Key Journals
History -- Books and eBooks
General History
Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America by
Born in Blood and Fire spans six centuries and covers twenty countries in a compelling narrative of the Latin American experience, animated by stories about men and women from all walks of life and enriched by insightful analysis. This is a story of despair and hope, the processes of conquest and colonization, race mixing and class construction, revolution and republic formation, and the elusive quests for sustained economic growth and political and social equality. Nearly 100,000 copies sold!
Location: Mugar Stacks F1410 .C4397 2011Publication Date: 2011
A History of Latin America by
The best-selling text for introductory Latin American history courses, A HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA encompasses political and diplomatic theory, class structure and economic organization, culture and religion, and the environment. The integrating framework is the dependency theory, the most popular interpretation of Latin American history, which stresses the economic relationship of Latin American nations to wealthier nations, particularly the United States. Spanning pre-historic times to the present, A HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA takes both a chronological and a nation-by-nation approach, and includes the most recent historical analysis and the most up-to-date scholarship. The Ninth Edition includes expanded coverage of social and cultural history (including music) throughout and increased attention to women, indigenous cultures, and Afro-Latino people assures well balanced coverage of the region's diverse histories.
Location: Mugar Stacks F1408.3 .K443 2013Publication Date: 2012
History and Politics
Transforming Latin America: The International and Domestic Origins of Change by
This ambitious book offers a clear and unified framework for understanding political change across Latin America. The impact of U.S. hegemony and the global economic system on the region is widely known, and scholars and advocates alike point to Latin America's vulnerability in the face of external forces. In spite of such foreign pressure, however, individual countries continue to chart their own courses, displaying considerable variation in political and economic life. Looking broadly across the Western Hemisphere, with examples from Brazil, the Southern Cone, the Andes, and Central America, Arceneaux and Pion-Berlin identify general rules that explain how international and domestic politics interact in specific contexts. The detailed, accessible case studies cast new light on such central problems as neoliberal economic reform, democratization, human rights, regional security, environmental degradation, drug trafficking, and immigration. And they consider not only what actors, institutions, and ideas matter in particular political contexts, but when, where, and how they matter. By dividing issues into the domains of "high" and "low" politics, and differentiating between short-term problems and more permanent concerns, they create an innovative typology for analyzing a wide variety of political events and trends.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2005
In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War by
Over the last decade, studies of the Cold War have mushroomed globally. Unfortunately, work on Latin America has not been well represented in either theoretical or empirical discussions of the broader conflict. With some notable exceptions, studies have proceeded in rather conventional channels, focusing on U.S. policy objectives and high-profile leaders (Fidel Castro) and events (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and drawing largely on U.S. government sources. Moreover, only rarely have U.S. foreign relations scholars engaged productively with Latin American historians who analyze how the international conflict transformed the region's political, social, and cultural life. Representing a collaboration among eleven North American, Latin American, and European historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, this volume attempts to facilitate such a cross-fertilization. In the process, In From the Cold shifts the focus of attention away from the bipolar conflict, the preoccupation of much of the so-called "new Cold War history," in order to showcase research, discussion, and an array of new archival and oral sources centering on the grassroots, where conflicts actually brewed. The collection's contributors examine international and everyday contests over political power and cultural representation, focusing on communities and groups above and underground, on state houses and diplomatic board rooms manned by Latin American and international governing elites, on the relations among states regionally, and, less frequently, on the dynamics between the two great superpowers themselves. In addition to charting new directions for research on the Latin American Cold War, In From the Cold seeks to contribute more generally to an understanding of the conflict in the global south. Contributors. Ariel C. Armony, Steven J. Bachelor, Thomas S. Blanton, Seth Fein, Piero Gleijeses, Gilbert M. Joseph, Victoria Langland, Carlota McAllister, Stephen Pitti, Daniela Spenser, Eric Zolov
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2008
The Color of Citizenship Race, Modernity and Latin American / Hispanic Political Thought by
The role of race in politics, citizenship, and the state is one of the most perplexing puzzles of modernity. While political thought has been slow to take up this puzzle, Diego von Vacano suggests that the tradition of Latin American and Hispanic political thought, which has long consideredthe place of mixed-race peoples throughout the Americas, is uniquely well-positioned to provide useful ways of thinking about the connections between race and citizenship. As he argues, debates in the United States about multiracial identity, the possibility of a post-racial world in the aftermathof Barack Obama, and demographic changes owed to the age of mass migration will inevitably have to confront the intellectual tradition related to racial admixture that comes to us from Latin America.Von Vacano compares the way that race is conceived across the writings of four thinkers, and across four different eras: the Spanish friar Bartolome de Las Casas writing in the context of empire; Simon Bolivar writing during the early republican period; Venezuelan sociologist Laureano VallenillaLanz on the role of race in nationalism; and Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos writing on the aesthetic approach to racial identity during the cosmopolitan, post-national period. From this comparative and historical survey, von Vacano develops a concept of race as synthetic, fluid and dynamic --a concept that will have methodological, historical, and normative value for understanding race in other diverse societies.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2012
