The most readable, highly regarded, and affordable history of Latin America for our times. Born in Blood and Fire, Fourth Edition has been extensively revised to heighten emphasis on current cultural analyses of Latin American society and facilitate meaningful connections between the Encounter and the present.

Latin America, an area of great economic potential, has long been in need of an authoritative and concise introduction. This history has been written by a specialist who was closely connected with Latin America for over forty years. His text emphasizes how many races and classes have contributed to the civilization of this great land-mass: Indians, European conquistadores, priests, planters, African slaves, caudillos, liberal intellectuals and commercial...

"Sixteen nations emerged from the violent and cataclysmic wars of independence in Spanish America in the early nineteenth century. In overturning Spain's control of the Americas, such great military leaders as Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin unleashed both civil wars and revolutions between 1810 and 1824. The liberators set themselves up to govern the new states they created but quickly failed as rulers. They succumbed, in part, to change resulting...

Throughout Latin America, social medicine has been widely recognized for its critical perspectives on mainstream understandings of health and for its progressive policy achievements. Nevertheless, it has been an elusive subject: hard to define, with puzzling historical discontinuities and misconceptions about its origins. Drawing on a vast archive and with an ambitious narrative scope that transcends national borders, Eric D. Carter offers the first...

"The gripping and little known story of the fight for the allegiance of Latin America during World War II The Tango War fills an important gap in WWII history. Beginning in the thirties, both sides were well aware of the need to control not just the hearts and minds but also the resources of Latin America. The fight was often dirty: residents were captured to exchange for U.S. prisoners of war and rival spy networks shadowed each other across the...

Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus's arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul's explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos...

Privateers of the Americas examines raids on Spanish shipping conducted from the United States during the early 1800s. These activities were sanctioned by, and conducted on behalf of, republics in Spanish America aspiring to independence from Spain. Among the available histories of privateering, there is no comparable work. Because privateering further complicated international dealings during the already tumultuous Age of Revolution, the book also...

"Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth. Through her father’s prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the...

This book proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust consciousness in Latin America since the 1970s. Community leaders, intellectuals, writers, and political activists facing state repression have seen themselves reflected in Holocaust histories and have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries. In so doing, they have developed a unique, controversial approach to the memory of the Holocaust that...

The Failure of Latin America is a collection of John Beverley's previously published essays and pairs them with new material that reflects on questions of post-colonialism and equality within the context of receding continental socialism. Beverley sees an impasse within both the academic postcolonial project and the Bolivarian idea of Latin America. The Pink Tide may have failed to permanently reshape Latin America, but in its failure there remains...