Summary
The story of how the United States' identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation's unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other.
America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest—the greatest mortality event in human history—through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century, and beyond. Grandin shows, among other things, how in response to U.S. interventions, Latin Americans remade the rules, leading directly to the founding of the United Nations; and how the Good Neighbor Policy allowed FDR to assume the moral authority to lead the fight against world fascism.
Grandin's book sheds new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain; the Colombian Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of Cold War political terror, death squads, and disappearances; and the radical journalist Ernest Gruening, who, in championing non-interventionism in Latin America, helped broker the most spectacularly successful policy reversal in United States history. This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of Spanish and English colonialism, slavery and racism, and the rise of universal humanism. At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. In so doing, Grandin argues that Latin America's deeply held culture of social democracy can be an effective counterweight to today's spreading rightwing authoritarianism.
A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.
BookBrowse Review
The origin and development of the United States is usually explained primarily by looking back east towards Europe, but in America, América, historian Greg Grandin shifts the focus south to Latin America to reveal the rocky interdependence of the northern and southern continents. This magisterial one-volume history opens with a challenge in the form of a pointed question: "Who is an American? And what is America?" By examining the various definitions of the word "America," which the U.S. eventually commandeered to pertain only to its political nation-state, Grandin makes it clear early on that his book is not simply a chronological history of the Americas as much as an exploration of "the New World's long history of ideological and ethical contestation."
Grandin begins with the Spanish Conquest in the early 1500s—one of the "greatest mortality events in human history," which saw "unprecedented" carnage—and introduces the conscience of this epic narrative, a voice that recurs throughout the five-hundred-year history: Bartolomé de las Casas. Las Casas was a Spanish priest who recorded the unimaginable suffering of the Native Americans caused by the Conquest in his famous 1542 account, A Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies, a widely published tract that horrified the world and shamed the Catholic Church… for a time. Quickly, however, Conquest apologists spun up a "new morality" to rationalize the enslavement and murder of Indigenous peoples—rationalizations that the English would borrow when they, too, began colonizing the New World.
Grandin is an engaging guide through these sometimes-arcane arguments and through the ways that events in Latin America impacted English colonization and, eventually, the laws and ethics that would shape the United States. For example, he explains how José de Acosta, a Spanish Jesuit missionary in Latin America who wrote about the New World in the late 1500s and posited evolutionary theories of "primitive" and "complex" societies, influenced English and European philosophers like John Locke; Locke's ideas about property and sovereignty would, in turn, directly influence the founding principles of the United States (see Beyond the Book).
In the 18th century, the American Revolution inspired independence movements in Spanish-held lands, including those of Venezuelan freedom fighters Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar, who led and fought in the Spanish American wars for independence. By the 1800s, the Spanish Empire in the Americas had yielded to these independent breakaways, and a style of freedom that was slightly different than the U.S.'s had emerged—a "republicanism that was both more inclusive and more activist than its counterpart in the United States"; for those in the South, Grandin writes, America was a "redeemer continent" that stood for the equality of all peoples. Thus republicanism in North and South America were on "divergent paths": one that esteemed private property and a burgeoning individualistic capitalist society, and the other that valued equality and community above the individual. Grandin shows how these paths continued to diverge as the historical narrative moves through the 19th and 20th centuries' major events: the War of 1812, the Monroe Doctrine, the Age of Revolutions, World War I and II, the beginning of the United Nations, and beyond.
The scope of the book is breathtaking, but equally notable is the proficiency of Grandin's prose and the originality of his thought. He analyzes the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America through the philosophical lens of "immanent critique," which he defines in this context as "a form of dissent" in which one party (Latin America) critiques the other (the United States) not by dismissing the legitimacy of their worldview, but rather by accepting the worldview and showing how they've failed to live up to those stated ideals. What has often been taken for "anti-Americanism" in Latin America, Grandin argues, is more like "a competing version of Americanism"—and, furthermore, this rivalry has played a vital role in the creation of the modern world, as the two societies competed against the other to "define a set of nominally shared but actually contested ideals: Christianity, freedom, law, sovereignty, property, equality, liberalism, democracy, and, above all, the very meaning of America."
Grandin concludes his history with a sobering epilogue about the state of the United States, as well as the ways Latin America "tried to warn" its northern neighbor, writing that Latin America has always been the power "ground" to the "lightning-like" U.S.:
"Its persistent opposition to intervention and conquest, and its unwavering demand for the recognition of absolute national sovereignty, obliged Washington to learn how to discipline itself, to control its energies, letting its power flow more efficiently and evenly."
Brimming with intellectual rigor and authentic insights, America, América is a superbly written work of scholarship that history readers will want to keep on their shelves permanently.
Book reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski
Beyond the Book:
Two Major Works that Shaped American (and Américan) Thought
In America, América, historian Greg Grandin references two major intellectual works of history and philosophy that influenced the worldviews of peoples in the Americas and in Europe. These two books offer much in the way of understanding the evolution of both the United States and Latin America in relation to one another and are highly recommended for further reading.
A Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas
Written in 1542 and published in 1552, A Brief History (sometimes translated under different titles) chronicles the full horror of the Spanish Conquest as witnessed by Catholic Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas. A clarion call against the brutalization of Indigenous people, the book was translated into English, French, German, Dutch, and Italian and saw wide distribution throughout Protestant Europe. This firsthand account drips with "extreme colonial gore," Grandin writes, which shocked the world and shamed the Spanish Catholic Church, so much so that a "new morality" was required by its eminent thinkers to justify the continued enslavement, torture, rape, and other depredations it enacted in the New World.
Grandin notes that Las Casas made a clever play on the use of "destruction" in the title, as opposed to "instruction," which was what Catholics were supposed to be providing America's inhabitants. The urgent and dramatic style of the account is also worth noting; as Grandin observes, the priest's denunciation of violence against the people of the New World "perfected a polemical style based not on revelation or appeals to authority but the power of personal witness."
Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
The first sentence of philosopher John Locke's Two Treatises on Government sets the stage dramatically: "In the beginning all the world was America." As Grandin explains, Locke's 1689 tract about society would have been more appropriate if he had opened with "in the beginning all the world was Spanish America," because Locke drew heavily from Spanish thinkers and jurists. Grandin traces Locke's ideas about social contract theory—consent of the governed—back to the Jesuit Juan de Mariana, who published a work one hundred years earlier that "tracks point by point" what Locke argued for in the Two Treatises. In this context, Grandin cites the work as an example of early European thought of America as "empty and unclaimed" that would lay the foundation for a "claim" to the land.
As Grandin observes, Locke imbibed many of the beliefs of Jesuitical thinking of the New World as "pristine, inhabited not by the storied Aztecs or the cultured Inca but by artless peoples whose simplicity offered a window back in time to what Europe was like before written records and political society." The treatise explores the notion of possession, and while Locke says Indigenous inhabitants of America have the right to possession, he claims that "Amerindians didn't make use of this right." Two Treatises is worth reading to understand the European political and philosophical attitude toward land, labor, and "adding value" to nature's bounty, despite the destructive result of this attitude already observed by Las Casas.