Here are 100 books that Mastering the Law fans have personally recommended if you like
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History tells us who we are and what we can become. History in the Andes tells us that people of the African Diaspora have been a part of building that part of the world into what it is today for over 500 years. I have been fascinated by learning this history and inspired by leaders, writers, artists, and fellow historians who consider themselves Afro-Andean and are building the future. For 25 years now, I have been scouring historical archives in Peru, Spain, and the US to find more sources to help us recognize and understand that history as we use it to build a better, more just present and future.
Did you know that African and indigenous people worked together in what is today Bolivia and Argentina? They were both enslaved and those who had bought their freedom. Bolivia, high in the mountains, might seem remote, but in the 1500s and 1600s its rich silver mines were the motor of the Spanish Empire’s economy. And Spain was the superpower that dominated Europe, America, and the Atlantic.
Bolivia and the zones that supplied it with coerced and free workers, mules, food, wine, textiles, and the stimulant coca leaf was called Charcas, and it was the most valuable and important part of all of the Americas at the time.
This wonderfully detailed book by an outstanding Bolivian historian tells the story of the Black and indigenous laborers who made this possible.
This book investigates the phenomenon of slavery and other forms of servitude experienced by people of African or indigenous origin who were taken captive and then subjected to forced labor in Charcas (Bolivia) in the 16th and 17th centuries.
I’ve always wanted to know why people acquire the things they choose, how they get them, and what they do with them. For years, too, I’ve been fascinated by the period when modernity was being born, a time full of worldwide exploration, the founding of new nations and societies, and the invention of new ways of making, transporting, and distributing all sorts of goods and services. I discovered that studying consumers, consumer goods, and trade from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century was the perfect way to satisfy my curiosity. The Material Atlantic is my report about what I’ve learned.
Luxury is not usually associated with slavery. But in the colonial Americas, it could be. Sometimes, because some enslaved men and women were tailors and seamstresses, and some of the clothing they created was costly. More often, however, because some enslaved people got their hands on expensive, fashionable clothing.
Historians have begun to tell this story, and few do it better than the young scholar Tamara Walker. In this superb study, Walker tracks down all sorts of sources, written and pictorial, to describe the many ways that enslaved individuals acquired fine clothing in Lima, Peru, a Spanish-American colonial capital renowned for its residents’ opulent apparel.
Exquisite Slaves adds a fresh dimension to the exciting scholarship that is revealing how marginalized groups have obtained goods usually forbidden to them.
In Exquisite Slaves, Tamara J. Walker examines how slaves used elegant clothing as a language for expressing attitudes about gender and status in the wealthy urban center of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Lima, Peru. Drawing on traditional historical research methods, visual studies, feminist theory, and material culture scholarship, Walker argues that clothing was an emblem of not only the reach but also the limits of slaveholders' power and racial domination. Even as it acknowledges the significant limits imposed on slaves' access to elegant clothing, Exquisite Slaves also showcases the insistence and ingenuity with which slaves dressed to convey their own sense…
History tells us who we are and what we can become. History in the Andes tells us that people of the African Diaspora have been a part of building that part of the world into what it is today for over 500 years. I have been fascinated by learning this history and inspired by leaders, writers, artists, and fellow historians who consider themselves Afro-Andean and are building the future. For 25 years now, I have been scouring historical archives in Peru, Spain, and the US to find more sources to help us recognize and understand that history as we use it to build a better, more just present and future.
The first reason to read this book is that the fight against slavery in the Americas is not just a US story about its famous abolitionists and Civil War. The bigger story about abolition and the forces that opposed it involves European powers like Spain that controlled more territory in the Americas and governed the lives of many millions more people than lived in the US and what became the US.
The second reason to read this book is that nineteenth-century Spain was divided between liberal forces that wanted to end enslavement and conservative forces that wanted to preserve “property rights” at all costs; and this led to dueling abolitionist and antiabolitionist discourses. We can learn from this history as today, our own country is increasingly divided between dueling discourses.
Details the abolition of the slave trade in the Atlantic World to the 1860s.
Throughout the nineteenth century, very few people in Spain campaigned to stop the slave trade and did even less to abolish slavery. Even when some supported abolition, the reasons that moved them were not always humanitarian, liberal, or egalitarian. How abolitionist ideas were received, shaped, and transformed during this period has been ripe for study. Jesus Sanjurjo's In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1800-1870 provides a comprehensive theory of the history, the politics, and…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
History tells us who we are and what we can become. History in the Andes tells us that people of the African Diaspora have been a part of building that part of the world into what it is today for over 500 years. I have been fascinated by learning this history and inspired by leaders, writers, artists, and fellow historians who consider themselves Afro-Andean and are building the future. For 25 years now, I have been scouring historical archives in Peru, Spain, and the US to find more sources to help us recognize and understand that history as we use it to build a better, more just present and future.
For thousands of years, right down to the present, textiles and weaving in the Andes has been some of the most exquisite and sophisticated in the world. It has been linked to the amazing cultural creativity of people in the Andes and the rise and fall of successive empires because controlling textile production is controlling power and wealth.
This book shows us something entirely new: how the weavers who made these amazing textiles experienced and often resisted that power and the exploitation of their labor. Even though this book is not explicitly about Afro-Andean people, they were an integral part of the Andean labor force, and they figure in histories of resistance and rebellion in the Andes.
