"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
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.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author and science writer Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian Americas. It was the 2006 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public's understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine.
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United …
A pathbreaking history of the United States' overseas p…
Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System
With the Liberal International Order (LIO) in decline, scholars have focused increasingly on the possible return to a Westphalian great power system marked by sovereigntist claims and balancing among states. The actions of the Trump administration, however, raise a number of significant puzzles for such accounts—the US seems willing to sign deals with traditional adversaries including Russia and China, while targeting long-standing allies like Canada and Denmark. At the same time, transactional politics often serve narrow personalist interests rather than national objectives. In short, a Westphalian lens focused on states and sovereignty may generate intellectual blinders that misreads the emerging international order. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative account, which we label neo-royalism. The neo-royalist order centers on an international system structured by a small group of hyper elites, which we term cliques. Such cliques seek to legitimize their authority through appeals to their exceptionalism in order to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes. This short paper lays out the key elements of the neo-royalist order, differentiating it from the Westphalian and Liberal International Orders, and applies its insights to better grapple with the emerging system being promoted by the United States under Donald J. Trump. For policymakers and scholars, the neo-royalist approach clarifies recent events in US foreign policy. Theoretically, the field should take contending ideas of international order seriously, and establish a research agenda beyond a backward looking view to the Westphalian moment.
CRISES AVERTED. How A Few Past Societies Found Adaptive Reforms in the Face of Structural-Demographic Crises
Historians and social scientists have long been preoccupied with understanding and documenting periods of crisis. Such emphasis is only growing, and becoming more pressing, as the world continues to face a number of interrelated stressors in the form of irreversible climate change, major ecological shocks and disease outbreaks, eruptions of military violence, economic disruptions and deepening inequalities, political polarization and unrest, the rise of authoritarian and nationalist regimes. Crises in these domains are not new, but have been recurrent features of past societies. Although these periods have typically led to massive loss of life, the failure of critical institutions, and even complete societal collapse, there are instances in the historical record of societies managing to turn the tide of crisis even as violence and social turmoil grow. Here, we focus on four such cases of crises mitigated with structural reforms revealed from our previous historical analyses: early Republican Rome, mid-19th century England and Russia, USA during the the late 20th to early 21st centuries. Utilizing structural demographic theory as a lens to explore these cases, we seek to expose the pressures that built up leading to crisis and the early signs of violent confrontation revealed by these societies, as well as to examine the conditions and key decisions made in the midst of this unrest that allowed these societies to turn the tide and enact significant structural adaptations. Our findings have clear relevance to understanding and navigating similar crises in contemporary societies.
How conspiracy theories conquered America
Things have changed a lot since January 6th, 2021.
The Brazilianization of the World - American Affairs Journal
The West’s involution finds its mirror image in the original country of the future, the nation doomed forever to remain the country of the future, the one that never reaches its destination: Brazil. The Brazilianization of the world is our encounter with a future denied, and in which this frustration has become constitutive of our social reality. While the closing of historical horizons has often been a leftist, indeed Marxist, concern, the sense that things don’t work as they should is now widely shared across the political spectrum. Welcome to Brazil. Here the only people satisfied with their situation are financial elites and venal politicians. Everyone complains, but everyone shrugs their shoulders. This slow degradation of society is not so much a runaway train, but more of a jittery rollercoaster, occasionally holding out promise of ascent, yet never breaking free from the tracks. We always come back to where we started, shaken and disoriented, haunted by what might have been...
When Pedro Arrests Juan: Why Latinos Join Border Patrol and ICE ~ L.A. TACO
Many Latino families inherited the same lesson generation after generation: When society views you as foreign, proving your Americanness can become its own form of survival.
The Closing of the Frontier — Tanya Verma
In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that much that is distinctive about America was shaped by the existence of free land to the West where anyone could start over, and that this condition infused America with its characteristic liberty, egalitarianism, rejection of feudalistic hierarchy, self-sufficiency, and ambition.
Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America
From the 1880s through the 1940s, tens of thousands of first- and second-generation immigrants embraced the anarchist cause after arriving on American shores. Kenyon Zimmer explores why these migrants turned to anarchism, and how their adoption of its ideology shaped their identities, experiences, and actions. Zimmer focuses on Italians and Eastern European Jews in San Francisco, New York City, and Paterson, New Jersey. Tracing the movement's changing fortunes from the pre–World War I era through the Spanish Civil War, Zimmer argues that anarchists, opposed to both American and Old World nationalism, severed all attachments to their nations of origin but also resisted assimilation into their host society. Their radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity instead embraced diversity and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. Though ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of Americanism and other nationalisms, the anarchist movement nonetheless provided a shining example of a transnational collective identity delinked from the nation-state and racial hierarchies.
Mercantilisme et capitalisme de la finitude : aux origines de l’Empire Trump | Le Grand Continent
Les seigneurs de la Silicon Valley s'installent dans l'État américain : un nouveau pouvoir disrupte le libéralisme et la démocratie. Vivons-nous un moment inédit ? Il y a quatre cents ans, une start-up de la City – la Compagnie des Indes – se lançait déjà dans une entreprise de conquête mondiale similaire. Pour expliquer Trump et Musk, Arnaud Orain renoue avec les fils de cette histoire, en forgeant un concept : le capitalisme de la finitude.
Governance Archaeology: Research as Ancestry
Abstract. This essay presents the idea of governance archaeology, an approach to learning from the past to inform the politics of the future. By reporting on a prototype historical database, we outline a strategy for co-producing a global commons of collective governance practices that can inspire institutional learning and experimentation, particularly in the face of rapid technological change and vexing global crises. Embedded in our approach is an orientation of ancestry whereby practitioners cultivate relationships of accountability and responsibility to the legacies they learn from, recognizing the harm from past patterns of exploitation. By taking seriously a wide range of historical governance practices, particularly those outside the Western canon, governance archaeology seeks to expand the options available for the design of more moral political economies.
A History of Menus is a Menu of History
What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America?
