The 100 Greatest Latin American History & Politics Books
Twelve-angled stone in the Hatun Rumiyoc street of Cusco, from Wikipedia (CC BY 2.5)
The 100 Greatest Latin American and Caribbean History and Politics Books is a list of books mostly ranging from the colonial period onwards. The list has a focus on political history and on imperialism.
1. Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America
The most readable, highly regarded, and affordable history of Latin America for our times.Born in Blood and Fire, Fourth Edition has been extensively revised to heighten emphasis on current cultural analyses of Latin American society and facilitate meaningful connections between the Encounter and the present. Throughout the Fourth ... More »
2. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
By Eduardo Galeano | Used Price: 60% Off
Eduardo Galeano's classic account of five centuries of exploitation that Latin America has suffered at the hands of the imperial powers. More »
3. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America
By Walter LaFeber | Under $1.00
Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica are five small countries, and yet no other part of the world is more important to the US. This book explains the history of US/Central American relations, explaining why these countries have remained so overpopulated, illiterate and violent; and why ... More »
4. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
By Alfred W. Crosby | Used Price: 50% Off
Thirty years ago, Alfred Crosby published a small work that illuminated a simple point, that the most important changes brought on by the voyages of Columbus were not social or political, but biological in nature. The book told the story of how 1492 sparked the movement of organisms, ... More »
5. Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910
By Brooke Larson | Used Price: 90% Off
Brooke Larson's interpretive analysis of the history of Andean peasants reveals the challenges of nation making in the republics of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia during the volatile nineteenth century. Nowhere in Latin America were postcolonial transitions more turbulent than in the Andes, where communal indigenous roots grew ... More »
6. Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America's Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present
By Susan Kellogg | Used Price: 80% Off
Weaving the Past offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary history of Latin America's indigenous women. While the book concentrates on native women in Mesoamerica and the Andes, it covers indigenous people in other parts of South and Central America, including lowland peoples in and beyond Brazil, and Afro-indigenous peoples, ... More »
7. Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000
By George Reid Andrews | Used Price: 80% Off
While the rise and abolition of slavery and ongoing race relations are central themes of the history of the United States, the African diaspora actually had a far greater impact on Latin and Central America. More than ten times as many Africans came to Spanish and Portuguese America ... More »
8. Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge
By Deborah J. Yashar | Used Price: 90% Off
Deborah Yashar analyzes the contemporary and uneven emergence of Latin American indigenous movements--addressing both why indigenous identities have become politically salient in the contemporary period and why they have translated into significant political organizations in some places and not others. She argues that ethnic politics can best be ... More »
9. The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America: A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights
By Javier Corrales; Mario Pecheny | 60% Off
The city of Buenos Aires has guaranteed all couples, regardless of gender, the right to register civil unions. Mexico City has approved the Cohabitation Law, which grants same-sex couples marital rights identical to those of common-law relationships between men and women. Yet, a gay man was murdered every ... More »
10. Between Tyranny and Anarchy: A History of Democracy in Latin America, 1800-2006
By Paul W. Drake | Used Price: 90% Off
Between Tyranny and Anarchy provides a unique comprehensive history and interpretation of efforts to establish democracies over two centuries in the major Latin American countries. Drake takes an unusual interdisciplinary approach, combining history and political science with an emphasis on political institutions. He argues that, without a thorough ... More »
11. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War
By Jean Franco | Used Price: 60% Off
The cultural Cold War in Latin America was waged as a war of values--artistic freedom versus communitarianism, Western values versus national cultures, the autonomy of art versus a commitment to liberation struggles--and at a time when the prestige of literature had never been higher. The projects of the ... More »
12. Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War
By Jorge G. Castaneda | Used Price: 80% Off
Castro's Cuba is isolated; the guerrillas who once spread havoc through Uruguay and Argentina are dead, dispersed, or running for office as moderates. And in 1990, Nicaragua's Sandinistas were rejected at the polls by their own constituents. Are these symptoms of the fall of the Latin American left? ... More »
13. Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America
What role does war play in political development? Our understanding of the rise of the nation-state is based heavily on the Western European experience of war. Challenging the dominance of this model, Blood and Debt looks at Latin America's much different experience as more relevant to politics today ... More »
