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Combining history with discussions of dramatic cinema, Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies examines how film has portrayed Latin America from the late fifteenth century to the present. The book opens with an introduction on the visual presentation of the past in the movies, while the rest of the book consists of essays that explore the best feature films on Latin America from the professional historian's perspective.
From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations around the world, including the United States, have turned to guestworker programs to manage migration. These temporary labor recruitment systems represented a state-brokered compromise between employers who wanted foreign workers and those who feared rising numbers of immigrants. Unlike immigrants, guestworkers couldn't settle, bring their families, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead of creating a manageable form of migration, guestworker programs created an especially vulnerable class of labor. Based on a vast array of sources from U.S., Jamaican, and English archives, as well as interviews, N...
This lively and engaging text offers a panorama of modern Chinese history through compelling biographies of the famous and obscure. Spanning five hundred years, they include a Ming dynasty medical pioneer, a Qing dynasty courtesan, a nineteenth-century Hong Kong business leader, a Manchu princess, an arsenal manager, a woman soldier, and a young maid in contemporary Beijing. Through the lives of these diverse people, readers will gain an understanding of the complex questions of modern Chinese history: What did it mean to be Chinese, and how did that change over time? How was learning encouraged and directed in imperial and post-imperial China? Was it possible to challenge entrenched gender ...
Although Mexico began its national life in the 1821 as one of the most liberal democracies in the world, it ended the century with an authoritarian regime. Examining this defining process, distinguished historians focus on the evolution of Mexican liberalism from the perspectives of politics, the military, the Church, and the economy. Based on extensive archival research, the chapters demonstrate that--despite widely held assumptions--liberalism was not an alien ideology unsuited to Mexico's traditional, conservative, and multiethnic society. On the contrary, liberalism in New Spain arose from Hispanic culture, which drew upon a shared European tradition reaching back to ancient Greece. This...
This engaging and humanizing text traces the development of Europe since the mid-eighteenth century through the lives of people of the time. Capturing key moments, themes, and events in the continent's turbulent modern past, the book explores how ordinary Europeans both shaped their societies and were affected by larger historical processes. By focusing on the lives of individual actors, both famous and obscure, students can gain a sense for how the well-known revolutions, wars, and social transformations of the modern era were experienced in private homes, work places, political forums, and on battlefields throughout the region. Fittingly, the book opens with the French Revolution and concl...
At the turn of the century, diverse political, economic, and social conditions divided Ecuador. During the construction of the Guayaquil-Quito Railway, the people of Ecuador faced the challenge of working together. The Redemptive Work: Railway and Nation in Ecuador, 1895-1930 examines local, regional, and national perspectives on the building of the railway and analyzes the contradictory processes of national incorporation. The elite landowners of the highlands were concerned with the transportation of their agricultural products to the coast, while the agro-export elite of the coast were more interested in forming a labor market. Because the underlying objectives were contradictory, only a partial consensus was reached on the nature of national development. The Redemptive Work is the first text to deal with these complex issues in Ecuador's history. It is useful for undergraduate and graduate courses in Latin American history, social history, anthropology, political science, and nation and state formation.
The 2,000-mile-long international boundary between the United States and Mexico gives shape to a unique social, economic, and cultural entity. David E. Lorey here offers the first comprehensive treatment of the fascinating evolution of the region over the past century. Exploring the evolution of a distinct border society, Lorey traces broad themes in the region's history, including geographical constraints, boom-and-bust cycles, and outside influences. He also examines the seminal twentieth-century events that have shaped life in the area, such as Prohibition, World War II, and economic globalization. Bringing the analysis up to the present, the book considers such divisive issues as the distinction between legal and illegal migration, trends in transboundary migrant flows, and North American free trade. Informative and accessible, this valuable study is ideal for courses on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Chicano studies, Mexican history, and Mexican-American history.
Before there was Sim-n Bol'var, there was Francisco de Miranda. He was among the most infamous men of his generation, loved or hated by all who knew him. Venezuelan General Francisco Gabriel de Miranda (1750-1816) participated in the major political events of the Atlantic World for more than three decades. Before his tragic last days he would be Spanish soldier, friend of U.S. presidents, paramour of Catherine the Great, French Revolutionary general in the Belgian campaigns, perennial thorn in the side of British Prime Minister William Pitt, and fomenter of revolution in Spanish America. He used his personal relationships with leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to advance his dream of a liberated Spanish America. Author Karen Racine brings the man into focus in a careful, thorough analysis, showing how his savvy, firm political beliefs and courageous actions saved him from being the simple scoundrel that his dalliances suggested. Shedding light on one of history's most charismatic and cosmopolitan world citizens, Francisco de Miranda will appeal to all those interested in biography and Latin American history.
As the elder daughter of an emperor whose wife had presented him with no sons, Isabel stood to inherit the monarchy of Brazil with the passing of Dom Pedro II. On three separate occasions, Isabel was named regent, or head of state, when her father was required to leave the country for extended periods. On each occasion, she served as the dutiful daughter, following her father's instructions to the letter and resisting any attempts at personal aggrandizement. During her third regency, as her father recuperated in Europe, rather than accumulate personal power and oppose the forces of republicanism and abolition, Isabel personally led the struggle to pass the Gold Law of 1888 abolishing slavery...
This classic history of the Mexican hacienda from the colonial period through the nineteenth century has been reissued in a silver anniversary edition complete with a substantive new introduction and foreword. Eric Van Young explores 150 years of Mexico's economic and rural development, a period when one of history's great empires was trying to extract more resources from its most important colony, and when an arguably capitalist economy was both expanding and taking deeper root. The author explains the development of a regional agrarian system, centered on the landed estates of late colonial Mexico, the central economic and social institution of an overwhelmingly rural society. With rich em...