, J. H. Elliott’s edited collection, The Hispanic World (London, 1991), published in the United States as The Spanish World (New York, 1991), offers a useful introduction to Spanish history and civilisation. Focusing on the early modern period, see an excellent selection of the same author’s essays: J. H. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1989). There are two older works which remain useful: De la conquista a la independencia (Mexico, D.F., 1954), by the Venezuelan Mariano Picón Salas, translated into English as A Cultural History of Spanish America (Berkeley, 1962), is a work about culture in the traditional sense of ‘high culture’, that is, books and fine arts; George Foster’s Culture and Conquest (Chicago, 1960) concerns culture in the anthropological sense of the word and stresses the cultural contribution of Spain to the daily life of Spanish America in the colonial era. There are important chapters devoted to cultural life in America by Guillermo Céspedes del Castillo (for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba (for the eighteenth) in the monumental Historia de Espana y América, edited by J. Vicens Vives (Barcelona, 1957; 2nd ed., 1977). A recent general survey is Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba, Historia y literatura en Hispano-América 1492–1820: La versión intelectual de una experiencia (Valencia, Spain, 1978). Mario Góngora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America (Cambridge, Eng., 1975) discusses many aspects of intellectual and cultural life.