America, América
A New History of the New World
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times bestseller • A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, 2025 Kirkus Prize, 2025 Cundill History Prize, and 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker,The New Republic, and Mother Jones
“Greg Grandin's argument is compelling and written with zest. His history is punchy, the array of sources is vast, and the narrative pace is superb.” —Financial Times
“An extraordinarily ambitious book . . . America, América reads at times as the historical equivalent of the great epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez.” —Irish Times
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both
In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how the United States and Latin America were forged 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 world wars, coups, and revolutions of the twentieth century and beyond.
Grandin’s book sheds new light on well-known historical figures such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as lesser-known actors such as Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of cold war political terror. At once comprehensive and accessible, this monumental work of scholarship shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the Western Hemisphere but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The histories of North and South America have been shaped by the continents' relationship to one another, according to this scintillating study. Pulitzer winner Grandin (The End of the Myth) traces the Americas' intercontinental feedback loop from the colonial period—when Spain and Portugal goaded England's imperial ambitions with reports of bloodthirsty conquest—through the revolutionary period, when Spain and England each funded revolts in the other's colonies. As independence was won, the two continents' paths significantly diverged, Grandin writes, when South American statesman Simon Bolivar rejected the "expansionist" U.S. model of democracy as a continuation of Europe's "doctrine of conquest." Bolivar instead called for redistribution of land to Indigenous people—an ultimately half-completed project that Grandin notes nevertheless inspired some politicians in the North to reconceptualize democracy, leading to the yo-yoing between "boots-on-the-ground invasions" and nascent planning for "a system of international law" that characterized U.S. foreign policy by the early 20th century. This tension came to a head, according to Grandin, when Woodrow Wilson backed a democratic socialist faction in the Mexican Revolution, prompting U.S. elites to stage a backlash so severe that U.S. policy toward Latin America has remained antileftist ever since. The Americas, Grandin perceptively concludes, have spent centuries "battling over how to justify dominion," with philosophies of imperialism and democracy flourishing side by side. It's a monumental new view of the New World.
