BookBrowse Reviews America, América by Greg Grandin

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An original and impressive new interpretation of the history of the Americas explains the impact and influence of Latin America on the United States and vice versa.

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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.

This review first ran in the June 4, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.