Here are 100 books that Foundations of Despotism fans have personally recommended if you like
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I became curious about US imperialism and Latin American history after reading Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. While pursuing a BA in History and Spanish at Dalhousie and an MA and PhD in Latin American Studies and History at Georgetown, I learned that Marquez's fictional banana worker massacre really happened in 1928 Colombia. What made me focus on sugar, rather than bananas, is the fact that sugar’s not really food... it often takes over land where food was planted, and the lack of food leads to a potentially revolutionary situation. I've used the following books in my classes about Revolution, Populism, and Commodities in Latin America at York University's Glendon College.
To get through over a hundred books on my History PhD comprehensive exams list, I allowed myself a maximum of one reading day plus a maximum of one double-sided cue card per book.
Jeff Gould crammed so much super cool theory about populism and revolution, workers, and women into his beautifully written book that he got four cue cards and three days! Gould explains that the first Somoza (named “Anastasio”) rose to power largely thanks to US influence, but, once there, he built his own following and passed some remarkably progressive reforms, at least on paper.
The book changed the way I think about populism and revolution in Latin America, completely inspiring the PhD research that became my first book and my current project on rural populism in Brazil. To Lead as Equals shows how powerful sugar workers can be when rural sugar-cane cutters unite with industrial sugar-factory workers, and…
This book is a carefully argued study of peasants and labor during the Somoza regime, focusing on popular movements in the economically strategic department of Chinandega in western Nicaragua. Jeffrey Gould traces the evolution of group consciousness among peasants and workers as they moved away from extreme dependency on the patron to achieve an autonomous social and political ideology. In doing so, he makes important contributions to peasant studies and theories of revolution, as well as our understanding of Nicaraguan history.
According to Gould, when Anastasio Somoza first came to power in 1936, workers and peasants took the Somocista reform…
I became curious about US imperialism and Latin American history after reading Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. While pursuing a BA in History and Spanish at Dalhousie and an MA and PhD in Latin American Studies and History at Georgetown, I learned that Marquez's fictional banana worker massacre really happened in 1928 Colombia. What made me focus on sugar, rather than bananas, is the fact that sugar’s not really food... it often takes over land where food was planted, and the lack of food leads to a potentially revolutionary situation. I've used the following books in my classes about Revolution, Populism, and Commodities in Latin America at York University's Glendon College.
I came across Margaret Randall’s Sandino’s Daughters Revisited while researching my MA thesis on women in the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution, and I love to use it with students since it tells a fascinating history through individuals’ stories.
The book is a really interesting follow-up to Sandino’s Daughters, which was based on interviews Randall did before the triumph of the revolution. Here, Randall is interviewing many of the same women after the Sandinistas lost democratic elections in 1990, offering lots of insights to readers about the complex causes for the triumph and downfall of the revolution.
The twelve women came from many different backgrounds, including: Diana Espinoza, who worked for an employee-owned factory during the revolutionary period; Daisy Zamora, a poet who served as vice-minister of culture during the revolution, and Dora Maria Vidaluz Meneses, the daughter of a Somozan official who shares some really moving stories about her time living…
Sandino's Daughters, Margaret Randall's conversations with Nicaraguan women in their struggle against the dictator Somoza in 1979, brought the lives of a group of extraordinary female revolutionaries to the American and world public. The book remains a landmark. Now, a decade later, Randall returns to interview many of the same women and others. In Sandino's Daughters Revisited, they speak of their lives during and since the Sandinista administration, the ways in which the revolution made them strong--and also held them back. Ironically, the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas at the ballot box has given Sandinista women greater freedom to express…
I became curious about US imperialism and Latin American history after reading Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. While pursuing a BA in History and Spanish at Dalhousie and an MA and PhD in Latin American Studies and History at Georgetown, I learned that Marquez's fictional banana worker massacre really happened in 1928 Colombia. What made me focus on sugar, rather than bananas, is the fact that sugar’s not really food... it often takes over land where food was planted, and the lack of food leads to a potentially revolutionary situation. I've used the following books in my classes about Revolution, Populism, and Commodities in Latin America at York University's Glendon College.
Weavers of Revolution is still my favorite "history from below” book to use in classes about Latin American revolutions.
It reads like a novel, bringing readers into the story by focusing on the workers of Chile’s largest cotton mill and highlighting their activities before and during the socialist Salvador Allende regime (1970-73). The Lebanese Yarur family used ethnic networks to build a successful economic enterprise that endured for many decades, but when the socialist Allende was elected, workers rejected paternalism and took over the factory to run it themselves.
Winn, building on interviews with workers as well as Allende regime officials, beautifully communicates the complexities of the era. Allende and his advisors urged workers to wait for gradual change—also urging rural workers who were seizing plantations to await formal land reform—but urban and rural workers executed factory take-overs and land occupations, radicalizing the revolution from below.
Peter Winn, a highly regarded and internationally recognized Latin-American scholar and journalist, has written an innovative case study of Chile's revolution from below. Winn's analysis of the dramatic seizure of the Yarur cotton mill in Santiago and its widely felt repercussions for Allende's revolution is based on extensive, unique interviews. He juxtaposes the workers' views and activities during the revolution with a portrait of the government.