14. In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes
By Flores Galindo Alberto; Carlos Aguirre; Charles F. Walker; Willie Hiatt
In Search of an Inca examines how people in the Andean region have invoked the Incas to question and rethink colonialism and injustice, from the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century until the late twentieth century. It stresses the recurrence of the "Andean utopia," that ... More »
15. State Repression and the Labors of Memory
By Elizabeth Jelin | Used Price: 80% Off
Hearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for "the disappeared" in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Gou More »
16. Mothers Making Latin America: Gender, Households, and Politics Since 1825
By Erin E. O'Connor | Used Price: 90% Off
Mothers Making Latin America utilizes a combination of gender scholarship and source material to dispel the belief that women were separated from-or unimportant to-central developments in Latin American history since independ More »
17. An Environmental History of Latin America
By Shawn William Miller | 80% Off
This book narrates the mutually mortal historical contest between humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a period that begins with Amerindian civilizations and concludes in the region's present urban agglomerations, the work off More »
18. A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War
By Gilbert M. Joseph; Greg Grandin | 70% Off
Latin America experienced an epochal cycle of revolutionary upheavals and insurgencies during the twentieth century, from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 through the mobilizations and terror in Central America, the Southern Cone, a More »
19. The Right in Latin America
By Barry Cannon
Most current analysis on Latin American politics has been directed at examining the shift to the left in the region. Very little attention, however, has been paid to the reactions of the right to this phenomenon. What kind of discur More »
20. The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and Representation
By Carlos M. Vilas; Douglas A. Chalmers; Katherine Hite
Against a broad backdrop of globalization and worldwidede movement toward democracy, the essays in this important new collection examine the unfolding relationships among suchips phenomena as social change, equity, and democratic respresentation of the poor in nine different Latin American countries and Spain. Recent shifts in the composition ... More »
21. Media Power in Central America
By Rick Rockwell; Noreene Janus | 70% Off
Media Power in Central America is the first book in a generation to explore the media landscape in Central America. It captures the political and cultural interplay between the media and those in power in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Nicaragua. Highlighting the subtle strangulation ... More »
22. The Economic History of Latin America since Independence
This study, now in a revised and updated third edition, covers the economic history of Latin America from independence in the 1820s to the present. It stresses the differences between Latin American countries while recognizing the external influences to which the whole region has been subject. Victor Bulmer-Thomas ... More »
23. A Concise History of Brazil
By Boris Fausto | Used Price: 70% Off
The second edition of A Concise History of Brazil offers a sweeping yet accessible history of Latin America's largest country. Boris Fausto examines Brazil's history from the arrival of the Portuguese in the New World through the long and sometimes rocky transition from independence in 1822 to democracy ... More »
24. The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories
First published in 1985 and now expanded to include a new chapter on women, the book explores the social, political, economic, and intellectual currents that shaped nineteenth-century Brazil and whose reverberations continue to be felt throughout contemporary Brazilian society. More »
25. The Color of Modernity: Sao Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil
By Barbara Weinstein | Used Price: 80% Off
In The Color of Modernity, Barbara Weinstein focuses on race, gender, and regionalism in the formation of national identities in Brazil; this focus allows her to explore how uneven patterns of economic development are consolidated and understood. Organized around two principal episodes-the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and 1954's IV ... More »
26. A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro
By Brodwyn Fischer | Used Price: 90% Off
A Poverty of Rights is an investigation of the knotty ties between citizenship and inequality during the years when the legal and institutional bases for modern Brazilian citizenship originated. Between 1930 and 1964, Brazilian law dramatically extended its range and power, and citizenship began to signify real political, ... More »
27. With Broadax and Firebrand
By Warren Dean | Used Price: 90% Off
Warren Dean chronicles the chaotic path to what could be one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times: the disappearance of the Atlantic Forest. A quarter the size of the Amazon Forest, and the most densely populated region in Brazil, the Atlantic Forest is now the most ... More »
28. Lula, the Workers' Party and the Governability Dilemma in Brazil
While scholars, activists and pundits from around the world have heralded the Lula years as a breakthrough for poverty reduction and the forthcoming emergence of Brazil as a dynamic economic superpower, many of their counterparts in the country as well as a number of Brazilianists elsewhere, have expressed ... More »
29. The Brazilian Workers' ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern Sao Paulo
By John D. French | Used Price: 70% Off
