By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2 

There is an old debate among US historians called "the Bolton theory" named after professor Herbert Bolton who asked in his presidential address before the American Historical Association in 1932 that "Did the Americas have a common history?" Herbert Bolton taught at the University of California at Berkeley.

Professor Bolton had written many works on the history of the western frontier of US from Texas to California. He believed that US history needed to better incorporate a wider and more comprehensive sense that it was part of a wider continental process of cultural and geographical interaction where the Iberian role had been important.

In effect Professor Bolton was taking US historians to task for their belief in the uniqueness of US history and their chronic monolingual parochialism, and they did not like it. Few US historians were convinced by Bolton's argument.

For the majority of them Iberia America represented everything they were not. But there is one area of human activity, sports, where the response to professor Bolton's question is a decisive no. And this hemispheric divide is very much on display this week when Brazil is hosting the Pan American games in Rio and in which Brazil won the copa america in Venezuela. The Latin American press is full of stories on both. But would the readers of any major US newspaper know this?

In last Sunday's sports section the only reference to the Pan American games was an AP report at the bottom of page 9, all of them. The copa America story was consigned to the "soccer roundup" on page 11, a section which led with the elimination of the US team from the FIFA under 20's world cup in Toronto.

The one full story the New York Times did print in anticipation of the Pan American games concerned the marginality of baseball, "America's pastime" in Brazil. How odd that the most avid aficionados in US baseball in the Americas, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, are also the region's most notorious anti-Americans. Now there is history in search of a theory.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper.