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America, América: A New History of the New World
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—no less than Latin America’s was indelibly stamped by 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 royalist Spanish America, by sending troops and supplies, helped save the republican American Revolution; 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 State history. This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of slavery and racism, the rise of universal humanism, and the role of social democracy in staving off extremism. 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.
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.
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—no less than Latin America’s was indelibly stamped by 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 royalist Spanish America, by sending troops and supplies, helped save the republican American Revolution; 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 State history. This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of slavery and racism, the rise of universal humanism, and the role of social democracy in staving off extremism. 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.
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.
768 pages, Hardcover
First published April 22, 2025
581 people are currently reading
4981 people want to read
About the author
Greg Grandin
25 books528 followersGreg Grandin is the author of Fordlandia, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A Professor of History at New York University, Grandin has published a number of other award-winning books, including Empire's Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and The Blood of Guatemala.
Toni Morrison called Grandin's new work, The Empire of Necessity, "compelling, brilliant and necessary." Based on years of research on four continents, the book narrates the history of a slave-ship revolt that inspired Herman Melville's other masterpiece, Benito Cereno. Philip Gourevitch describes it as a "rare book in which the drama of the action and the drama of ideas are equally measured, a work of history and of literary reflection that is as urgent as it is timely."
Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times.
He received his BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 1992 and his PhD from Yale in 1999. He has been a guest on Democracy Now!, The Charlie Rose Show, and the Chris Hayes Show.
Toni Morrison called Grandin's new work, The Empire of Necessity, "compelling, brilliant and necessary." Based on years of research on four continents, the book narrates the history of a slave-ship revolt that inspired Herman Melville's other masterpiece, Benito Cereno. Philip Gourevitch describes it as a "rare book in which the drama of the action and the drama of ideas are equally measured, a work of history and of literary reflection that is as urgent as it is timely."
Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times.
He received his BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 1992 and his PhD from Yale in 1999. He has been a guest on Democracy Now!, The Charlie Rose Show, and the Chris Hayes Show.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews
May 15, 2025
America, América is one of the most ambitious historical works I’ve read in years. With meticulous and analytic precision, Greg Grandin reorients our view of the Western Hemisphere by insisting that “America” is not just a nation, but an imperial project shaped through constant entanglement with Latin America. This book doesn’t just chart U.S. interventions abroad; it interrogates the consolidation of American identity as always dependent on domination, extraction, and repression across the hemisphere.
Grandin connects the dots between ideology and economy, between the soaring rhetoric of liberty and the sordid machinery of conquest. His analysis of U.S. imperialism’s extractive logic echoes strongly with Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. Grandin meticulously details how, from the Monroe Doctrine to Cold War coups and into the neoliberal era, the U.S. pursued access to labor, raw materials, and markets - not as aberrations, but as structural imperatives of its rise. In one section, Grandin writes that “expansion and exploitation were not reactions to crisis but constitutive of what the United States is.” This dovetails with Galeano’s analysis: “The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.” Both Grandin and Galeano insist that to understand the present, we must reckon with the centuries of plunder and structural violence that defined hemispheric relations.
Still, Grandin’s regional framing raises important questions. While his emphasis on the Americas is historically and politically generative, it can also obscure the global dynamics that shaped the very structures he describes. This is where Gerald Horne’s body of work, and in particular The Counter-Revolution of 1776, provides a necessary expansion. He writes, “The revolt of the mainland colonies was driven in no small part by the fear that London would strike a blow against the enslavement of Africans.” Horne reminds us that “London had begun to move, ever so haltingly, toward abolition, and the settlers feared their property in human beings was in jeopardy.” The American Revolution was not simply an ideological rupture but a counterrevolutionary defense of slavery and settler capitalism against British abolitionism and imperial restructuring. By decentering Britain and Europe, Grandin’s hemispheric focus can inadvertently mystify the deeper global structures of empire. If Grandin shows how U.S. identity is built through its actions in Latin America, Horne reminds us that this identity was forged in the crucible of global capitalism, colonial rivalry, and racial slavery — centered as much in London and West Africa as in Virginia or Veracruz.
Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History also complicates Grandin’s narrative in productive ways. Grandin often critiques liberal ideology for masking violence, but Losurdo digs deeper, showing that liberalism emerged historically not in opposition to hierarchy, but alongside — and often in service of — systems of domination. “Far from being the ideology of universal freedom,” Losurdo writes, “liberalism was the self-conscious ideology of a historically determined form of class rule.” Grandin gestures toward this contradiction but stops short of fully theorizing it. As a result, his critique sometimes veers toward moral disillusionment rather than material analysis — liberalism as betrayal rather than liberalism as structural logic.
Grandin’s ability to trace ideological continuities, from 19th-century expansionism through Cold War containment and into the current architecture of border militarization—is one of the book’s major achievements. His narrative threads together U.S. interventions abroad and the shaping of domestic political imaginaries, showing how violence directed outward often returns home in transformed, institutionalized forms. His discussion of counterinsurgency tactics developed in Latin America and later adapted for use within U.S. policing and border enforcement is particularly compelling, even if his characterization of the hemisphere's bastions of socialist achievement and anti-imperialist resistance - namely Cuba and Venezuela - are reluctantly acknowledged if not outright ignored.
Nonetheless, America, América is a landmark work. It synthesizes centuries of conflict, hope, and struggle into a coherent narrative that centers Latin America not as a peripheral stage, but as central to the making of U.S. power. Grandin’s writing is elegant, his archival work impeccable, and his political commitments clear. Still, I recommend reading it alongside Horne, Losurdo, and Galeano. Where Grandin shows us the architecture of empire, they illuminate its foundations. Together, they offer a more complete vision of the long and unfinished history of resistance in the Americas.
Grandin connects the dots between ideology and economy, between the soaring rhetoric of liberty and the sordid machinery of conquest. His analysis of U.S. imperialism’s extractive logic echoes strongly with Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. Grandin meticulously details how, from the Monroe Doctrine to Cold War coups and into the neoliberal era, the U.S. pursued access to labor, raw materials, and markets - not as aberrations, but as structural imperatives of its rise. In one section, Grandin writes that “expansion and exploitation were not reactions to crisis but constitutive of what the United States is.” This dovetails with Galeano’s analysis: “The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.” Both Grandin and Galeano insist that to understand the present, we must reckon with the centuries of plunder and structural violence that defined hemispheric relations.
Still, Grandin’s regional framing raises important questions. While his emphasis on the Americas is historically and politically generative, it can also obscure the global dynamics that shaped the very structures he describes. This is where Gerald Horne’s body of work, and in particular The Counter-Revolution of 1776, provides a necessary expansion. He writes, “The revolt of the mainland colonies was driven in no small part by the fear that London would strike a blow against the enslavement of Africans.” Horne reminds us that “London had begun to move, ever so haltingly, toward abolition, and the settlers feared their property in human beings was in jeopardy.” The American Revolution was not simply an ideological rupture but a counterrevolutionary defense of slavery and settler capitalism against British abolitionism and imperial restructuring. By decentering Britain and Europe, Grandin’s hemispheric focus can inadvertently mystify the deeper global structures of empire. If Grandin shows how U.S. identity is built through its actions in Latin America, Horne reminds us that this identity was forged in the crucible of global capitalism, colonial rivalry, and racial slavery — centered as much in London and West Africa as in Virginia or Veracruz.
Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History also complicates Grandin’s narrative in productive ways. Grandin often critiques liberal ideology for masking violence, but Losurdo digs deeper, showing that liberalism emerged historically not in opposition to hierarchy, but alongside — and often in service of — systems of domination. “Far from being the ideology of universal freedom,” Losurdo writes, “liberalism was the self-conscious ideology of a historically determined form of class rule.” Grandin gestures toward this contradiction but stops short of fully theorizing it. As a result, his critique sometimes veers toward moral disillusionment rather than material analysis — liberalism as betrayal rather than liberalism as structural logic.
Grandin’s ability to trace ideological continuities, from 19th-century expansionism through Cold War containment and into the current architecture of border militarization—is one of the book’s major achievements. His narrative threads together U.S. interventions abroad and the shaping of domestic political imaginaries, showing how violence directed outward often returns home in transformed, institutionalized forms. His discussion of counterinsurgency tactics developed in Latin America and later adapted for use within U.S. policing and border enforcement is particularly compelling, even if his characterization of the hemisphere's bastions of socialist achievement and anti-imperialist resistance - namely Cuba and Venezuela - are reluctantly acknowledged if not outright ignored.
Nonetheless, America, América is a landmark work. It synthesizes centuries of conflict, hope, and struggle into a coherent narrative that centers Latin America not as a peripheral stage, but as central to the making of U.S. power. Grandin’s writing is elegant, his archival work impeccable, and his political commitments clear. Still, I recommend reading it alongside Horne, Losurdo, and Galeano. Where Grandin shows us the architecture of empire, they illuminate its foundations. Together, they offer a more complete vision of the long and unfinished history of resistance in the Americas.
May 26, 2025
4.75 EPIC, masterful, academic and yes, occasionally challenging. Heck it's a lot of info and you need to find a reading rhythm and focus BUT, it reveals it's grandeur and impact with each decade detailed, as the passions and policies of the myriad characters are revealed, and intertwine. I learned soooooooo much! The further along I got the more this book makes history sing.
Names that previously only brought to mind hot sauce, or had been associated with simplistic, heroic narratives (FDR), were... deepened.? Monroe Doctrine, yeah I vaguely remembered that but now it holds a place of value in my memory. This is the history book that I wish I had read when I was younger, though I fear given the current political nightmare in the US this book will be viewed as too culturally threatening(?) to good old Merican values and be removed. I truly hope the opposite is the case; that it is read, discussed and debated widely.
A central revelation for me was how unique the core philosophy and goals of policy makers in Latin American nations seemed to have been, and while they have gradually evolved they stayed true to a central theme - a global vision of humanity and cooperation. In contrast to all other previous and existing nations, "Spanish American revolutionaries sought to build a community of nations without colonies or empires, dedicated to an idealistic conception of how the world SHOULD be ordered.". I also better comprehend why this was/is the case based on the contrasting histories of... development on each region.
I've traveled and lived in many countries in South and Central America and read numerous history books, but none have provided such a glorious and impactful overview. I thought I knew about folks like Bartolome de las Casas and the Sandinistas but this book connects all the dots, plus it introduced me to so many incredible individuals, from Jorge Gaitán to Henry Wallace, though I wish there had been more woman included.
This exchange between Mexican President Victoria (I previously only associated name w/ hot sauce) and US Ambassador to Spain Everett, when Victoria refers to North America as "The United States of the North" and tells Everett "We are all Americans.". Victoria is corrected by Everett: "Moreover, Everett was also bothered by Mexico's official name, Estados Unidos Mexicanos. He felt that Estados Unidos, or, in English, the United States, was proprietary to his country, the United States of America. Mexicans were both plagiarists and thieves, "borrowing one half our name" only "to rob us of the other." Wow! Gulf of America anyone?
Much of what I learned from this book is unfortunately still relevant today - the manner which smaller/less powerful countries are marginalized at COP is the same as the treatment received throughout most of the history this book recounts. "Great powers, wrote the London Times, "will not, and can not, in any circumstances" allow small states "to have an equal right with them-selves in laying down the law." To elevate small states to equal status of great ones "would involve the subjugation of the higher civilization by the lower," and "condemn the more advanced peoples to moral and intellectual regression."
This is a hell of a read and despite the dense nature of the subject it's well worth your time. Certainly I shall forget many of the details but I'll long appreciate and recall how I better understand the amazing relationship and influences between the regions.
But... I need to warn you that the epilogue is not for the faint hearted. Mr Grandin had me choked up as a result of his clean, factual and by necessity scathing summation of the current state of the world. While I was reading this book I often reflected on how I hoped that today's current politicians would read and learn the lessons within because despite the often distressing history related and our current state of affairs this is ultimately a positive book - but heck, isn't every great history book a positive book because they offer the opportunity to learn from our choices. I remain a pragmatic optimist and deeply inspired by the authors spectacular history. Thank you Greg!
PS. This is definitely the sort of book that would have benefited immensely with the inclusion of maps that illustrate the shifting borders, along with a timeline that perhaps highlights significant world events for each chapter/section. Of course I love those sorts of items on history books and find them super helpful to reference for context.
Names that previously only brought to mind hot sauce, or had been associated with simplistic, heroic narratives (FDR), were... deepened.? Monroe Doctrine, yeah I vaguely remembered that but now it holds a place of value in my memory. This is the history book that I wish I had read when I was younger, though I fear given the current political nightmare in the US this book will be viewed as too culturally threatening(?) to good old Merican values and be removed. I truly hope the opposite is the case; that it is read, discussed and debated widely.
A central revelation for me was how unique the core philosophy and goals of policy makers in Latin American nations seemed to have been, and while they have gradually evolved they stayed true to a central theme - a global vision of humanity and cooperation. In contrast to all other previous and existing nations, "Spanish American revolutionaries sought to build a community of nations without colonies or empires, dedicated to an idealistic conception of how the world SHOULD be ordered.". I also better comprehend why this was/is the case based on the contrasting histories of... development on each region.
I've traveled and lived in many countries in South and Central America and read numerous history books, but none have provided such a glorious and impactful overview. I thought I knew about folks like Bartolome de las Casas and the Sandinistas but this book connects all the dots, plus it introduced me to so many incredible individuals, from Jorge Gaitán to Henry Wallace, though I wish there had been more woman included.
This exchange between Mexican President Victoria (I previously only associated name w/ hot sauce) and US Ambassador to Spain Everett, when Victoria refers to North America as "The United States of the North" and tells Everett "We are all Americans.". Victoria is corrected by Everett: "Moreover, Everett was also bothered by Mexico's official name, Estados Unidos Mexicanos. He felt that Estados Unidos, or, in English, the United States, was proprietary to his country, the United States of America. Mexicans were both plagiarists and thieves, "borrowing one half our name" only "to rob us of the other." Wow! Gulf of America anyone?
Much of what I learned from this book is unfortunately still relevant today - the manner which smaller/less powerful countries are marginalized at COP is the same as the treatment received throughout most of the history this book recounts. "Great powers, wrote the London Times, "will not, and can not, in any circumstances" allow small states "to have an equal right with them-selves in laying down the law." To elevate small states to equal status of great ones "would involve the subjugation of the higher civilization by the lower," and "condemn the more advanced peoples to moral and intellectual regression."
This is a hell of a read and despite the dense nature of the subject it's well worth your time. Certainly I shall forget many of the details but I'll long appreciate and recall how I better understand the amazing relationship and influences between the regions.
But... I need to warn you that the epilogue is not for the faint hearted. Mr Grandin had me choked up as a result of his clean, factual and by necessity scathing summation of the current state of the world. While I was reading this book I often reflected on how I hoped that today's current politicians would read and learn the lessons within because despite the often distressing history related and our current state of affairs this is ultimately a positive book - but heck, isn't every great history book a positive book because they offer the opportunity to learn from our choices. I remain a pragmatic optimist and deeply inspired by the authors spectacular history. Thank you Greg!
PS. This is definitely the sort of book that would have benefited immensely with the inclusion of maps that illustrate the shifting borders, along with a timeline that perhaps highlights significant world events for each chapter/section. Of course I love those sorts of items on history books and find them super helpful to reference for context.
October 12, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️ — America, America by Greg Grandin
This was an epic history book in every sense of the word. Greg Grandin is an incredible historian who has a gift for exposing the seedy underbelly of the Western Hemisphere — from the exploitation that built empires to the myths that keep them intact.
As a young man, I cut my teeth on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and I was hoping for more of the same spirit here — a sweeping, people-centered narrative that challenges traditional history. In many ways, that’s exactly what I got. Grandin takes a massive swing at retelling the history of the Americas through the lens of inequality, imperial ambition, and moral contradiction.
That said, America, America is a massive undertaking — over 700 pages — and it often feels like it. The book is deeply researched and full of insight, but at times it’s bloated and overly sentimental. I found myself drifting in and out, impressed by Grandin’s intellect but wishing for a bit more narrative focus.
