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A New History of the New World
by Greg Grandin
Book Reviewed by:From the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both.
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.
1.
Leaves of Grass
Philosophy begins in wonder," Socrates said. It matures, Hegel added, in terror, on the "slaughter bench" of history. So it was with the arrival of the Spanish in the New World.
Wonder there was when Christendom realized there existed another half a world, filled with rarezas, rarities, curious plants and animals but above all people, many more and many more different kinds than lived in all of Europe. Even before Copernicus, Europe was awakening to the idea that the Earth wasn't the center of existence, and that the universe contained, Giordano Bruno would soon reckon, "innumerable suns" and "infinite earths that equally revolve around these suns."
Scholars intuited a link between the celestial and earthly multitudes. There was one heavenly realm, containing an incalculable number of stars. There was one earthly estate, now known to contain many more millions of people than previously imagined. The realization that the earth was not the center of ...
The scope of the book is breathtaking, but equally notable is the proficiency of Grandin's prose and the originality of his thought... 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.....continued
Full Review
(781 words)
(Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski).
Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of Doppelganger
Dazzling. Sweeping. Mind-altering. World-changing. This is a once-in-a-generation contribution destined to become our new reference for understanding the making of the modern world. With extraordinary depth, erudition and precision, Grandin avenges the dead and fights for the living. Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself
In his awe-inspiring masterpiece, Greg Grandin shows how hemispheric relationships have defined the history of the United States for five centuries. Latin Americans did more than decry our failures to live up to the new world's revolutionary ideals. As our country ascended to hegemon in the last century, our neighbors pushed—in part because of their unequal might and wealth—for the reimagination of how the globe itself ought to be governed.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 ...
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