-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A New History of the New World
by Greg GrandinFrom 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.
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.
Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
