Rieveschl Winner Ann Twinam Earns New Respect for Work

Bomb blasts, earthquakes and daunting secret codes have never been enough to distract historian Ann Twinam from her quest to better understand the history of Latin America. Potential danger and difficulty are all in a day's research for Twinam. Her research often takes her to Colombia, now an unstable center for illegal drug lords. Her most recent volume, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America, centers on more than 200 legal cases in which a host of well-to-do men and women sought to have their illegitimate births made "legitimate" through the purchase of an expensive court document. Before she could find these petitions, she had to crack an unknown coding system in an old Spanish archives.

Read the full story