Economic Development
The Economic Development of Latin America since Independence by
Latin America is attracting increasing interest due to the strong economic performance of the last decade and to the political changes that are taking place. This book gives a unique, comprehensive, and up to date view of Latin America economic development over the two centuries sinceIndependence. It considers Latin American economies within the wider context of the international economy, and covers economic growth, international trade, capital flows, and trends in inequality and human development.With chapters that cover different eras, it traces the major developments of Latin American countries and offers a novel and coherent interpretation of the economic history of the region. It combines a wealth of original research, new perspectives, and empirical information to provide a synthesis ofthe growing literature that both complements and extends previous studies.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2012
Modernization, Urbanization and Development in Latin America, 1900s - 2000s by
In this book Arturo Almandoz places the major episodes of Latin America's twentieth and early twenty-first century urban history within the changing relationship between industrialization and urbanization, modernization and development. This relationship began in the early twentieth century, when industrialization and urbanization became significant in the region, and ends at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when new tensions between liberal globalization and populist nationalism challenge development in the subcontinent, much of which is still poverty stricken. Latin America's twentieth-century modernization and development are closely related to nineteenth-century ideals of progress and civilization, and for this reason Almandoz opens with a brief review of that legacy for the different countries that are the focus of his book - Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela - but with references to others. He then explores the regional distortions, which resulted from the interaction between industrialization and urbanization, and how the imbalance between urbanization and the productive system helps to explain why 'take-off' was not followed by the 'drive to maturity' in Latin American countries. He suggests that the close yet troublesome relationship with the United States, the recurrence of dictatorships and autocratic regimes, and Marxist influences in many domains, are all factors that explain Latin America's stagnation and underdevelopment up to the so-called 'lost decade' of 1980s. He shows how Latin America's fate changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when neoliberal programmes, political compromise and constitutional reform dismantled the traditional model of the corporate state and centralized planning. He reveals how economic growth and social improvements have been attained by politically left-wing yet economically open-market countries while others have resumed populism and state intervention. All these trends make up the complex scenario for the new century - especially when considered against the background of vibrant metropolises that are the main actors in the book.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2014
The Social Life of Economic Inequalities in Contemporary Latin America by
This edited volume examines how economic processes have worked upon social lives and social realities in Latin America during the past decades. Through tracing the effects of the neoliberal epoch into the era of the so-called pink tide, the book seeks to understand to what extent the turn to the left at the start of the millennium managed to challenge historically constituted configurations of inequality. A central argument in the book is that in spite of economic reforms and social advances on a range of arenas, the fundamental tenants of socio-economic inequalities have not been challenged substantially. As several countries are now experiencing a return to right-wing politics, this collection helps us better understand why inequalities are so entrenched in the Latin American continent, but also the complex and creative ways that it is continuously contested. The book directs itself to students, scholars and anyone interested in Latin America, economic anthropology, political anthropology, left-wing politics, poverty and socio-economic inequalities.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2017
Culture, Race and Ethnicity -- Books and eBooks
Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean by
Latin America's long history of showing how racism can co-exist with racial mixture and conviviality offers useful ammunition for strengthening anti-racist stances. This volume asks whether cultural production has a particular role to play within discourses and practices of anti-racism in Latin America and the Caribbean. The contributors analyse music, performance, education, language, film and art in diverse national contexts across the region. The book also places Latin American and Caribbean racial formations within a broader global context and sets out the premise that the region provides valuable opportunities for thinking about anti-racism when recent political events have made ever more fragile the claims that, at least in Europe and the United States, we exist in a 'post-racial' world.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2020
Black in Latin America by
Selected as a 2012 Outstanding Title by AAUP University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World during the Middle Passage. While just over 11.0 million survived the arduous journey, only about 450,000 of them arrived in the United States. The rest--over ten and a half million--were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America. This astonishing fact changes our entire picture of the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, and of its lasting cultural impact. These millions of Africans created new and vibrant cultures, magnificently compelling syntheses of various African, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish influences. Despite their great numbers, the cultural and social worlds that they created remain largely unknown to most Americans, except for certain popular, cross-over musical forms. So Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their acknowledge--or deny--their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries--Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru--through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism that has sometimes sought to keep the black cultural presence from view. In Brazil, he delves