I’m glad I stuck with it, though. Grandin’s perspective is vital and illuminating, even when the prose gets heavy. This is a book I respect more than I loved. For readers who enjoy Zinn-style revisionist people centered history and don’t mind a long, winding journey, it’s worth the commitment.
This was an epic history book in every sense of the word. Greg Grandin is an incredible historian who has a gift for exposing the seedy underbelly of the Western Hemisphere — from the exploitation that built empires to the myths that keep them intact.
As a young man, I cut my teeth on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and I was hoping for more of the same spirit here — a sweeping, people-centered narrative that challenges traditional history. In many ways, that’s exactly what I got. Grandin takes a massive swing at retelling the history of the Americas through the lens of inequality, imperial ambition, and moral contradiction.
That said, America, America is a massive undertaking — over 700 pages — and it often feels like it. The book is deeply researched and full of insight, but at times it’s bloated and overly sentimental. I found myself drifting in and out, impressed by Grandin’s intellect but wishing for a bit more narrative focus.
I’m glad I stuck with it, though. Grandin’s perspective is vital and illuminating, even when the prose gets heavy. This is a book I respect more than I loved. For readers who enjoy Zinn-style revisionist people centered history and don’t mind a long, winding journey, it’s worth the commitment.
August 3, 2025
A really fresh approach to the history of the Americas. Of course, there’s not enough time to cover everything, so the author focuses on colonialism, racism, and diplomacy.
May 24, 2025
While it is illuminating, it is terribly one sided. His héroes are the far left, Allende, petro, the Sandinistas, not the Center left, Frei, the Concertación, Betancourt, Figueres. Fernando Enrique Cardodo. And deendency theory and Prebisch's call for import sundtotution no longer taken seriously ny the center left (social demócrats). Moreover, he praises Latín American cpnstitutions, for their high ideals failing to explain why they are so weak in practise.
April 21, 2025
*Thanks to NetGalley for an eARC of this book*
This book, no this tome, is worth every page. In his usual propulsive writing style, Grandin takes us on a centuries long look at the different ways North America and South America have worked together and how they have moved ideologically apart.
From the conquest to the 2024 electoral results, there is little of hemispheric history that Grandin does not evaluate. While this is a long work, it is a cohesive examination of this geographic area concerning the idea of what it means when we say 'America' and the ways the Americas have and have not changed since their founding.
Another excellent work by Grandin with insightful ideas and a South American focus that is often missed in the analysis of what 'America' was, is, and can be.
This book, no this tome, is worth every page. In his usual propulsive writing style, Grandin takes us on a centuries long look at the different ways North America and South America have worked together and how they have moved ideologically apart.
From the conquest to the 2024 electoral results, there is little of hemispheric history that Grandin does not evaluate. While this is a long work, it is a cohesive examination of this geographic area concerning the idea of what it means when we say 'America' and the ways the Americas have and have not changed since their founding.
Another excellent work by Grandin with insightful ideas and a South American focus that is often missed in the analysis of what 'America' was, is, and can be.
June 22, 2025
I still remember being chastised in Spain when I referred to myself as an American instead of a North American. The memory remained with me when Pope Leo XII was referred to as the first American pope (what about the Argentinian Francis?). Along with thinking of ourselves as "America", present-day US attention is largely focused across the oceans towards Europe and Asia. With a few exceptions (e.g. Mexican-American war, Panama Canal), the US history we are taught in school drops our neighbors to the south once Columbus, Cortez and Pizzaro have left the scene.
Greg Grandin's America, América filled many gaps in my knowledge about our neighbors to the south and the inextricable links between the US and Latin America. Grandin's big thesis is that Latin America has been as big a source of ideas regarding revolution, governance, treatment of indigenous, emancipation, racial equality and the relations between nations as has the US. The early Spanish debates regarding the indigenous were particularly interesting.
It seems that US relations with Latin America have always involved a battle between the uplifters and the exploiters, with the exploiters usually winning out. Major exceptions were the Wilson and FDR administrations when our southern neighbors were given freer reign to develop policies that went against powerful moneyed interests of the US. While the advocates of these policies seemed to be true altruists, it also appears they were only able to win out because of the US need for support in two world wars.
The postwar era was particularly dark as brutal right-wing regimes were allowed free reign to suppress the entire left including social Democrats in the name of anti-Communism. Grandin pays particular attention to Colombia; it makes me want to read more Marquez now that I have some context. The role of the Catholic Church here is also interesting, with priests on the ground favoring liberation theology despite a hostile hierarchy. John Paul II and Benedict fiercely opposed these priests, but Francis (who of course is Argentinian) showed more sympathy. In some sense, Leo XIV's service to the poor in Peru makes him the second Latin American pope; it will be interesting to see how this Pope, who in some sense represents both America and América, balances religion and social justice.
This is definitely a noteworthy read that will significantly broaden most US reader's knowledge of our hemisphere. Thanks to Penguin Press and NetGalley for providing a pre-release ebook for early review.
Greg Grandin's America, América filled many gaps in my knowledge about our neighbors to the south and the inextricable links between the US and Latin America. Grandin's big thesis is that Latin America has been as big a source of ideas regarding revolution, governance, treatment of indigenous, emancipation, racial equality and the relations between nations as has the US. The early Spanish debates regarding the indigenous were particularly interesting.
