Best of
Latin-American-History

1993

Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico


Hugh Thomas - 1993
    Conquest is an essential work of history from one of our most gifted historians.

Rebel Radio: The Story of El Salvador's Radio Venceremos


José Ignacio Lopez Vigil - 1993
    Rebel radio: the story of El Salvador's Radio Venceremos describes the courage and sacrifices of the young men and women responsible for running the guerrillas' radio station during the ten-year-long civil war in El Salvador

The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself


David Bushnell - 1993
    It tells the remarkable story of a country that has consistently defied modern Latin American stereotypes—a country where military dictators are virtually unknown, where the political left is congenitally weak, and where urbanization and industrialization have spawned no lasting populist movement.There is more to Colombia than the drug trafficking and violence that have recently gripped the world's attention. In the face of both cocaine wars and guerrilla conflict, the country has maintained steady economic growth as well as a relatively open and democratic government based on a two-party system. It has also produced an impressive body of art and literature.David Bushnell traces the process of state-building in Colombia from the struggle for independence, territorial consolidation, and reform in the nineteenth century to economic development and social and political democratization in the twentieth. He also sheds light on the modern history of Latin America as a whole.

Royal Tombs of Sipan


Walter Alva - 1993
    100 and 800. The tombs, which contained extraordinary gold and silver jewelry and ceremonial attire, are the richest ever excavated archaeologically in the Western Hemisphere. The detailed accounts of the tombs and methods of excavation will be useful for scholars, but the authors have made the non-specialist reader their primary audience. A skillfully designed format and fold-out pages are helpful in relating tomb artifacts to text descriptions. Providing an exemplary view of an ancient culture, the Sipn tombs have had a profound impact on our understanding of Moche civilization.

New World Encounters


Stephen Greenblatt - 1993
    This collection of essays, encompassing history, literary criticism, art history, and anthropology, offers a fresh and innovative approach to the momentous encounter.

Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, And The Capitalist World System


Frederick Cooper - 1993
    Moreover, it maintains, the intellectual reverberations within and across the African and Latin American fields constitute a challenging and underappreciated counterpoint to laments that contemporary historical knowledge has suffered a splintering so extreme that it undermines larger dialogue and meaning.    The authors, in their substantive essays, synthesize, order, and evaluate the significance of the enormous resonating literatures that have come to exist for Africa and Latin America on the themes of the capitalist world system, labor, and peasantries.  They historicize these literatures by analyzing an entire cycle of critical dialogue and confrontation with historical paradigms and the professional upheavals that accompanied them.  They review the initial confrontations with frameworks of historical knowledge that erupted in the 1960s and the early 1970s; the emergence of new “dissident” paradigms; the outpouring of subsequent scholarship on peasants, labor, and capitalism that began to unravel the newly proposed paradigms by the 1980s and 1990s; and the outlines of the new interpretive frameworks that tended to displace both the “traditional” and “early dissident” paradigms.  They also suggest possible outlines of a new cycle of “Third World” confrontations with paradigm, anchored in themes such as gender and ethnicity.    Confronting Historical Paradigms employs a historicized awareness of intellectual networks, conversations, and history–theory dialogues.  The result is a critical analysis and synthetic presentation of substantive advances that have preoccupied scholarship on Africa and Latin America in recent decades and a powerful challenge to notions that “new” fields of history have ended up destroying intellectual coherence and community.

Taríacuri's Legacy: The Prehispanic Tarascan State


Helen Perlstein Pollard - 1993
    Pollard draws upon ethnohistoric documentation, ecological data, and archaeological research, including her own recent work in the region, to provide a comprehensive overview of the Tarascan state, one of the two great political powers the Spanish encountered when they arrived in Mexico in the early