Latin America

"Bolivia is a country with a reputation," writes James Dunkerley. "Not so long ago it was for Che Guevara, for whose death its citizens are on occasions held to be collectively responsible. More recently it has been for cocaine. But in general it is for...

"Much has been written about the Mexican war, but this ...is the best military history of that conflict...Leading personalities, civilian and military, Mexican and American, are given incisive and fair evaluations. The coming of war is seen as...

'A Hero's Curse' is the story of the modern Venezuelans whose lives have taken shape in the shadow of Simon Bolivar and his most passionate disciple, Comandante Hugo Chavez. For nearly two hundred years Venezuela's political leaders have evoked the...

In the wake of African decolonization, Brazil attempted to forge connections with newly independent countries. In the early 1960s it launched an effort to establish diplomatic ties with Africa; in the 1970s it undertook trade campaigns to open African...

Originally published in Brazil as O Diabo e a Terra de Santa Cruz, this translation from the Portuguese analyzes the nature of popular religion and the ways it was transferred to the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using richly...

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brazil's dictatorship arrested, tortured, and interrogated many people it suspected of subversion; hundreds of those arrested were killed in prison. In May 1970, Marcos P. S. Arruda, a young political activist, was...

Believing that Maya studies today are ""suffering from imbalance,"" J. Eric S. Thompson here approaches Maya history and religion from the standpoint of ethno-history. Present-day archaeologists often tend to restrict their curiosity to their excavations...

Elizabeth Emma Ferry traces the movement of minerals as they circulate from Mexican mines to markets, museums, and private collections on both sides of the US-Mexico border. She describes how and why these byproducts of ore mining come to be valued by...

Chile was the first major Latin American nation to carry out a complete neoliberal transformation. Its policies-encouraging foreign investment, privatizing public sector companies and services, lowering trade barriers, reducing the size of the state, and...

This is the extraordinary history of the hidden civilizations of the first people of the South American Andes, with over 200 photographs and illustrations. This is a fascinating in-depth guide to the mysterious Inca world, providing an extraordinary...

In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this...

During the two years just before the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet, the historian Steve J. Stern had been in Chile collecting oral histories of life under Pinochet as part of an investigation into the form and meaning of memories of...

In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco examines the conditions under which extreme cruelty became the instrument of armies, governments, rebels, and rogue groups in Latin America. She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of...

On the basis of an examination of the colonial mercury and silver production processes and related labor systems, Mercury, Mining, and Empire explores the effects of mercury pollution in colonial Huancavelica, Peru, and Potosi, in present-day Bolivia...

Argentina's Missing Bones is the first comprehensive English-language work of historical scholarship on the 1976-83 military dictatorship and Argentina's notorious experience with state terrorism during the so-called dirty war. It examines this history...

Why does Argentina's national anthem describe its citizens as sons of the Inca? Why did patriots in nineteenth-century Chile name a battleship after the Aztec emperor Montezuma? Answers to both questions lie in the tangled knot of ideas that constituted...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781696397155Author David RobbinsFormat PaperbackPage Count 102Imprint Independently PublishedPublisher Independently PublishedWeight(grams)...

Before Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492, no European had ever seen, much less tasted, tobacco or chocolate. Initially dismissed as dry leaves and an odd Indian drink, these two commodities came to conquer Europe on a scale unsurpassed by any other...

Ecuador is the third-largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the western United States. As the source of this oil, the Ecuadorian Amazon has borne the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of a growing U.S. demand for petroleum and the...

Bolivia's foremost social and political theorist, Rene Zavaleta Mercado held diplomatic and ministerial posts with the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement in the 1950s and '60s, before eventually aligning with the Marxist left, where he developed the...

Oil has played a major role in Venezuela's economy since the first gusher was discovered along Lake Maracaibo in 1922. As Miguel Tinker Salas demonstrates, oil has also transformed the country's social, cultural, and political landscapes. In The Enduring...

After the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917, post-revolutionary leaders hoped to assimilate the country's racially diverse population into one official mixed-race identity-the mestizo. This book shows that as part of this vision, the Mexican...

A sweeping history of Latin American republicanism in the nineteenth centuryBy 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...

None of the world's "lost writings" have proven more perplexing than the mysterious script in which the Inka Empire kept its records. Ancient Andean peoples encoded knowledge in knotted cords of cotton or wool called khipus. In The Cord Keepers, the...

In the century between 1830 and 1930, following independence from Spain and Portugal, major cities in Latin America experienced large-scale growth, with the development of a new urban bourgeois elite interested in projects of modernization and rapid...

Indigenous Struggles for Autonomy: The Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua offers a broad and comprehensive analysis of Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast and the process of autonomy that was initiated in 1987 as part of a wider conflict resolution process during the...

"My breasts stopped growing when my grandfather touched them," confides 'Elisa', a young woman who recounts the traumatic incest and sexual abuse she experienced in childhood. In Family Secrets, Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez tells the life stories of 60 men and...

The past two decades have seen an explosion of research on Postclassic Mesoamerican societies. In this ambitious new volume, the editors and contributors seek to present a complete picture of the middle and late Postclassic period (ca. AD 1100-1500)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781584351108Author Sergio Gonzalez RodriguezFormat PaperbackPage Count 136Imprint Semiotext (E)Publisher AutonomediaWeight(grams) 136gDimensions(mm) 178mm *...

This collection of essays challenges long-entrenched ideas about the history, nature, and significance of the informal neighborhoods that house the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor. Until recently, scholars have mainly viewed these settlements...

The War on Drugs in the Americas brings together the history of the War on Drugs in the US and Latin America to reveal how, since 1914, when the US first criminalized the non-medical use of narcotics, the trade and violence associated with drugs has...

For a thousand days in the early 1970s, Chileans experienced revolution not as a dream but as daily life. Alongside Salvador Allende's attempt to democratically bring about a socialist regime, new understandings of the meaning of revolutionary change...

Many treatments of the twentieth-century Latin American left assume a movement populated mainly by affluent urban youth whose naive dreams of revolution collapsed under the weight of their own elitism, racism, sexism, and sectarian dogmas. However, this...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9788742552476Author Anne Sofie SternbergPage Count 10Imprint GlobePublisher GlobeWeight(grams) 210g

Through a wide variety of primary sources--including letters, eyewitness accounts, and governmental documents--this collection portrays in vivid detail the three indigenous rebellions that threatened Spanish control of its South American colonies more...

Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores-everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to...

In The CIA in Ecuador Marc Becker draws on recently released US government surveillance documents on the Ecuadorian left to chart social movement organizing efforts during the 1950s. Emphasizing the competing roles of the domestic ruling class and...

Reissued with a new preface by the author, The Paraguayan War is an engrossing and comprehensive account of the origins and early campaigns of the deadliest and most extensive interstate war ever fought in Latin America. A 2003 CHOICE Academic Title of...

A narrative history of exploration from Christopher Columbus to the 19th century, with journal excerpts, diaries and other writings of the explorers themselves. Goodman has marshaled his wide-ranging research and lifelong interest in exploration into a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781647488048Author Captivating HistoryFormat PaperbackPage Count 210Imprint Captivating HistoryPublisher Captivating HistoryWeight(grams) 313gDimensions(mm)...