behind the façade of Carnaval to discover how this 'rainbow nation' is waking up to its legacy as the world's largest slave economy. In Cuba, he finds out how the culture, religion, politics and music of this island is inextricably linked to the huge amount of slave labor imported to produce its enormously profitable 19th century sugar industry, and how race and racism have fared since Fidel Castro's Communist revolution in 1959. In Haiti, he tells the story of the birth of the first-ever black republic, and finds out how the slaves's hard fought liberation over Napoleon Bonaparte's French Empire became a double-edged sword. In Mexico and Peru, he explores the almost unknown history of the significant numbers of black people--far greater than the number brought to the United States--brought to these countries as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the worlds of culture that their descendants have created in Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the Costa Chica region on the Pacific, and in and around Lima, Peru. Professor Gates' journey becomes ours as we are introduced to the faces and voices of the descendants of the Africans who created these worlds. He shows both the similarities and distinctions between these cultures, and how the New World manifestations are rooted in, but distinct from, their African antecedents. "Black in Latin America" is the third instalment of Gates's documentary trilogy on the Black Experience in Africa, the United States, and in Latin America. In America Behind the Color Line, Professor Gates examined the fortunes of the black population of modern-day America. In Wonders of the African World, he embarked upon a series of journeys to reveal the history of African culture. Now, he brings that quest full-circle in an effort to discover how Africa and Europe combined to create the vibrant cultures of Latin America, with a rich legacy of thoughtful, articulate subjects whose stories are astonishingly moving and irresistibly compelling.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2011
Manufacturing Otherness: Missions and Indigenous Cultures in Latin America by
The discovery of the New World offered European civilisation the chance to generate a process of circulation of its own cultural values-the spiritual conquest-that has no comparable precedents. The missionary orders played an important role during this Westernisation of the world, not only as key players in the spread of Christian values, but also as mediators between different worlds. Indeed, missionary practices imposed the dominating culture's values and institutions on the vanquished peoples. At the same time, they also promoted the circulation of new knowledge and the negotiation between different cultures during the age of a global integration of space. This book looks at the vast field of study concerning the history of missions from a specific viewpoint. Firstly, it focuses on local processes, singling out specific case studies to be used for a general reflection. On the other hand, it refocuses the attention on the Indigenous cultures-which the missionaries helped to bring to light in the field of Western history-showing how they succeeded in entering the areas of negotiation created by missionaries, and in producing their own cultural subjectivity.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2014
Race and Ethnicity in Latin America by
For over ten years, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America has been an essential text for students studying the region. This second edition adds new material and brings the analysis up to date.Race and ethnic identities are increasingly salient in Latin America. Peter Wade examines changing perspectives on Black and Indian populations in the region, tracing similarities and differences in the way these peoples have been seen by academics and national elites. Race and ethnicity as analytical concepts are re-examined in order to assess their usefulness.This book should be the first port of call for anthropologists and sociologists studying identity in Latin America.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2010-05-12
Latin American Identities After 1980 by
Latin American Identities After 1980 takes an interdisciplinary approach to Latin American social and cultural identities. With broad regional coverage, and an emphasis on Canadian perspectives, it focuses on Latin American contact with other cultures and nations. Its sound scholarship combines evidence-based case studies with the Latin American tradition of the essay, particularly in areas where the discourse of the establishment does not match political, social, and cultural realities and where it is difficult to uncover the purposely covert. This study of the cultural and social Latin America begins with an interpretation of the new Pax Americana, designed in the 1980s by the North in agreement with the Southern elites. As the agreement ties the hands of national governments and establishes new regional and global strategies, a pan-Latin American identity is emphasized over individual national identities. The multi-faceted impacts and effects of globalization in Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the Caribbean are examined, with an emphasis on social change, the transnationalization and commodification of Latin American and Caribbean arts and the adaptation of cultural identities in a globalized context as understood by Latin American authors writing from transnational perspectives.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2010
Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean by
Beyond Slavery traces the enduring impact and legacy of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean in the modern era. In a rich set of essays, the volume explores the multiple ways that Africans have affected political, economic, and cultural life throughout the region. Focusing on areas traditionally associated with Afro-Latin American culture such as Brazil and the Caribbean basin, this innovative work also highlights places such as Rio de La Plata and Central America, where the African legacy has been important but little studied. The contributors engage readers interested in the African diaspora in a series of vigorous debates ranging from agency and resistance to transculturation, displacement, cross-national dialogue, and popular culture. Documenting the array of diverse voices of Afro-Latin Americans throughout the region, this interdisciplinary book brings to life both their histories and contemporary experiences. Contributions by: Aviva Chomsky, Dari n J. Davis, Dario Euraque, Sujatha Fernandes, David Geggus, Aline Helg, Ricardo D. Salvatore, Eduardo Silva, Jason Stanyek, Camilla Townsend, Bobby Vaughn, Ben Vinson III, and Judith Michelle Williams
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2006