John French analyzes the emergence of the Brazilian system of politics and labor relations between 1900 and 1953 in the industrial municipalities of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo do Campo, and Sao Caetano do Sul. These municipalities, which constitute the so-called ABC region of greater Sao Paolo, were made ... More »
30. Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil
By James N. Green | Used Price: 60% Off
For many foreign observers, Brazil still conjures up a collage of exotic images, ranging from the camp antics of Carmen Miranda to the bronzed girl (or boy) from Ipanema moving sensually over the white sands of Rio's beaches. Among these tropical fantasies is that of the uninhibited and ... More »
31. The Japanese Community in Brazil, 1908-1940: Between Samurai and Carnival
By Stewart Lone
On the eve of the Pacific war (1941-45), there were 198,000 Japanese in Brazil, the largest expatriate body outside East Asia. Yet the origins of this community have been obscured. The English-language library is threadbare while Japanese scholars routinely insist that life outside of Japan was filled with ... More »
32. Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery
One reason that Schwartz is the leading authority on colonial Brazilian social and economic history (especially slavery) is that he ranges widely, addressing comparative themes and reexamining traditional interpretations about society. This collection of essays reconsiders the critical issues of how the Brazilian slave system operated, how it ... More »
33. This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil
By Wendy Wolford | Used Price: 80% Off
In This Land Is Ours Now, Wendy Wolford presents an original framework for understanding social mobilization. She argues that social movements are not the politically coherent, bounded entities often portrayed by scholars, the press, and movement leaders. Instead, they are constantly changing mediations between localized moral economies and ... More »
34. Requiem for Revolution: The United States and Brazil, 1961-1969
By Ruth Leacock
"Let us once again transform the American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts…" urged President John F. Kennedy on March 13, 1961. "Let us once again awaken our American revolution until it guides the struggle of people everywhere-not with an imperialism of force or ... More »
35. Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro
By Janice Perlman | Used Price: 90% Off
Janice Perlman wrote the first in-depth account of life in the favelas, a book hailed as one of the most important works in global urban studies in the last 30 years. Now, in Favela, Perlman carries that story forward to the present. Re-interviewing many longtime favela residents whom ... More »
36. The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964-1985
The largest and most important country in Latin America, Brazil was the first to succumb to the military coups that struck that region in the 1960s and the early 1970s. In this authoritative study, Thomas E. Skidmore, one of America's leading experts on Latin America and, in particular, ... More »
37. Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma
By Roberto DaMatta; John Drury | 60% Off
Encompassing half the continent of South America, Brazil is one of the most modern, complex, and misunderstood nations. Renowned Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta takes the misconceptions and offers a fresh, provocative interpretation of the complexity of social structure in Brazil. Using the tools of comparative social anthropology, DaMatta ... More »
38. The Life and Times of Mexico
By Earl Shorris | Used Price: 80% Off
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. "A work of scope and profound insight into the divided soul of Mexico." -History TodayThe Life and Times of Mexico is a grand narrative driven by 3,000 years of history: the Indian world, the Spanish invasion, Independence, the 1910 ... More »
39. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution
By John Womack | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
This narrative history follows the exploits of Emiliano Zapata, a leader in the Mexican Revolution and inspiration to the Zapatistas. The book explores events preceding the Revolution and examines the political and agrarian reforms that took place. More »
40. Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico
By Gilbert M. Joseph; Daniel Nugent | 90% Off
Everyday Forms of State Formation is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between popular cultures and state formation in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. While most accounts have emphasized either the role of peasants and peasant rebellions or that of state formation in Mexico's past, these original ... More »
41. Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution
By Rick A. Lopez | Used Price: 90% Off
After Mexico's revolution of 1910-1920, intellectuals sought to forge a unified cultural nation out of the country's diverse populace. Their efforts resulted in an "ethnicized" interpretation of Mexicanness that intentionally incorporated elements of folk and indigenous culture. In this rich history, Rick A. López explains how thinkers and ... More »
42. Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico
By Jocelyn H. Olcott | Used Price: 90% Off
Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico is an empirically rich history of women's political organizing during a critical stage of regime consolidation. Rebutting the image of Mexican women as conservative and antirevolutionary, Jocelyn Olcott shows women activists challenging prevailing beliefs about the masculine foundations of citizenship. Piecing together material ... More »
43. Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priista, 1940-1962
