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“An extraordinarily ambitious book . . . America, América reads at times as the historical equivalent of the great epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez.” —Irish Times
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both
The story of how the United States’ identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other.
America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest—the greatest mortality event in human history—through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century, and beyond. Grandin shows, among other things, how in response to U.S. interventions, Latin Americans remade the rules, leading directly to the founding of the United Nations; and how the Good Neighbor Policy allowed FDR to assume the moral authority to lead the fight against world fascism.
Grandin’s book sheds new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain; the Colombian Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of Cold War political terror, death squads, and disappearances; and the radical journalist Ernest Gruening, who, in championing non-interventionism in Latin America, helped broker the most spectacularly successful policy reversal in United States history. This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of Spanish and English colonialism, slavery and racism, and the rise of universal humanism. At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. In so doing, Grandin argues that Latin America’s deeply held culture of social democracy can be an effective counterweight to today’s spreading rightwing authoritarianism.
A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.
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Release date
April 22, 2025 -
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780593831267
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780593831267
- File size: 14022 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from February 15, 2025
Five centuries of persecution and resistance. In the 150 years after Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas, the Indigenous population dropped by roughly 90%, writes Grandin, a historian who has written perceptive books about corporate and governmental iniquity, among themFordlandia andThe Empire of Necessity. Native people were enslaved, felled by disease, disemboweled with swords. According to the book's conscience--16th-century Spanish priest Bartolom� de las Casas, an early and outspoken critic of violent colonialism--his countrymen blithely tortured Indigenous children. English colonists committed countless atrocities of their own, and while Grandin describes these and subsequent evils in necessary detail, he's primarily interested in the intellectual, political, and moral battles over what it means to be American. Many in Mexico and countries to its south, who'd "thought themselves Americans," he writes, seem to have first found their self-definition challenged in the 1820s by an American diplomat who didn't want Mexico calling itself Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Against this backdrop of contested identity, Grandin's sweeping narrative leaves no major event unexplored, chronicling the horrors of slavery in the U.S., wars against Spanish colonialism in South America, and the CIA's reckless meddling in Latin America. Grandin also spotlights lesser-known developments, such as the resentment stoked by the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt postwar Europe, in part with resources extracted from Latin America. The book's most fertile throughline concerns willful moral blindness that caused incalculable suffering--and, conversely, principled opposition to invasion and exploitation. As early as the 16th century, Grandin writes, Spain's subjugation of Indigenous people inspired England's repression of the Irish. Later, God-fearing Americans considered it benevolent to give human beings as gifts to respected elders. More recently, Grandin details, Latin America's intellectual movements--in literature, history, economics--proved immensely influential in their "persistent opposition to intervention and conquest." An authoritative history of the debates and brutality that made our world.COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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April 25, 2025
Grandin (The End of the Myth), a professor of history at Yale, winner of both the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes, and a finalist for the National Book Award, offers an accessible, character-filled history of the Western hemisphere, covering 500 years, revealing how the many nations of the Americas defined themselves through engagement, reflection, and struggle with each other. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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