International Studies Book List ·

Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984

Ariel Armony focuses, in this study, on the role played by Argentina in the anti–Communist crusade in Central America. This systematic examination of Argentina’s involvement in the Central American drama of the late 1970s and early 1980s fine–tunes our knowledge of a major episode of the Cold War era.…

The Bewitchment of Silver

The Social Economy of Mining in Nineteenth-Century Peru

Mining was crucial for the development of nineteenth-century Peru. Silver mining in particular was a key to both the export sector and the creation of an internal market and national development. The Bewitchment of Silver is an inquiry into the impact of that mineral on a national economy in a country at the periphery of nineteenth-century capitalism.…

Beyond the Barricades

Nicaragua and the Struggle for the Sandinista Press, 1979–1998

Throughout the 1980s, Barricada, the official daily newspaper of the ruling Sandinista Front, played the standard role of a party organ, seeking the mobilize the Nicaraguan public to support the revolutionary agenda.…

Child Slaves in the Modern World

Child Slaves in the Modern World is the second of two volumes that examine the distinctive uses and experiences of children in slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of previously unpublished essays exposes the global victimization of child slaves from the period of abolition of legal slavery in the nineteenth century to the human rights era of the twentieth century.…

Chocolate Islands

Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa.…

The Church and Revolution in Nicaragua

This volume addresses the complex issue of the Christian response to the Nicaraguan revolution from a perspective generally sympathetic to the Sandinista’s goals. Luis Serra, himself a Latin American who has worked with the peasantry, argues that the institutional Church has now become a major autonomous source of opposition to the revolution.…

Civil War, Civil Peace

More than two hundred wars have been fought in the past halfcentury. Nearly all have been civil wars, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than thirty civil wars were being fought. The “rules” of interstate war do not apply; each atrocity provokes retribution, and civil war takes on a brutal dynamic of its own.…

Claribel Alegría and Central American Literature

Critical Essays

These essays examine the multifaceted work of the Central American author whom Latin American literary historians consider precursor of “cultural dialogism” in poetry and fiction. As poet, essayist, journalist, novelist, and writer of “quasi–testimonio,” Alegría’s multiple discourses transgress the boundaries between traditional and postmodern political theories and practices.…

Collisions with History

Latin American Fiction and Social Science from “El Boom” to the New World Order

Latin American intellectuals have traditionally debated their region’s history, never with so much agreement as in the fiction, commentary, and scholarship of the late twentieth century. Collisions with History shows how “fictional histories” of discovery and conquest, independence and early nationhood, and the recent authoritarian past were purposeful revisionist collisions with received national versions.…

Communities of Work

Rural Restructuring in Local and Global Contexts

The image of rural America portrayed in this illuminating study is one that is vibrant, regionally varied, and sometimes heroic. Communities of Work focuses on the ways in which rural people and places are affected by political, social, and economic forces far outside their control and how they sustain themselves and their communities in response.…

Conservative Thought in Twentieth Century Latin America

The Ideas of Laureano Gomez

Laureano Gómez was president of Colombia in the early 1950s until overthrown by a military coup. He was also, for some fifty years, the leading exponent of Latin American conservatism, a political philosophy with roots in both nineteenth–century politics and religion.…

Constructive Engagement?

Chester Crocker & American Policy in South Africa, Namibia & Angola, 1981–1988

The notion of engagement represents an indispensable tool in a foreign policy practitioner’s armory. The idea of constructive engagement is forwarded by governments as a method whereby pressure can be brought to bear on countries to improve their record on human rights, while diplomatic and economic contracts can be maintained.…

The Cuban Counterrevolution

For forty years the Cuban Revolution has been at the forefront of American public opinion, yet few are knowledgeable about the history of its enemies and the responsibility of the U.S. government in organizing and sustaining the Cuban counterrevolution.…

Cultivating Coffee

The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880–1930

Many scholars of Latin America have argued that the introduction of coffee forced most people to become landless proletarians toiling on large plantations. Cultivating Coffee tells a different story: small and medium-sized growers in Nicaragua were a vital part of the economy, constituting the majority of the farmers and holding most of the land.…

Cultivating the Colonies

Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature reveals the nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exotic nature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally “got their hands dirty” in the business of empire.…

Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region.…

Ethnic Conflict

Religion, Identity, and Politics

The outbreak of numerous and simultaneous violent conflicts around the globe in the past decade resulted in immense human suffering and countless lost lives. In part, both results were aided by inactivity or by belated and often misplaced responses by the international community to the embattled groups.…

Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution

Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas

In many Latin American countries, guerrilla struggle and feminism have been linked in surprising ways. Women were mobilized by the thousands to promote revolutionary agendas that had little to do with increasing gender equality.…

Framing the Polish Home

Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self

As the subject of ideological, aesthetic, and existential manipulations, the Polish home and its representation is an ever-changing phenomenon that absorbs new tendencies and, at the same time, retains its centrality to Polish literature, whether written in Poland or abroad.…

Gabriela Mistral

The Audacious Traveler

Gabriela Mistral is the only Latin American woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even so, her extraordinary achievements in poetry, narrative, and political essays remain largely untold.…