By Tanalis Padilla | Used Price: 80% Off
In Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, Tanalís Padilla shows that the period from 1940 to 1968, generally viewed as a time of social and political stability in Mexico, actually saw numerous instances of popular discontent and widespread state repression. Padilla provides a detailed history of a ... More »
44. Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties
By Jaime M. Pensado | Used Price: 80% Off
Winner of the 2014 Mexican Book Prize In the middle of the twentieth century, a growing tide of student activism in Mexico reached a level that could not be ignored, culminating with the 1968 movement. This book traces the rise, growth, and consequences of Mexico's "student problem" during ... More »
45. The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement
By Gloria Munoz Ramirez | 60% Off
In 1983, a small group of Mexicans traveled to the Lacandón jungle in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas, with the dream of organizing a national revolution. For the next ten years they lived with the indigenous Mayan communities there, listening, learning and blending with them. This was the ... More »
46. Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border
By Elliott Young | Used Price: 60% Off
Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border rescues an understudied episode from the footnotes of history. On September 15, 1891, Garza, a Mexican journalist and political activist, led a band of Mexican rebels out of South Texas and across the Rio Grande, declaring a revolution against Mexico's dictator, ... More »
47. Amexica: War Along the Borderline
By Ed Vulliamy | Used Price: 80% Off
With a New AfterwordIn 2009, Ed Vulliamy traveled two thousand miles along the frontier from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico, and from Tijuana to Matamoros, a journey through a kaleidoscopic landscape of corruption and all-out civil war. He describes in revelatory detail the dreaded narco ... More »
48. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
The story of the Aztecs has always been told using the Spanish narrative. Now Camilla Townsend has written a new history of the Aztecs based on native sources only. More »
49. Mexico: The Struggle for Democratic Development
By Daniel C. Levy; Kathleen Bruhn; Emilio Zebadua
This engaging book provides a broad and accessible analysis of Mexico's contemporary struggle for democratic development. Now completely revised, it brings up to date issues ranging from electoral reform and accountability to drug trafficking, migration, and NAFTA. It also considers the rapidly changing role of Mexico's mass and ... More »
50. The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself
By David Bushnell | Used Price: 50% Off
Colombia's status as the fourth largest nation in Latin America and third most populous-as well as its largest exporter of such disparate commodities as emeralds, books, processed cocaine, and cut flowers-makes this, the first history of Colombia written in English, a much-needed book. It tells the remarkable story ... More »
51. Violence in Colombia, 1990-2000: Waging War and Negotiating Peace
By Charles Bergquist; Ricardo Penaranda; Gonzalo Sanchez G.
Violence In Colombia provides students with a deeper understanding of the crisis facing Colombia today. The book focuses on the 1990s, a decade that witnessed a strengthening of the oldest and largest guerrilla insurgency in the Americas and the emergence of a powerful paramilitary right. The decade also ... More »
52. The Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia
By Alfredo Molano; Aviva Chomsky | 90% Off
"This book is proof that today's Latin American literature reaches far and digs deep. Alfredo Molano isn't a novelist or poet, but rather a sociologist who realizes that 'the way to understand wasn't to study people but to listen to them.' The testimonies that Molano collects are a ... More »
53. Rebelocracy: Social Order In The Colombian Civil War
By Ana Arjona
Conventional wisdom portrays war zones as chaotic and anarchic. In reality, however, they are often orderly. This work introduces a new phenomenon in the study of civil war: wartime social order. It investigates theoretically and empirically the emergence and functioning of social order in conflict zones. By theorizing ... More »
54. Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
By Marguerite Guzman Bouvard | 90% Off
Revolutionizing Motherhood examines one of the most astonishing human rights movements of recent years. During the Argentine junta's Dirty War against subversives, as tens of thousands were abducted, tortured, and disappeared, a group of women forged the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and changed Argentine politics forever. ... More »
55. The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake
By Mark A. Healey | Used Price: 90% Off
In January 1944, an earthquake reduced the province of San Juan, Argentina, to rubble, leaving perhaps ten thousand dead and one hundred thousand homeless. In The Ruins of the New Argentina, Mark A. Healey argues that the disaster and the massive rebuilding project that followed transformed not only ... More »
56. A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture
By Marguerite Feitlowitz | 70% Off
Tanks roaring over farmlands, pregnant women tortured, 30,000 individuals "disappeared"--these were the horrors of Argentina's Dirty War. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Finalist for the L.L. Winship / PEN New England Award in 1998, A Lexicon of Terror is a sensitive and unflinching ... More »
57. A New Economic History of Argentina
By Alan M. Taylor; Gerardo della Paolera
