The Emergence Of Latin America In The Nineteenth Century

Here for the first time is a comprehensive yet compact history of Latin America in the formative period from independence to 1880. Covering all the major countries, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century combines a review of the issues and problems affecting the region as a whole with illuminating in-depth discussions of particular national case studies, and is written in a style that is both accessible and engaging. The authors focus on the preliminary experiments in nation-building throughout Latin America and explore the conscious--if perhaps misguided--attempts by most leaders to adopt a liberal mode of both socioeconomic and political development. No pat answers are provided, but the nagging questions of Latin American "instability" and "underdevelopment" are examined, and the data and factors that come into play are presented and explained to students. Incorporating the most recent research on Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, this unique, single-volume survey provides complete and up-to-date coverage of the entire region during the critical era that saw the formation and consolidation of its distinctive national institutions, laying the groundwork for contemporary Latin America.

This volume provides readings from the works of eighteen Latin American thinkers of the nineteenth century who were engaged in articulating and examining the problems that Spanish and Portuguese America faced in the one hundred years after securing independence. The selections represent all major regions of Latin America. Although these regions differ significantly with regard to indigenous background, geography, climate, and available resources, their people confronted the common problems that surround the intractable challenges of statecraft and nation building: issues of race, international relations, economics, education, and self-understanding. Burke and Humphrey provide fresh, accessible translations of key works, a majority of which appear for the first time in English; a General Introduction that sets the works in historical and intellectual context; detailed headnotes for each selection; a Guide to Themes; and bibliographic references.

Why has "America" - that is, the United States of America - become so much more than simply a place in the imagination of so many people around the world? In both Europe and Latin America, the United States has often been a site of multiple possible futures, a screen onto which could be projected utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares. Whether castigated as a threat to civilized order or championed as a promise of earthly paradise, America has invariably been treated as a cipher for modernity. It has functioned as an inescapable reference point for both European and Latin American societies, not only as a model of social and political organization - one to reject as much one to emulate - but also as the prime example of a society emerging from a dramatic diversity of cultural and social backgrounds.

The customary division of Latin American history into colonial and modern periods has come into question recently. This new book demonstrates that there was a middle period in Latin America's historical evolution since the European Conquest-one no longer colonial, but not yet modern-which has left a legacy in its own right for contemporary Latin America. This volume is a narrative text on Latin America's "long nineteenth century," from the period of Imperial Reforms in the late eighteenth century up to the Great Depression. Incorporating local and regional studies from the last three decades which have profoundly broadened and altered customary views about Latin America, the book is a synthesis of this "Middle Period." Latin America in the Middle Period re-evaluates the relation between subsistence and market production in the post-independence economy, stressing regional diversity. It also re-evaluates the mechanics of politics, which customarily have been seen as liberal-conservative, caudillo-oligarchy, region-nation, and merchant-landowner-industrialist. The text discusses the acceleration of the forces of modernization, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the beginnings of a national ordering of life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which eroded the fabric of Middle Period society, a process consummated in the aftermath of world depression in the 1930s, ushering in modern Latin America. This new volume is an excellent resource for courses in nineteenth-century Latin American history and the second half of Latin American history survey.

This is an authoritative large-scale history of the whole of Latin America, from the first contacts between native American peoples and Europeans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present day.

A sweeping history of Latin American republicanism in the nineteenth century By the 1820s, after three centuries under imperial rule, the former Spanish territories of Latin America had shaken off their colonial bonds and founded independent republics. In committing themselves to republicanism, they embarked on a political experiment of an unprecedented scale outside the newly formed United States. In this book, Hilda Sabato provides a sweeping history of republicanism in nineteenth-century Latin America, one that spans the entire region and places the Spanish American experience within a broader global perspective. Challenging the conventional view of Latin America as a case of failed modernization, Sabato shows how republican experiments differed across the region yet were all based on the radical notion of popular sovereignty--the idea that legitimate authority lies with the people. As in other parts of the world, the transition from colonies to independent states was complex, uncertain, and rife with conflict. Yet the republican order in Spanish America endured, crossing borders and traversing distinct geographies and cultures. Sabato shifts the focus from rulers and elites to ordinary citizens and traces the emergence of new institutions and practices that shaped a vigorous and inclusive political life. Panoramic in scope and certain to provoke debate, this book situates these fledgling republics in the context of a transatlantic shift in how government was conceived and practiced, and puts Latin America at the center of a revolutionary age that gave birth to new ideas of citizenship.

The Cambridge History of Latin America is a large scale, collaborative, multi-volume history of Latin America during the five centuries from the first contacts between Europeans and the native peoples of the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present. A Cultural History of Latin America brings together chapters from Volumes III, IV, and X of The Cambridge History on literature, music, and the visual arts in Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essays explore: literature, music, and art from c. 1820 to 1870 and from 1870 to c. 1920; Latin American fiction from the regionalist novel between the Wars to the post-War New Novel, from the 'Boom' to the 'Post-Boom'; twentieth-century Latin American poetry; indigenous literatures and culture in the twentieth century; twentieth-century Latin American music; architecture and art in twentieth-century Latin America, and the history of cinema in Latin America. Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliographical essay.

From the Preface by Bradford Burns:If this essay succeeds, it will open an interpretive window providing a different perspective of Latin America's recent past. At first glance, the view might seem to be of the conventional landscape of modernization, but I hope a steady gaze will reveal it to be far vaster and more complex. For one thing, rather than enumerating the benefits accruing to Latin America as modernization became a dominant feature of the social, economic, and political life of the region, this essay regards the imposition of modernization as the catalyst of a devastating cultural struggle and as a barrier to Latin America's development. Clearly if a window to the past is opened by this essay, then so too is a new door to controversy. After most of the nations of Latin America gained political independence, their leaders rapidly accelerated trends more leisurely under way since the closing decades of the eighteenth century: the importation of technology and ideas with their accompanying values from Western Europe north of the Pyrenees and the full entrance into the world's capitalistic marketplace. Such trends shaped those new nations more profoundly than their advocates probably had realized possible. Their promoters moved forward steadfastly within the legacy of some basic institutions bequeathed by centuries of Iberian rule. That combination of hoary institutions with newer, non-Iberian technology, values, and ideas forged contemporary Latin America with its enigma of overwhelming poverty amid potential plenty. This essay emphasizes that the victory of the European oriented ruling elites over the Latin American folk with their community values resulted only after a long and violent struggle, which characterized most of the nineteenth century. Whatever advantages might have resulted from the success of the elites, the victory also fastened two dominant and interrelated characteristics on contemporary Latin America: a deepening dependency and the declining quality of life for the majority.

"This book authoritatively recounts the main events in the history of Latin America and highlights the men and women who played key roles in the establishment and growth of the region. Though long inhabited only by various Amerindian tribes, Latin America was transformed by the arrival of Europeans, who built colonial empires across the region beginning in the sixteenth century. Much of Latin America secured its independence in the early nineteenth century, but the new countries were plagued by political and economic instability, some of which continues today. Readers will get a full picture of Latin America's complex history and an understanding of how it affects the present-day region."