The French in Central America

The French in Central America
Author: Thomas David Schoonover
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780842027922

Accounts of the international relations of Central America have been dominated by the role of the United States and Great Britain. The role of France in Central America has largely been overshadowed by the other great powers. In a well-written, tight, and masterful synthesis, Thomas Schoonover redresses this imbalance.p Based on exhaustive multinational archival research, The French in Central America: Culture and Commerce, 1820-1930 details French attempts to establish a sphere of influence in Central America amongst the machinations of the British, Germans, and U.S. who all sought to dominate trade in Central America, control transit routes between the oceans, advise the national militaries, and influence cultural developments.p The book traces the involvement of the French in Central America from Independence to the unsteady economic years following World War I. Central America, in the nineteenth century was an area of vital importance to the French, who, along with a number of other powers, were interested in building a canal across the isthmus. The French in Central America demonstrates how the French used both economic and military means to further their desire for economic as well as colonial expansion. More importantly, the book examines how the French worked to develop strong cultural bonds with the nations of Central America through education, language schools, orders, and military missions. The French sought cultural advantage in considerable part because they hoped and expected commercial benefits to result.p The French in Central America: Culture and Commerce, 1820-1930 is an important addition to the growing literature on the international relations of the Americas. Thisbook will be of great interest to professors and students of French and Central American history as well as individuals interested in international relations and cultural studies.p

French Connections

French Connections
Author: Andrew N. Wegmann
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2020-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807174572

French Connections examines how the movement of people, ideas, and social practices contributed to the complex processes and negotiations involved in being and becoming French in North America and the Atlantic World between the years 1600 and 1875. Engaging a wide range of topics, from religious and diplomatic performance to labor migration, racialization, and both imagined and real conceptualizations of “Frenchness” and “Frenchification,” this volume argues that cultural mobility was fundamental to the development of French colonial societies and the collective identities they housed. Cases of cultural formation and dislocation in places as diverse as Quebec, the Illinois Country, Detroit, Haiti, Acadia, New England, and France itself demonstrate the broad variability of French cultural mobility that took place throughout this massive geographical space. Nevertheless, these communities shared the same cultural root in the midst of socially and politically fluid landscapes, where cultural mobility came to define, and indeed sustain, communal and individual identities in French North America and the Atlantic World. Drawing on innovative new scholarship on Louisiana and New Orleans, the editors and contributors to French Connections look to refocus the conversation surrounding French colonial interconnectivity by thinking about mobility as a constitutive condition of culture; from this perspective, separate “spheres” of French colonial culture merge to reveal a broader, more cohesive cultural world. The comprehensive scope of this collection will attract scholars of French North America, early American history, Atlantic World history, Caribbean studies, Canadian studies, and frontier studies. With essays from established, award-winning scholars such as Brett Rushforth, Leslie Choquette, Jay Gitlin, and Christopher Hodson as well as from new, progressive thinkers such as Mairi Cowan, William Brown, Karen L. Marrero, and Robert D. Taber, French Connections promises to generate interest and value across an extensive and diverse range of concentrations.

The United States in Central America, 1860-1911

The United States in Central America, 1860-1911
Author: Thomas David Schoonover
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1991
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780822311607

In a work of unprecedented scope, Thomas D. Schoonover combines exhaustive multicountry archival research with a sophisticated theoretical framework grounded in world systems theory to elucidate the relations between the United States and Central America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Schoonover's archival research in Central America, Europe, and the United States encompasses public, business, organizational, and individual records. In analyzing this material, Schoonover applies a world systems theory approach with that of social imperialism and dependency theory to underscore the broad, multistate dimension of international affairs. In exploring the international history of Central America, Schoonover describes the role of personalities such as John C. Frémont, Otto von Bismarck, Theodore Roosevelt, Manuel Estrada Cabrera, and José Santos Zelaya; the impact of railroad building and canal projects; and the role of pan-Americanism, nationalism, racism, and anti-Americanism.

Open Veins of Latin America

Open Veins of Latin America
Author: Eduardo Galeano
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0853459916

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe. Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably. This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende's inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.

Blacks and Blackness in Central America

Blacks and Blackness in Central America
Author: Lowell Gudmundson
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2010-10-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822393131

Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and people of African descent constituted the majority of nonindigenous populations in the region long thereafter. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African ancestry and social and political involvement in favor of Spanish and Indian heritage and contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to identify themselves as something other than African American, reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the Americas. The essays in this collection begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region’s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed-race majorities as “Indo-Hispanic,” or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of the first region of the Americas in which African Americans not only gained the right to vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency, following independence from Spain in 1821. Contributors. Rina Cáceres Gómez, Lowell Gudmundson, Ronald Harpelle, Juliet Hooker, Catherine Komisaruk, Russell Lohse, Paul Lokken, Mauricio Meléndez Obando, Karl H. Offen, Lara Putnam, Justin Wolfe

Handbook of Latin American Studies

Handbook of Latin American Studies
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 808
Release: 2007
Genre: Latin America
ISBN:

Contains scholarly evaluations of books and book chapters as well as conference papers and articles published worldwide in the field of Latin American studies. Covers social sciences and the humanities in alternate years.

American Foreign Policy Toward Latin America in the 80s and 90s

American Foreign Policy Toward Latin America in the 80s and 90s
Author: Howard J. Wiarda
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 1992
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 081479257X

This thoughtful, controversial book, by one of the country's leading Latin America scholars, examines the fundamental tenets and ideologies behind America's policy towards Latin America over the course of the last three administrations. Howard Wiarda, who has served as a consultant for the State Department, the Department of the Army, the National Security Council, the Kissinger Commission, and the White House, is ideally situated to provide an insider account of policy decisions and process during the Reagan-Bush era. The combination of Wiarda's academic background and his hands-on knowledge of Washington practices and processes results in a volume that is extremely readable and will serve as a vital link between the scholarly and policymaking communities. Wiarda supplements his incisive analysis on the role of the military in Latin America, shifting U.S. strategic policy, democracy and human rights, and the problems presented by dictators in decline with illuminating case studies of Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, South America, and the Caribbean. The result is a book that will be of interest to both scholars and students of American foreign policy and Latin American studies, as well as policymakers and analysts.

Spanish Central America

Spanish Central America
Author: Murdo J. MacLeod
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 622
Release: 2010-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292788258

The seventeenth century has been characterized as "Latin America's forgotten century." This landmark work, originally published in 1973, attempted to fill the vacuum in knowledge by providing an account of the first great colonial cycle in Spanish Central America. The colonial Spanish society of the sixteenth century was very different from that described in the eighteenth century. What happened in the Latin American colonies between the first conquests, the seizure of long-accumulated Indian wealth, the first silver booms, and the period of modern raw material supply? How did Latin America move from one stage to the other? What were these intermediate economic stages, and what effect did they have on the peoples living in Latin America? These questions continue to resonate in Latin American studies today, making this updated edition of Murdo J. MacLeod's original work more relevant than ever. Colonial Central America was a large, populous, and always strategically significant stretch of land. With the Yucatán, it was home of the Maya, one of the great pre-Columbian cultures. MacLeod examines the long-term process it underwent of relative prosperity, depression, and then recovery, citing comparative sources on Europe to describe Central America's great economic, demographic, and social cycles. With an updated historiographical and bibliographical introduction, this fascinating study should appeal to historians, anthropologists, and all who are interested in the colonial experience of Latin America.