Friede is considered together with Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, Luis Eduardo Nieto Arteta and Luis Ospina Vásquez, one of the founders of "New History" in Colombia, after writing a voluminous work about the conquests and indigenous history in his 1955 publication Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de Colombia [REF].
In 1959 the Department of Social Sciences of the National University of Colombia was founded, where Juan Friede was one of the main professors [REF].