Not since the publication of Carlos DÃaz Alejandro's Essays on the Economic History of the Argentine Republic in 1970 has there been a new standard reference for those seeking a more quantitative understanding of Argentina's development. Research in the "new economic history" in the intervening years has led ... More »
58. Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946-1976
By Daniel James | Used Price: 90% Off
This book analyzes the relationship between Peronism and the Argentine working class from the foundation of the Peronist movement in the mid 1940s to the overthrow of Peron's widow in 1976. It presents an account of such crucial issues as the role of the Peronist union bureaucracy and ... More »
59. Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina
By Donna J. Guy | Used Price: 90% Off
A study of prostitution necessarily examines questions of power, class, gender, and public health. In Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires these questions combine with particular force. During most of the time covered in this provocative book, from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, prostitution was ... More »
60. Cochineal Red: Travels Through Ancient Peru
By Hugh Thomson
Imagine that all the great discoveries of Ancient Egypt had happened in the last few years...and you will have some conception of the great excitement over recent finds in Peru More »
61. Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780-1840
By Charles F. Walker | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
In Smoldering Ashes Charles F. Walker interprets the end of Spanish domination in Peru and that country's shaky transition to an autonomous republican state. Placing the indigenous population at the center of his analysis, Walker shows how the Indian peasants played a crucial and previously unacknowledged role in ... More »
62. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991
By Marisol de la Cadena | 80% Off
In the early twentieth century, Peruvian intellectuals, unlike their European counterparts, rejected biological categories of race as a basis for discrimination. But this did not eliminate social hierarchies; instead, it redefined racial categories as cultural differences, such as differences in education or manners. In Indigenous Mestizos Marisol ... More »
63. How Difficult It Is to Be God: Shining Path's Politics of War in Peru, 1980-1999
By Carlos Ivan Degregor; Steve J. Stern
The revolutionary war launched by Shining Path, a Maoist insurgency, was the most violent upheaval in modern Peru's history, claiming some 70,000 lives in the 1980s-1990s and drawing widespread international attention. Yet for many observers, Shining Path's initial successes were a mystery. What explained its cult-like appeal, and ... More »
64. The Tupac Amaru Rebellion
The largest rebellion in the history of Spain's American empire-a conflict greater in territory and costlier in lives than the contemporaneous American Revolution-began as a local revolt against colonial authorities in 1780. As an official collector of tribute for the imperial crown, José Gabriel Condorcanqui had seen firsthand ... More »
65. Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know
By Miguel Tinker Salas | Used Price: 50% Off
Among the top ten oil exporters in the world and a founding member of OPEC, Venezuela currently supplies 11 percent of U.S. crude oil imports. But when the country elected the fiery populist politician Hugo Chavez in 1998, tensions rose with this key trading partner and relations have ... More »
66. We Created Chavez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution
Since being elected president in 1998, Hugo Chávez has become the face of contemporary Venezuela and, more broadly, anticapitalist revolution. George Ciccariello-Maher contends that this focus on Chávez has obscured the inner dynamics and historical development of the country's Bolivarian Revolution. In We Created Chávez, by examining social ... More »
67. Venezuela Before Chavez: Anatomy of an Economic Collapse
By Ricardo Hausmann; Francisco R. Rodriguez
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Venezuela had one of the poorest economies in Latin America, but by 1970 it had become the richest country in the region and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries such as Greece, Israel, and Spain. ... More »
68. Families in War and Peace: Chile from Colony to Nation
By Sarah C. Chambers | Used Price: 90% Off
In Families in War and Peace Sarah C. Chambers places gender analysis and family politics at the center of Chile's struggle for independence and its subsequent state building. Linking the experiences of both prominent and more humble families to Chile's political and legal history, Chambers argues that matters ... More »
69. Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile's Road to Socialism
By Peter Winn | Used Price: 90% Off
This analysis of the dramatic seizure of the Yarur cotton mill in Santiago and its repercussions for Allende's revolution is based on extensive, unique interviews with officials (including Allende) and workers as well as on archival research. More »
70. Remembering Pinochet's Chile
By Steve J. Stern | Used Price: 90% Off
During the two years just before the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet, the historian Steve J. Stern had been in Chile collecting oral histories of life under Pinochet as part of an investigation into the form and meaning of memories of state-sponsored atrocities. In this ... More »
71. The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents
By John Dinges | Used Price: 90% Off
Throughout the 1970s, six Latin American governments led by Chile formed a military alliance called Operation Condor to carry out kidnappings, torture, and political assassinations across three continents. It was an early "war on terror" initially encouraged by the CIA which later backfired on the United States. ... More »
72. Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War
By Tanya Harmer | Used Price: 90% Off
Fidel Castro described Salvador Allende's democratic election as president of Chile in 1970 as the most important revolutionary triumph in Latin America after the Cuban revolution. Yet celebrations were short lived. In Washington, the Nixon administration vowed to destroy Allende's left-wing government while Chilean opposition forces mobilized against ... More »
73. La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile's Frontier Territory
By Thomas Miller Klubock | 70% Off
In La Frontera, Thomas Miller Klubock offers a pioneering social and environmental history of southern Chile, exploring the origins of today's forestry "miracle" in Chile. Although Chile's forestry boom is often attributed to the free-market policies of the Pinochet dictatorship, La Frontera shows that forestry development began in ... More »
74. For Every Indio Who Falls: A History of Maya Activism in Guatemala, 1960-1990
By Betsy Konefal | Used Price: 90% Off
In 1978, a Maya community queen stood on a stage to protest a massacre of indigenous campesinos at the hands of the Guatemalan state. She spoke graphically to the dead and to the living alike: "Brothers of Panzós, your blood is in our throats!"Given the context, her message ... More »
75. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala
By Kirsten Weld
In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960-1996), silence and ... More »
76. Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala
By Diane M. Nelson | Used Price: 60% Off
Following the 1996 treaty ending decades of civil war, how are Guatemalans reckoning with genocide, especially since almost everyone contributed in some way to the violence? Meaning "to count, figure up" and "to settle rewards and punishments," reckoning promises accounting and accountability. Yet as Diane M. Nelson shows, ... More »
77. Adios Nino: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death
By Deborah T. Levenson | Used Price: 80% Off
In Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death, Deborah T. Levenson examines transformations in the Guatemalan gangs called Maras from their emergence in the 1980s to the early 2000s. A historical study, Adiós Niño describes how fragile spaces of friendship and exploration turned ... More »
78. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
By Stephen Schlesinger; Stephen Kinzer
Bitter Fruit is a comprehensive and insightful account of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. First published in 1982, this book has become a classic, a textbook case of the relationship between the United States and the Third ... More »
79. Mobilizing Bolivia's Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land
By Nicole Fabricant | Used Price: 80% Off
The election of Evo Morales as Bolivia's president in 2005 made him his nation's first indigenous head of state, a watershed victory for social activists and Native peoples. El Movimiento Sin Tierra (MST), or the Landless Peasant Movement, played a significant role in bringing Morales to power. Following ... More »
80. Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics
By Forrest Hylton; Sinclair Thomson | 90% Off
A comprehensive study of insurrection in Bolivia, from the late eighteenth century to the present day. In an age of military neoliberalism, social movements and center-Left coalition governments have advanced across South America, sparking hope for radical change in a period otherwise characterized by regressive imperial and anti-imperial ... More »
81. A History of the Cuban Revolution
By Aviva Chomsky | Used Price: 60% Off
A History of the Cuban Revolution presents a concise socio-historical account of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, an event that continues to spark debate 50 years later. Balances a comprehensive overview of the political and economic events of the revolution with a look at the revolution's social ... More »
82. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba
By Alejandro de la Fuente | 90% Off
After thirty years of anticolonial struggle against Spain and four years of military occupation by the United States, Cuba formally became an independent republic in 1902. The nationalist coalition that fought for Cuba's freedom, a movement in which blacks and mulattoes were well represented, had envisioned an egalitarian ... More »
83. The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography
By Louis A. Perez Jr | Used Price: 70% Off
A century after the Cuban war for independence was fought, Louis Perez examines the meaning of the war of 1898 as represented in one hundred years of American historical writing. Offering both a critique of the conventional historiography and an alternate history of the war informed by Cuban ... More »
84. Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989-2001
By Morris Morley; Chris McGillion | 80% Off
In this first comprehensive study of U.S. policy toward Cuba in the post-Cold War era, Morris Morley and Chris McGillion draw on interviews with Bush and Clinton policymakers, congressional participants in the policy debate, and leaders of the anti-sanctions business community to argue that Bush and Clinton operated ... More »
85. The Black Jacobins
By C.L.R. James | Used Price: 70% Off
The Black Jacobins is the authoritative history of the Haitian Revolution of 1794, the first revolution in the Third World."The prospect of a Black Republic is equally disturbing to the Spanish, the English and the Americans. Jefferson has promised that on the instant the French army has arrived ... More »
86. The Uses of Haiti
By Paul Farmer; Noam Chomsky; Jonathan Kozol