It seems that US relations with Latin America have always involved a battle between the uplifters and the exploiters, with the exploiters usually winning out. Major exceptions were the Wilson and FDR administrations when our southern neighbors were given freer reign to develop policies that went against powerful moneyed interests of the US. While the advocates of these policies seemed to be true altruists, it also appears they were only able to win out because of the US need for support in two world wars.
The postwar era was particularly dark as brutal right-wing regimes were allowed free reign to suppress the entire left including social Democrats in the name of anti-Communism. Grandin pays particular attention to Colombia; it makes me want to read more Marquez now that I have some context. The role of the Catholic Church here is also interesting, with priests on the ground favoring liberation theology despite a hostile hierarchy. John Paul II and Benedict fiercely opposed these priests, but Francis (who of course is Argentinian) showed more sympathy. In some sense, Leo XIV's service to the poor in Peru makes him the second Latin American pope; it will be interesting to see how this Pope, who in some sense represents both America and América, balances religion and social justice.
This is definitely a noteworthy read that will significantly broaden most US reader's knowledge of our hemisphere. Thanks to Penguin Press and NetGalley for providing a pre-release ebook for early review.
June 6, 2025
I needed this book in my life.
It feels like I’ve waited years for someone to finally put into one single work a non academic but well-researched account of how Latin America’s history has always been shaped by global events, and vice versa. This idea has always been floating in my head, but I had never found it written out in such a clear, thoughtful way.
This topic has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. For example, when I was a teenager reading Jane Austen, I would constantly pause and look up what was happening in Colombia during the same time period, even if our political affairs had absolutely nothing to do with Austen’s heroines. I’ve always been interested on how dots connect across histories, and Grandin does exactly that here, but with actual depth, context, and clarity.
I consider myself someone with solid knowledge of Colombian history, decent knowledge of Latin American history, and a good grasp of Western history. Still, this book taught me so so much. The amount of research that must have gone into it is wild. It's ambitious, dense, layered, and still manages to be a page-turner.
If you’re a fan of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, you’ll love this. It reads like a follow-up and deep dive into the American, Colombian, and Mexican revolutions. Even better, Grandin traces the long-term consequences of these events into the modern era.
One thing I particularly appreciated was the book’s nuanced take on the Catholic Church. Too often, the Church’s role in Latin American history is portrayed as uniformly oppressive, ultra-conservative, and allied with the right wing. While that’s certainly part of the story, Grandin also highlights the Church’s more progressive legacy: how it provided philosophical and moral justifications for independence movements, the emancipation of enslaved people, and the defense of Indigenous populations. In more recent history, the Church has even played a key role in resisting fascism. It’s not that the Catholic Church has been all good, but it hasn’t been all bad either.
My favorite part was the final section, covering recent history from the 1940s and until the 80s. As a kid, I studied the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán I'm school. As an adult, I watched a couple of documentaries on the topic. And yet I never realized the international importance of that moment. It was fascinating.
I thought about listing pros and cons, but honestly, there are too many pros to count. The entire book is a “pro” if you’re into this kind of thing as much as I am.
That said, here are a few points that might be considered “cons” depending on the reader, but not for me:
- The author clearly has an opinion, and his opinion shines through the words. If you’re uncomfortable with critiques of the United States, this might not be your book.
- The focus is uneven. The early chapters about independence are heavily centered on Simón Bolívar, with very little mention of San Martín or other libertadores. And the final part is strongly focused on Colombia. Personally, I loved that, since Colombia is the country I care most about, but other readers might find it unbalanced.
- The book may feel like it overstates Latin America’s role in world affairs, particularly in shaping the UN or global decolonization. Depending on your worldview, this could either feel inspiring or like a stretch.
- Also: this book is very niche. I can only think of one person I’d recommend it to. It’s for someone who is equally interested in Latin American history, world history, and who enjoys reading long books in English (as far as I know, there’s no Spanish translation yet).
The only true “con” for me:
- Puerto Rico is nearly absent. It gets just a couple of brief mentions. I understand this book is already incredibly ambitious and covering every country in depth would be impossible. But if you’re going to write about U.S.–Latin America relations, you can’t ignore Puerto Rico, which is still a U.S. colony to this day. It’s a glaring omission.
I definitely plan to reread America América in the not-too-distant future and keep an eye for the author's future works.
It feels like I’ve waited years for someone to finally put into one single work a non academic but well-researched account of how Latin America’s history has always been shaped by global events, and vice versa. This idea has always been floating in my head, but I had never found it written out in such a clear, thoughtful way.
This topic has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. For example, when I was a teenager reading Jane Austen, I would constantly pause and look up what was happening in Colombia during the same time period, even if our political affairs had absolutely nothing to do with Austen’s heroines. I’ve always been interested on how dots connect across histories, and Grandin does exactly that here, but with actual depth, context, and clarity.
I consider myself someone with solid knowledge of Colombian history, decent knowledge of Latin American history, and a good grasp of Western history. Still, this book taught me so so much. The amount of research that must have gone into it is wild. It's ambitious, dense, layered, and still manages to be a page-turner.
If you’re a fan of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, you’ll love this. It reads like a follow-up and deep dive into the American, Colombian, and Mexican revolutions. Even better, Grandin traces the long-term consequences of these events into the modern era.