I became curious about US imperialism and Latin American history after reading Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. While pursuing a BA in History and Spanish at Dalhousie and an MA and PhD in Latin American Studies and History at Georgetown, I learned that Marquez's fictional banana worker massacre really happened in 1928 Colombia. What made me focus on sugar, rather than bananas, is the fact that sugar’s not really food... it often takes over land where food was planted, and the lack of food leads to a potentially revolutionary situation. I've used the following books in my classes about Revolution, Populism, and Commodities in Latin America at York University's Glendon College.
How could you not love a book that explores the at times hilarious, at times tragic, but always fascinating impact of the banana in the United States and Latin America?
From the changing faces of Chiquita Banana to cookbooks and popular jingles like, “Yes, we have no bananas!” Soluri shows us how the banana became one of the most common fruits in the US diet. At the same time, he shows how US importers and marketers took control over, manipulated, and expanded, much of the production in tropical areas like Honduras.
On the production side, Soluri explores ironies like the fact that the United Fruit Company created the perfect breeding ground for pathogens by shrinking banana gene pools and shoving the same type of banana trees all in a row... or the tragic fact that “macho” banana workers became sterile after refusing to wear protective clothing.
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 middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.
Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in…
I am passionate about historical facts, and fiction. My narrative has a universeal appeal making my work relevant to readers of diverse backgrounds. My books entertain and at the same time educate the reader, giving him/her a greater appreciation of the complex world of Latin America and the resilience of its people. I love reading diverse approaches to history and exploring ideas of how our personal interpretations of history shape our opinions.
This book by Mario Vargas Llosa explores the last days of the Dominican Republic's Trujillo dictatorship. I really enjoyed this novel for its blending of historical facts with fiction and for providing a detailed depiction of Rafael Trujillo's regime, its impact on the country, and his assassination in 1961.
The narrative combines three storylines: The character of Urania, who returns to the Dominican Republic after many years in the United States, and shows us the long-lasting psychological impact of Trujillo's rule on her and her family. Trujillo’s last days, personality, control over the country, and the loyalty and fear he commanded. Finally, the group of people plotting to assassinate Trujillo, their motivations, fears, and actions show us that freedom is one of our most valuable treasures worthy of risking our lives.
Vargas Llosa's detailed and compelling narrative profoundly examines how dictatorial regimes can distort societies and damage lives.
'The Feast of the Goat will stand out as the great emblematic novel of Latin America's twentieth century and removes One Hundred Years of Solitude of that title.' Times Literary Supplement
Urania Cabral, a New York lawyer, returns to the Dominican Republic after a lifelong self-imposed exile. Once she is back in her homeland, the elusive feeling of terror that has overshadowed her whole life suddenly takes shape. Urania's own story alternates with the powerful climax of dictator Rafael Trujillo's reign.
In 1961, Trujillo's decadent inner circle (which includes Urania's soon-to-be disgraced father) enjoys the luxuries of privilege while the…
I've been interested in U.S.-Latin American relations ever since my junior year in college when I studied abroad in Chile, a country that had only two years prior been run by dictator Augusto Pinochet. Often referred to as America’s “backyard,” Latin America has often been on the receiving end of U.S. machinations and expansions. In terms of the history of American foreign policy, it's never a dull moment in U.S. involvement in its own hemisphere. I have now had the privilege to work inside the executive branch of the U.S. government on Latin America policy, stints which have forced me to reconsider some of what I had assumed about U.S. abilities and outcomes.
Professor McPherson’s stellar history paints an incredibly rich portrait of protracted U.S. interventions—the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, most critically—during the so-called Banana Wars in the first decades of the 20th century. This painstaking researched and lucidly penned tome demands that we take the Latin American side of the story when we study the searing history of Uncle Sam interventionism.
In 1912 the United States sent troops into a Nicaraguan civil war, solidifying a decades-long era of military occupations in Latin America driven by the desire to rewrite the political rules of the hemisphere. In this definitive account of the resistance to the three longest occupations-in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic-Alan McPherson analyzes these events from the perspective of the invaded themselves, showing why people resisted and why the troops eventually left.
Confronting the assumption that nationalism primarily drove resistance, McPherson finds more concrete-yet also more passionate-motivations: hatred for the brutality of the marines, fear of losing land, outrage…
For almost thirty years, I have studied and tried to understand Latin America and the Caribbean. As a historian I have worked with manuscripts and newspapers and books, in archives and libraries and private collections, but I’ve learned my most important lessons elsewhere: on the baseball diamond in Holguín, Cuba, at pick-up cricket matches in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and in soccer stadiums in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires. These books help give us a sense of the power of such places, the power of sports to reveal the region, and as such they’re a great place to start to understand it.
