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"The Breve Historia offers a Latin American point of view . . . and a more explicitly political focus on the twentieth century. . . . It is stimulating reading and usefully controversial in some places. For now, it is probably the best single short history available."—Brian Loveman, San Diego State University "He demonstrates a fine talent for isolating and depicting major themes in the history of an area otherwise portrayed with great confusion. . . . I think he offers a masterful synthesis."—E. Bradford Burns, University of California, Los Angeles
This book studies the experience of twelve countries that have broken through the limits that low incomes so often impose on human survival: China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Oman, Panama, the former Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Most made impressive gains in life expectancy in the decades after 1920, and by 1960 nearly matched the rich countries in survival. James C. Riley finds that all of these countries enjoyed significant social growth, all invested in public health, and all gained the people's participation in the effort to improve their own lives and health. This innovative analysis suggests an alternative model of growth in which the measure of a nation's success is not its per capita income but the life expectancy of its population.
The seventeenth century has been characterized as "Latin America's forgotten century." This landmark work, originally published in 1973, attempted to fill the vacuum in knowledge by providing an account of the first great colonial cycle in Spanish Central America. The colonial Spanish society of the sixteenth century was very different from that described in the eighteenth century. What happened in the Latin American colonies between the first conquests, the seizure of long-accumulated Indian wealth, the first silver booms, and the period of modern raw material supply? How did Latin America move from one stage to the other? What were these intermediate economic stages, and what effect did th...
In the revolutionary movement in Central America during this century, Costa Rica followed a very different course from other countries in the region. This text explores the history of labour and the relationship between the Communist Party and the Catholic Church during the 1930s and 1940s.
This book features biographies of 32 of the most notable figures in Latin American history. To the 23 individuals from the first edition, consisting mostly of revolutionary, political, and military figures of the past, are added nine new biographies of contemporary Latin American presidents, providing an updated view of the region's leadership. Several patterns run through the individual biographies. The concept of native identity is an important aspect in the stories of Malinche, Juarez, Sandino, and Zapata--profoundly affecting the politics of modern Brazil, Mexico, and Nicaragua. One also sees a continuing compulsion to rebel against overwhelming odds in the cases of Manuela Saenz, Che Guevara and Daniel Ortega.
Using previously untapped resources including private collections, the records of cultural institutions, and federal and state government archives, Schoonover analyzes the German role in Central American domestic and international relations. Of the four countries most active in independent Central America-Britain, the United States, France, and Germany- historians know the least about the full extent of the involvement of the Germans. German colonial expansion was based on its position as an industrialized state seeking economi ...