One thing I particularly appreciated was the book’s nuanced take on the Catholic Church. Too often, the Church’s role in Latin American history is portrayed as uniformly oppressive, ultra-conservative, and allied with the right wing. While that’s certainly part of the story, Grandin also highlights the Church’s more progressive legacy: how it provided philosophical and moral justifications for independence movements, the emancipation of enslaved people, and the defense of Indigenous populations. In more recent history, the Church has even played a key role in resisting fascism. It’s not that the Catholic Church has been all good, but it hasn’t been all bad either.
My favorite part was the final section, covering recent history from the 1940s and until the 80s. As a kid, I studied the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán I'm school. As an adult, I watched a couple of documentaries on the topic. And yet I never realized the international importance of that moment. It was fascinating.
I thought about listing pros and cons, but honestly, there are too many pros to count. The entire book is a “pro” if you’re into this kind of thing as much as I am.
That said, here are a few points that might be considered “cons” depending on the reader, but not for me:
- The author clearly has an opinion, and his opinion shines through the words. If you’re uncomfortable with critiques of the United States, this might not be your book.
- The focus is uneven. The early chapters about independence are heavily centered on Simón Bolívar, with very little mention of San Martín or other libertadores. And the final part is strongly focused on Colombia. Personally, I loved that, since Colombia is the country I care most about, but other readers might find it unbalanced.
- The book may feel like it overstates Latin America’s role in world affairs, particularly in shaping the UN or global decolonization. Depending on your worldview, this could either feel inspiring or like a stretch.
- Also: this book is very niche. I can only think of one person I’d recommend it to. It’s for someone who is equally interested in Latin American history, world history, and who enjoys reading long books in English (as far as I know, there’s no Spanish translation yet).
The only true “con” for me:
- Puerto Rico is nearly absent. It gets just a couple of brief mentions. I understand this book is already incredibly ambitious and covering every country in depth would be impossible. But if you’re going to write about U.S.–Latin America relations, you can’t ignore Puerto Rico, which is still a U.S. colony to this day. It’s a glaring omission.
I definitely plan to reread America América in the not-too-distant future and keep an eye for the author's future works.
June 28, 2025
Amazingly new perspective of the history of both parts of the continent evolving since the 15th century. I gained so much new knowledge, especially about the deeply profound impact progressive (as in social democratic) ideas and philosophy Latin America had to shape international law.
More familiar is the consistently destructive influence US elites always had to trade economic power over democracy. Wealth extraction for North America has shaped everything for literally centuries.
The book is not an easy read and takes real effort but the reward is a real holistic view of 500 years of history.
More familiar is the consistently destructive influence US elites always had to trade economic power over democracy. Wealth extraction for North America has shaped everything for literally centuries.
The book is not an easy read and takes real effort but the reward is a real holistic view of 500 years of history.
October 30, 2025
This is quite the book. It traces the religious and political ideas that fought for dominance as Europe (Spain at first) encountered the new world and tried to figure out how to deal with this alien place: America. It covers the Spanish conquistadors and colonizers and all their atrocities as well as the priests (mostly) who fought for treating the natives like humans rather than subhuman beings who could be exploited, killed, and, literally, worked to death.
I as thinking that the tale of England’s interactions with the new world would be less atrocious, but I was wrong. The saddest part is how those men in power who aimed at committing the atrocities figured they’d wait and see whether there would be widespread dissent as there was with the Spanish, but there wasn’t.
It’s a unique book as so many of the aspects of US and World (as it is taught in the US) History take a back seat to the interactions between the US and our American neighbors. It’s really fascinating. The political intrigues can drag, but, overall, a really fascinating book that explains how and why much of the Western hemisphere has gotten ignored in the US since WWII, and how, after FDR, we turned from being good neighbors, to overthrowing democracy after democracy (not that we didn’t before WWII, because really, FDR was probably the brightest spot in our relationship with Central and South American countries) and enabling, if not outright training, despots and their regimes of terror.
Sad, but eye-opening, reading.
I as thinking that the tale of England’s interactions with the new world would be less atrocious, but I was wrong. The saddest part is how those men in power who aimed at committing the atrocities figured they’d wait and see whether there would be widespread dissent as there was with the Spanish, but there wasn’t.
It’s a unique book as so many of the aspects of US and World (as it is taught in the US) History take a back seat to the interactions between the US and our American neighbors. It’s really fascinating. The political intrigues can drag, but, overall, a really fascinating book that explains how and why much of the Western hemisphere has gotten ignored in the US since WWII, and how, after FDR, we turned from being good neighbors, to overthrowing democracy after democracy (not that we didn’t before WWII, because really, FDR was probably the brightest spot in our relationship with Central and South American countries) and enabling, if not outright training, despots and their regimes of terror.
Sad, but eye-opening, reading.
July 6, 2025
A very thorough and informative retelling of the discovery and conquest of both Americas that compares and contrasts the Spanish and English occupation. I learned much in Grandin's retelling especially that the Spanish for all their brutality knew what they were doing was wrong- thanks to Las Casas. The British though with all their "enlightened" philosophy saw nothing wrong with their exploitation of indigenous land and people. It was their duty and right to do so.
Latin America was a trailblazer in sovereignty and international law that created a blueprint for the League of Nations and the United Nations. Lots to absorb in this tome for the ages. Grandin takes it all the way to the present. I don't think he left a thing out. I am thinking of buying a copy now. It's on a par with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Eye opening.
Latin America was a trailblazer in sovereignty and international law that created a blueprint for the League of Nations and the United Nations. Lots to absorb in this tome for the ages. Grandin takes it all the way to the present. I don't think he left a thing out. I am thinking of buying a copy now. It's on a par with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Eye opening.
