<< Back August 2005

Street Wise
Jorge Basadre was a Distinguished
Academic and Public Servant who Wrote
the Definitive History of Republican Peru
By James Rudolph

Jorge Basadre Grohmann was born in 1903 in Tacna, still under Chilean occupation. In 1912, his family moved to Lima, where he attended San Marcos University and became active in the University Reform movement that swept Latin America from 1918 into the early 1920s. He earned his Doctorate in Letters in 1928, then began a distinguished career as a professor of history at San Marcos, the Military Academy in Chorrillos, and at Catholic University. He also taught in Argentina, Spain and the United States, where in 1931 he earned a Carnegie Foundation fellowship to study library science. He later served as the director of the San Marcos University library and, following a fire that destoyed Peru's National Library in 1943, he was named its director and successfully rebuilt it during over the next five years. He also acted as Minister of Education on two occasions, in 1945, and from 1956 to 1958.

Jorge Basadre published numerous texts on the history of Republican Peru, but he is best remembered for his monumental 16-volume Historia de la República del Perú, which was published between 1939 and 1969. He died in Lima in 1980.