Rosa, José María (1906–1991)
Rosa, José María (1906–1991)
José María Rosa, born August 20, 1906, was an Argentine lawyer and a well-known revisionist historian. In the 1930s, Rosa taught Argentine history at the University of Litoral, in Santa Fe. He founded the Instituto de Estudios Federalistas, which was crucial for articulating the contemporary historical revisionist movement that sought to "revise" Argentine history from a nationalist and anti-liberal perspective. Rosa's historical work is a prime example of that perspective: He conceives of Argentine history as a permanent struggle between two immobile blocs, the liberal pro-imperialist and the national and popular.
In 1945 Rosa became a Peronista. During the regime of Juan Domingo Perón (1945–1955), he was a professor at the University of La Plata; after Perón's fall, he was briefly imprisoned and then went into exile in Uruguay and Spain. Back in Argentina in 1958, Rosa directed the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas Juan Manuel de Rosas (named for the nineteenth-century nationalist dictator). His thirteen-volume Historia argentina (1970) was critical for modeling the historical imagination of young Peronistas. During the third Peronist government (1973–1976), Rosa was appointed ambassador to Paraguay and to Greece. Rosa returned to Argentina in the late 1970s and found that the dictatorship had banned his books. From the early 1980s to his death on July 2, 1991, he directed a magazine called Línea.
See alsoArgentina: The Twentieth Century; Argentina, Political Parties: Justicialist Party; Perón, Juan Domingo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Galasso, Norberto. Las luchas de los argentinos: Y cómo la cuentan diversas corrientes históricas. Buenos Aires: Pensamiento Nacional, 1995.
Halperin Donghi, Tulio. El revisionismo histórico argentino. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1970.
Rosa, José María. Historia argentina, 13 vols. Buenos Aires: Oriente, 1970.
Rosa, José María. Defensa y pérdida de nuestra independencia económica. Buenos Aires: Peña Lillo, 1986.
Valeria Manzano