October 11, 2025
Wonderful. Grandin never disappoints, but I especially love that he’s been let loose to do “big” history like this and his last book. Can’t believe, per the afterword, that he originally wanted to start the book with the Latin American revolutions because I think the best part is the beginning where he compares the Spanish conquest to English settlement of North America. I didn’t know that much about Bartoleme de Las Casas but now I’m convinced he’s one of the unsung heroes of history. Protestantism was a huge mistake—we should have never let people read and interpret the Bible for themselves! I also loved learning more about liberation theology. One of the better books I’ve read in a while!!
October 19, 2025
Ambitious and groundbreaking look at United States history through Latin America's eyes, covering the Spanish conquest to the present day. Scholarly but accessible. Even as a Latin American student, I learned a great deal from Grandin's writing. A thorough defense of Social liberalism, liberal democracy, and international cooperation over authoritarian nationalism...
July 9, 2025
I can't believe I added 100 Years of Solitude to my To Read at the start of a chapter and then had the ending spoiled by the end of the chapter!
But for real, an amazingly detailed walkthrough of the differences, similarities, and interactions between America and América.
But for real, an amazingly detailed walkthrough of the differences, similarities, and interactions between America and América.
May 2, 2025
a little bit of a slow burn but as it gets into the 19th/20th and 21st centuries it really cooks and could be an important book for people trying to understand the political climate today
better than "open viens of Latin American" as Grandin I think does an excellent job in celebrating Latin America's successful Leftist movement as opposed to just treating it like a victim (which I think open viens kind of does)
I found the early anti Imperialism debates within the 16th century catholic church and the work of Bartholome Las cassas as well as the liberation theologians of the 20th century to be particularly interesting
better than "open viens of Latin American" as Grandin I think does an excellent job in celebrating Latin America's successful Leftist movement as opposed to just treating it like a victim (which I think open viens kind of does)
I found the early anti Imperialism debates within the 16th century catholic church and the work of Bartholome Las cassas as well as the liberation theologians of the 20th century to be particularly interesting
October 29, 2025
Perhaps the definitive review has already been written for this book at American Ideologies - Dissent Magazine, but I still have a lot I want to say. While there’s a lot of very interesting material in the book, and I learned a few things from it, I strongly disagree with its middle-class leftist, or Woke politics, which sound very radical when dealing with events in the past, but which are actually very superficial. Some have given the label “presentism” to those who judge the past by what they view as today’s standards. Morality is not some unchanging thing as philosophical idealists believe. It changes, as everything does. I view that this approach is largely due to the widespread influence of A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present by Howard Zinn, an excellent writer who I characterized as an anarcho-liberal.
I agree that Las Casas is a figure of great importance, but I like the Marxist approach, so well-articulated by Armando Hart, Cuba’s former Minister of Education, and later of Culture, much of which appears in Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History. He explains why both Las Casas AND Columbus are heroes. But Grandin’s views on Las Casas are part of his myth-filled ideas about Latin America which take up a lot of room in the book. Much of the rest is idealist myths about the United States.
Contrary to what Grandin thinks, the US had two genuine revolutions, see America's Revolutionary Heritage and The Civil War in the United States. Other important Marxist works toward understanding US history include Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55, Out Now: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War, and Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. I also recommend the three-volume America in the King Years by Taylor Branch, despite its King-centric views.
One of the words Grandin is fond of is “imperialism.” The word has a long history, but it is only V.I. Lenin who gave it a modern, scientific meaning, which is monopoly capital, a stage of capitalism, NOT a policy. See Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Grandin likes Woodrow Wilson, who supported the first inter-imperialist slaughter (estimate 20 million dead), and his view of self-determination did not include colonial possessions. I don’t really care what he thought, even if there was some way I could know. The war, on both sides was just a war to make the rich richer.
FDR, secular saint of Stalinists and liberals was another imperialist. As befits an idealist, Grandin thinks their words, and what he would like to believe were their thoughts mean more than their actions. Roosevelt needed Latin America on his side as he prepared for a massive slaughter which was almost inevitable based on the terms of the Versailles Treaty, which bled Germany dry.
The German workers rose up against the war, as the Russian workers had, but the Social Democrats prevented revolution from going further than the overthrow of the kaiser and arranged for the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Although the Communist International had approved the perfect tool for fighting fascism—the united front (not to be confused with the later Stalinist policy of the popular front), the Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration in the Soviet Union (see The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky) resulted in a view that the Social Democrats represented a form of fascism, even more dangerous than Hitler’s variety. I suggest people read the Trotsky compilation, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, although they might have an easier time with Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business. Everything both the Stalinists and Social Democrats did, aided the rise of Nazism. Liberals always say that Nazism came to power peacefully, but this only means that they had no need for violence against the bourgeois state—they used massive violence against the Jews and the huge organizations of the working class, which included unions, cooperatives, political parties, athletic clubs, and singing groups.
Anti-Semitism is the only form of racism which can pass itself off as a form of socialism—for years it was called “the socialism of fools.” A lot of fools today who believe they’re still socialists are in fact moving closer to fascism. There is no difference between “left-wing” Jew-hatred and the “right-wing” variety—they’re both based on the same myths and conspiracy theories. What we call Nazis were the National Socialist German Workers Party, although they had few working-class members. Their ranks were filled with the lumpen proletariat (long time out of work, demoralized former workers involved in criminal activity), but primarily layers of the middle class—small bourgeoisie—with a frenzied fear of being forced down into the working class.