The Uses of Haiti tells the truth about uncomfortable matters-uncomfortable, that is, for the structures of power and the doctrinal framework that protects them from scrutiny. It tells the truth about what has been happening in Haiti, and the US role in its bitter fate.-Noam Chomsky, from the ... More »
87. The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934
By Hans Schmidt | Used Price: 90% Off
"A good history of a sordid intervention that submitted a people to autocratic rule and did little for economic development." --The New York Times "From Schmidt we get the full details . . . of the brutal racist practices inflicted on the Haitians for nearly all of the ... More »
88. The Dictator's Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo
By Lauren H. Derby | Used Price: 60% Off
The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator's Seduction is a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as it was experienced in the capital city of ... More »
89. Reinterpreting the Banana Republic: Region and State in Honduras, 1870-1972
In this new analysis of Honduran social and political development, Dar degreeso Euraque explains why Honduras escaped the pattern of revolution and civil wars suffered by its neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Within this comparative framework, he challenges the traditional Banana Republic 'theory' and its assumption that ... More »
90. Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule
By Michel Gobat | Used Price: 90% Off
Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the mid-nineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912-33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat ... More »
91. Adios Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution
By Sergio Ramirez; Stacey Alba D. Skar
Adiós Muchachos is a candid insider's account of the leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. During the 1970s, Sergio Ramírez led prominent intellectuals, priests, and business leaders to support the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), against Anastasio Somoza's dictatorship. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979, Ramírez ... More »
92. Nicaragua: Emerging From the Shadow of the Eagle
By Thomas W. Walker; Christine J. Wade
Nicaragua: Emerging from the Shadow of the Eagle details the country's unique history, culture, economics, politics, and foreign relations. Its historical coverage considers Nicaragua from pre-Columbian and colonial times as well as during the nationalist liberal era, the U.S. Marine occupation, the Somoza dictatorship, the Sandinista revolution and ... More »
93. Towards a Society That Serves Its People: The Intellectual Contribution of El Salvador's Murdered Jesuits
By John Hassett; Hugh Lacey | 70% Off
This collection presents a representative sample of the writings of three of the six Jesuits who were slain in El Salvador on November 16, 1989. Although little known in the United States, these men were significant scholars who possessed an original conception of the university. They affirmed in ... More »
94. To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932
By Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago; Jeffrey L. Gould
To Rise in Darkness offers a new perspective on a defining moment in modern Central American history. In January 1932 thousands of indigenous and ladino (non-Indian) rural laborers, provoked by electoral fraud and the repression of strikes, rose up and took control of several municipalities in central and ... More »
95. Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War
A land and culture poorly understood by analysts, politicians, and voters in the far-off United States. A regime permeated with corruption; a country in the steel grip of a few families that disdained any system which might give a voice to the millions who kept them in comfort: ... More »
96. The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960
By Lara Putnam | Used Price: 90% Off
In the late nineteenth century, migrants from Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, and beyond poured into Caribbean Central America, building railroads, digging canals, selling meals, and farming homesteads. On the rain-forested shores of Costa Rica, U.S. entrepreneurs and others established vast banana plantations. Over the next half-ce More »
97. Political Culture in Panama: Democracy after Invasion
The most comprehensive and empirically grounded analysis of the institutional and attitudinal factors that have shaped Panamanian politics since the 1989 U.S. invasion. Panama offers a unique opportunity to understand the long-term effects of United States policy and the challenges of building democracy after a military invasion. More »
98. Uruguay, 1968: Student Activism from Global Counterculture to Molotov Cocktails
By Vania Markarian; Eric Zolov; Laura Perez Carrara
The tumultuous 1960s saw a generation of Latin American youth enter into political life in unprecedented numbers. Though some have argued that these young-radical movements were inspired by the culture and politics of social movements burgeoning in Europe and the United States, youth activism developed its own distinct ... More »
99. The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938
By Thomas C. Holt | Used Price: 60% Off
"Holt greatly extends and deepens our understanding of the emancipation experience when, for just over a century, the people of Jamaica struggled to achieve their own vision of freedom and autonomy against powerful conservative forces."-David Barry Gaspar. More »
100. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico
By Laura Briggs | Used Price: 90% Off
Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this ... More »
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