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A history and analysis of the United States’ involvement in the deposition of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and the consequences. Using documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, recently opened archival collections, and interviews with the actual participants, Immerman provides us with a definitive, powerfully written, and tension-packed account of the United States’ clandestine operations in Guatemala and their consequences in Latin America today. “A valuable study of what Immerman correctly portrays as a seminal event, not just in the annals of the Cold War, but in U.S.–Latin American relations.” —Washington Monthly “A damning indictment of American interference abroad.” —Pittsburgh Press “A masterpiece of analysis.” —Reviews in American History
Winner of the Barrington Moore Jr. Prize for the Best Book in Comparative and Historical Sociology from the American Sociological AssociationWinner of the Best Book Award in the Comparative Democratization Section from the American Political Science Association Despite their many similarities, Central American countries during the twentieth century were characterized by remarkably different political regimes. In a comparative analysis of Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua, James Mahoney argues that these political differences were legacies of the nineteenth-century liberal reform period. Presenting a theory of "path dependence," Mahoney shows how choices made at cruc...
A fascinating encyclopedic survey of the Spanish-Cuban/American War, the Philippine War, and the small wars between 1899 and the end of the occupation of Haiti in 1934. The name changes themselves are instructive. The usage of "Spanish-American War" ignores the fact that the war in Cuba had been largely won by the Cuban revolutionaries before US intervention, hence the new title, Spanish-Cuban/American War. The use of "Philippine Insurrection" is replaced by Philippine War, since the Philippine forces had taken much of the islands from Spain before US ground forces arrived. And guerillas or revolutionaries have replaced "bandits," the term used by the US to discredit oppositional forces. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
A fascinating encyclopedic survey of the Spanish-Cuban/American War, the Philippine War, and the small wars between 1899 and the end of the occupation of Haiti in 1934. The name changes themselves are instructive. The usage of "Spanish-American War" ignores the fact that the war in Cuba had been la
Very few works of history, if any, delve into the daily interactions of U.S. Foreign Service members in Latin America during the era of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. But as Jorrit van den Berk argues, the encounters between these rank-and-file diplomats and local officials reveal the complexities, procedures, intrigues, and shifting alliances that characterized the precarious balance of U.S. foreign relations with right-wing dictatorial regimes. Using accounts from twenty-two ministers and ambassadors, Becoming a Good Neighbor among Dictators is a careful, sophisticated account of how the U.S. Foreign Service implemented ever-changing State Department directives from the 1930s through ...
Latin America is moving toward democracy. The region's countries hold elections, choose leaders, and form new governments. But is the civilian government firmly in power? Or is the military still influencing policy and holding the elected politicians in check under the guise of guarding against corruption, instability, economic uncertainty, and other excesses of democracy? The editors of this work, Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies, Jr., argue that with or without direct military rule, antipolitics persists as a foundation of Latin American politics. This study examines the origins of antipolitics, traces its nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, and focuses on the years from 1965 to 1...
A Next Big Idea Book Club Must-Read for March 2024 In the vein of The Shock Doctrine and Evil Geniuses, this timely manifesto from an acclaimed journalist illustrates how corporate and political power brokers have used planned capitalism to advance their own interests at the expense of the rest of us—and how we can take back our economy for all. It’s easy to look at the state of the world around us and feel hopeless. We live in an era marked by war, climate crisis, political polarization, and acute inequality—and yet many of us feel powerless to do anything about these profound issues. We’ve been assured that unfettered capitalism is necessary to ensure our freedom and prosperity, ev...
From virtually the onset of its independence in the early nineteenth century, Chile took a superior attitude toward its racially mixed and less organized neighbors. This stance was not unlike that of another young republic in the hemisphere: the United States. With their relatively stable governments and prosperous economies, the two countries claimed amoral right to impose their will on nearby nations. Given this shared imperial impulse, it is not surprising that they became rivals. In Chile and the United States, the third volume to appear in the series The United States and the Americas, William F. Sater traces the often stormy course of U.S.-Chilean relations, covering not only policy de...
In the first English-language survey of Argentine-U.S. relations to appear in more than a decade, David M. K. Sheinin challenges the accepted view that confrontation has been the characteristic state of affairs between the two countries. Sheinin draws on both Spanish- and English-language sources in the United States, Argentina, Canada, and Great Britain to provide a broad perspective on the two centuries of shared U.S.-Argentine history with fresh focus in particular on cultural ties, nuclear politics in the cold war era, the politics of human rights, and Argentina's exit in 1991 from the nonaligned movement. From the perspectives of both countries, Sheinin discusses such topics as Pan-Amer...