America, América: a new history of the New World
"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-no less than Latin America's was indelibly stamped by 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 royalist Spanish America, by sending troops and supplies, helped save the republican American Revolution; 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 State history. This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of slavery and racism, the rise of universal humanism, and the role of social democracy in staving off extremism. 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. 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"-- Provided by publisher
Welcome | Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America
This Project explores syntactic diversity found in varieties of English spoken in North America. By documenting the subtle, but systematic, differences in the syntax of English varieties, it provides a crucial source of data for the development of theories of human linguistic knowledge.
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United …
A pathbreaking history of the United States' overseas p…
The Freedom to Write
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.
The Imperial History Behind the Raid on Venezuela
Peter Beinart interviews scholar Greg Grandin on the history of US intervention in Latin America and what Trump’s new “doctrine” may portend.
Adam Shatz · Another Country: Visions of America
Is America a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is...
How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk (Published 2024)
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A Grand Unified Theory of Cultural Stagnation
Listen to your favorite podcasts online, in your browser. Discover the world's most powerful podcast player.
How Do You Talk? — American Accent Quiz & US Dialect Map
Discover where in the United States people talk like you with this interactive American Accent Quiz. Get a personalized dialect map based on the Harvard Dialect Survey.
Cosas para hacer/conocer en BA
11 votes, 19 comments. Hi! I'm Brazilian (but don't judge me badly), because I really love Argentina (I've already visited 3 times), Buenos Aires…
Why Robert Frank’s “The Americans” Matters Today
The photographer’s seminal monograph had a seismic impact on photography conventions and American culture.
Soundings and Silences
In studying existing constitutions or in assisting with drafting a new one, it is impossible not to notice that formative decisions about what to say and what not to say as a constitution is being created bear heavily on later decisions about how to interpret what a constitution says or fails to say, including whether to construe any given silence or gap only as a source of insight or as a kind of performative utterance. Among the features of the United States Constitution that have been crucial to its success has been the widespread recognition of its connected structure that, despite its gaps—some deliberate and others unintended—invites understanding as a coherent, if at times internally inconsistent, whole. Constitutional silences, like silences of other kinds, are everywhere and come in many varieties. There are as many reasons to be silent as there are to speak and as many ways to hear meaning in the sounds of silence as there are to attribute meaning to statements. The first section of this essay distinguishes silences that open a constitutional conversation by leaving options on the table from those that shut conversation down by limiting the options to one. The second section separates silences that bear on the structure created by the Constitution from those that bear on the individual rights the Constitution protects against government infringement. The third section turns to the special case of silences in the Constitution’s rules of interpretation and asks whether the Supreme Court should be silent on a particular constitutional matter or should address it squarely, recognizing that whatever an authoritative interpreter says about what the Constitution itself says or omits can be evaluated only against the background alternative of somehow contriving to remain silent.
Pluralistic: Comrade Trump (20 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
There aren't a lot of things I agree with Mark Carney about, but there's one area where he and I are in total accord: the old, US-dominated, "rules-based international order" was total bullshit:
Hello I'm an American living in a red state. I wrote a little thing for Europeans explaining the current the moment in the US. It's important that people understand why this is happening, because a similar thing is coming for most democracies. docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRPrDiXk2…