In Dominican Baseball, Alan Klein continues his essential work to document the country’s relationship to American professional baseball. As he says, Major League teams have come to view the Dominican Republic as “a renewable resource” of baseball talent, a resource they not only consume but produce, through sophisticated recruitment strategies and the highly regimented academies many teams run in the country. Rather than offering easy answers, he shows that the system is one of American power, but also of Dominican agency, of local pride in Dominican success, but also of anxiety about the loss of national sovereignty. He thus provides an invaluable illustration of how Latin American sports help us understand the region’s position in the global commodity chain.
Pedro Martinez. Sammy Sosa. Manny Ramirez. By 2000, Dominican baseball players were in every Major League clubhouse, and regularly winning every baseball award. In 2002, Omar Minaya became the first Dominican general manager of a Major League team. But how did this codependent relationship between MLB and Dominican talent arise and thrive?
In his incisive and engaging book, Dominican Baseball, Alan Klein examines the history of MLB's presence and influence in the Dominican Republic, the development of the booming industry and academies, and the dependence on Dominican player developers, known as buscones. He also addresses issues of identity fraud and…
I'm a historian of gender in colonial Latin America. I'm always looking for surprises in these stories: men's and women's lives in the past were not narrower than ours, and I love to find their strategies for dealing with a system that was often stacked against them. I enjoy learning that my expectations were wrong, and thinking about the past as a living world. As a researcher who is always stumbling on unusual documents that I have to confront with fresh eyes, I really love a book that challenges me to think about how we can even know about the past, especially in terms of race and gender.
This book introduced me to the concept of a "private pregnancy." Imagine that you are a wealthy young woman in the colonial Spanish empire. Your beloved asks to marry you, and you agree; based on that agreement, you begin to have sexual relations. You become pregnant. In many cases, this would not matter: marriage would eventually legitimate that child.
But what if he leaves or dies? You and your family have to create a fiction that you are not pregnant, place your child elsewhere, and hope you live an honorable enough life that the child can someday also benefit from your reputation. This is the kernel of Twinam's story of how Latin American elites manufactured notions of honor within their society and how Spanish monarchs ended up publishing a price list for legitimating illegitimate births after the fact. It really revealed the mindset behind elite society, not only colonial but…
I’m a Brazilian economist working in Paris and dedicated to historical scholarship. I have always been deeply impressed by the political weight carried by economic arguments across Latin America. Debates on economic policy are typically contentious everywhere, but in Latin America, your alignment with different traditions of political economy can go a long way to determine your intellectual and political identity. At the same time, our condition as peripheral societies – and hence net importers of ideas from abroad – raises perennial questions about the meaning of a truly Latin American political economy. I hope this list will be a useful entry point for people similarly interested in these problems.
This sprawling, two-volume collection of essays approaches the history of political economy in Latin America not as a chapter of intellectual history, but rather as an extension of the practices of state-building pursued in the continent.
The first volume,Republics of the Possible, covers the period from the early days of independence to the turbulent 1930s, touching on subjects as diverse as militarization, fiscal systems, educational institutions, national statistics, and ideological disputes.
The second volume, The Rise and Fall of the Developmental State, explores the 20th-century Latin American experiment on state-led development: its ideological underpinnings, the design of appropriate institutions, and the ambiguous aftermath of the developmental era in different national settings.
A third volume is still in the works to complete this state-of-the-art trilogy.
The growth of institutional capacity in the developing world has become a central theme in twenty-first-century social science. Many studies have shown that public institutions are an important determinant of long-run rates of economic growth. This book argues that to understand the difficulties and pitfalls of state building in the contemporary world, it is necessary to analyze previous efforts to create institutional capacity in conflictive contexts. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the process of state and nation building in Latin America and Spain from independence to the 1930s. The book examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to…
I am a professor emeritus of history and sociology, who has taught in universities in Canada and the UK. In the 20th century, Prague Castle was the seat of a gamut of modern political regimes, from democracy through fascism to communism. Gazing across the river at the Castle one night during my first visit to the city in early 1990, soon after the fall of communism, it occurred to me that there can be few better vantage points from which to rethink "the modern condition." My interest in imaginative histories, which montage details rather than attempting to provide an overarching grand narrative, stems from wrestling with how to communicate this complexity.
The Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano was by his own admission "a wretched history student," who set out "to rescue the kidnapped memory of all America, and especially of Latin America," from a "History [that] had stopped breathing: betrayed in academic texts, lied about in classrooms, drowned in dates, they had imprisoned her in museums and buried her, with floral wreaths, beneath statuary bronze and monumental marble."
In his Memory of Fire trilogy, Galeano resurrects the continent's real history in more than 1200 staccato images, built around quotations from colonial documents, contemporary press reports, and the like. These "fragments" come together in a "huge mosaic" to form a "voice of voices." This is exactly what I try to achieve in my own trilogy of books on the history of Prague.
Genesis , the first volume in Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, is both a meditation on the clashes between the Old World and the New and, in the author's words, an attempt to rescue the kidnapped memory of all America." It is a fierce, impassioned, and kaleidoscopic historical experience that takes us from the creation myths of the Makiritare Indians of the Yucatan to Columbus's first, joyous moments in the New World to the English capture of New York.