The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru documents the impact of Spanish colonial institutions of labor on identity and social cohesion in Peru. Through archaeological and historical lines of evidence, Di Hu examines the long-term social conditions that enabled the large-scale rebellions in the late Spanish colonial period in Peru. Hu argues that ordinary people from different backgrounds pushed back against the top-down identity categories imposed by the Spanish colonial government and in the process created a cosmopolitan social landscape that later facilitated broader rebellion.
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 am a Professor of History at Texas A&M University and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I teach and research broadly in the histories of Britain and its empire, North America, and the Atlantic world. I am the author of four books, including Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press and The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812. I am especially fascinated with how imperialism shape colonizers’ cultures.
Focusing on the Spanish Empire, this book explores two of the most imported goods from the Americas. Norton carefully examines the deep cultural significance of Tobacco and Chocolate amongst the indigenous peoples of the Americas and how the goods were adopted and adapted in Europe, ultimately highlighting the profound impact imperialism had on European cultures.
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 American resource or product. A fascinating story of contact, exploration, and exchange in the Atlantic world, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures traces the ways in which these two goods of the Americas both changed and were changed by Europe.
Focusing on the Spanish Empire, Marcy Norton investigates how tobacco and chocolate became material and symbolic links to the pre-Hispanic past…
Growing up in a sheltered environment on Long Island, NY, I had little sense of a larger world, except for seeing images of the Vietnam War. Going to college in the early 70s and becoming an anthropology major, the world began to open up, yet I hadn't experienced life outside the U.S. until my mid-20s as a graduate student living in Mexico to do dissertation research. That experience and travels to Guatemala, Peru, Cuba, and Costa Rica helped me to see how diverse Latin America is, and how real poverty and suffering are as well. Coming into my own as a historian, teacher, and writer, my fascination with women’s voices, experiences, and activism only grew.
Cacicaswere women who held high status, positions of political authority, and/or communally-significant economic or other responsibilities in colonial Spanish American native societies.
This book offers compelling portraits of how colonial women strategized to maneuver around patriarchal limitations of Spanish law, especially because they could not hold formal offices in the colonial governing hierarchy (though sometimes they actually did).
The individually-authored essays in this collection provide insightful portraits of individual women in a variety of circumstances across a wide range of geographic locations and types of communities across the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and Central and South American societies.
The reader will feel she or he learns something about these women as people defending themselves, their families, and peoples.
The term cacica was a Spanish linguistic invention, a female counterpart to caciques, the Arawak word for male indigenous leaders in Spanish America. But the term's meaning was adapted and manipulated by natives, creating a new social stratum where it previously may not have existed. This book explores that transformation, a conscious construction and reshaping of identity from within.
Cacicas feature far and wide in the history of Spanish America, as female governors and tribute collectors and as relatives of ruling caciques - or their destitute widows. They played a crucial role in the establishment and success of Spanish rule,…
I lived in Peru for five years, working as a writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist and have travelled extensively in South America, voyaging 4,500 miles from the northern tip of the Andes down to the southern tip of Patagonia, lived with a recently-contacted tribe in the Upper Amazon, visited Maoist Shining Path “liberated zones” in Peru and later made a number of documentaries on the Amazon as well as have written a number of books. Historically, culturally and biologically, South America remains one of the most interesting places on Earth.
The author spent many years in Brazil and Peru, editing the Americas’ section of The Economist andknows the region well. He does a great job of providing the reader with a broad, contemporary view of modern-day Central and South America, weaving together their many historical threads. If you want an insider’s account of Latin America by someone who thoroughly knows the area, then this is the book for you.
A newly updated edition of the best-selling primer on the social, political, and economic challenges facing Central and South America
Ten years after its first publication, Michael Reid's best-selling survey of the state of contemporary Latin America has been wholly updated to reflect the new realities of the "Forgotten Continent." The former Americas editor for the Economist, Reid suggests that much of Central and South America, though less poor, less unequal, and better educated than before, faces harder economic times now that the commodities boom of the 2000s is over. His revised, in-depth account of the region reveals dynamic societies…
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.
Lucidly written and soberly considered, Latin America’s Cold War is one top-five pick for a host of reasons, not least of which is that it forces us to consider that the usually potent Uncle Sam did mean that Latin American actors did not have influence, for good or ill. Rightist Latin American militaries, for a searing case, had their reasons for combatting leftist guerrillas, not just serving Washington’s bidding.
For Latin America, the Cold War was anything but cold. Nor was it the so-called "long peace" afforded the world's superpowers by their nuclear standoff. In this book, the first to take an international perspective on the postwar decades in the region, Hal Brands sets out to explain what exactly happened in Latin America during the Cold War, and why it was so traumatic.
Tracing the tumultuous course of regional affairs from the late 1940s through the early 1990s, Latin America's Cold War delves into the myriad crises and turning points of the period-the Cuban revolution and its aftermath; the…
Forthcoming eclipses coming up in Australia include that of 22 July 2028, which will cross Australia from the Northern Territory to Sydney, home of the internationally famous sights of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Eclipse Chasers will act as a guidebook for both locals and international visitors, giving…
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…