If Roosevelt had been interested in fighting fascism, he could have started at home with the Ku Klux Klan, and many similar groups. Sorry, the US didn’t go to war to defeat fascism. Not with a Jim Crow army, Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, a no-strike pledge forced on the unions, and the leaders of the most serious opposition to the war within the labor movement in prison—Leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minneapolis Teamsters. The US refused to bomb the rail lines leading to the death camps and cut Jewish immigration to the bone. They left the fascist dictator of Spain—Franco—in power.
The Socialist Workers Party was on the side of the Soviet Union in the war, despite having no confidence in the Stalinist leadership. It was also on the side of all the colonial people against their oppressors. SWP leader James P. Cannon had it right when he said “It is absolutely true that Hitler wants to dominate the world, but it is equally true that the ruling group of American capitalists has the same idea. We’re not in favor of either of them.” The SWP did not oppose conscription, much less call for sabotage (see Teamster Bureaucracy and Socialism on Trial: Testimony at Minneapolis Sedition Trial.
First, it was an inter-imperialist slaughter—the second in a quarter century waged over the redivision and plunder of the world. The victory in that war by Washington, London, and their allies over Berlin, Tokyo, and Rome did nothing to weaken, let alone eliminate, the worldwide system of imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation, which is the social root of the march toward depression, fascism, and war that has continued to confront humanity to this day. U.S. finance capital used the war to consolidate its position, economically and militarily, as the world’s mightiest (and, I should add, final) dominant imperialist power.
The US fought to dominate the world just as Hitler did. They were more successful against both their “allies” and enemies. But they used utter brutality—two nuclear weapons dropped on Japan, the perhaps even worse firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden, to show the German working class—among the first victims of Nazism-- that this war was not for their benefit.
As I explained, imperialism is not a policy--it is a stage of capitalism. Washington—the self-declared “indispensable nation.” But to Grandin it’s just a question of who the leaders are, and what the bourgeoisie economists say. But he himself admits that “neoliberalism” is nothing new, “In truth, this program was not all that different from the one the U.S. business lobby wanted Truman to press on Latin America in 1948."
As for today, Grandin’s epilogue is only correct on one thing—the threat of war—world war in fact—but he’s totally wrong about where it’s coming from. He says “Washington funds and arms dangerous, potentially escalatory wars, in Ukraine and Gaza, in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and the Gulf of Aden, wherever. Yet politicians are clueless about what comes after the guns go silent, or if they ever will go silent.”
Ukraine is fighting a totally defensive war, to prevent Putin from bringing back the tsarist “prison house of nations.” And the main reason they’re able to keep fighting isn’t the high-tech weapons, but the antiwar sentiments of the working class of Russia, especially that of oppressed nationalities, as well as an important layer of intellectuals. This is despite the ferocious repression they face.
And Israel is this time fighting a defensive war against Hamas, who in their own words want to complete the Holocaust. They have nothing to do with the national aspirations of the Palestian people. See The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch. The idea that what Israel is doing is “genocidal” is absurd. People committing genocide don’t warn the population to get out of the line of fire or help feed them. Every war the US has fought has been more “genocidal” than this war in Gaza. Yes, there are racists in high (and low) places in Israel, just like in the US. It’s a capitalist government that I don’t support, but without its survival there will be another Holocaust.
Grandin says that “And so far, the left has held the authoritarian right at bay as it always has, by putting forth a coherent social-democratic agenda.” This is nonsense. Whatever Grandin likes he calls social-democratic; it has no scientific or class content. While he considers Cuba to be authoritarian, there is little as authoritarian as the Stalinist-influenced Woke left. And little as prone to violence. They force people to accept their view that all whites are racist, and they are dismantling the rights women have won, by their “gender politics” which make it OK for males to invade women’s locker rooms and compete in sports against them. Have they never heard of sexual dimorphism? You cannot change the sex of a human being—this is not science—it’s sheer idealism—the opposite of science. Very young women, frequently with no sexual experience, are being brow-beaten to “change gender,” when they have same-sex attraction or reject “girl's toys.” (Why are toys still labeled as male or female? Because the liberation of women still has a long way to go after centuries of being slaves to fathers and then husbands). This is a huge scandal! And it represents totally reactionary politics.
To end with an optimistic book to read: The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward.
Selected reading on Latin America/the Caribbean and the United States
Bolivia
The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara
Fertile Ground: Che Guevara and Bolivia, A First-Hand Account by Rodolfo Saldaña
Pombo: A Man of Che’s guerrilla: With Che Guevara in Bolivia, 1966–68
Colombia
Revolution and the Road to Peace in Colombia: Lessons from the CubanvRevolution
Chile
On Chile
Cuba
Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution: A Marxist Appreciation
The First and Second Declarations of Havana
Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas
October 1962: The 'Missile' Crisis as Seen from Cuba
To Speak the Truth: Why Washington's 'cold War' Against Cuba Doesn't End
Grenada
Maurice Bishop Speaks: The Grenada Revolution and Its Overthrow, 1979-83
New International no 6: The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop
Nicaragua
The Rise and Fall of the Nicaraguan Revolution (New International Series) by Mary-Alice Waters
Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution
Peru
Peru's 'Shining Path': Evolution of a Stalinist Sect
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico: Independence Is a Necessity
I agree that Las Casas is a figure of great importance, but I like the Marxist approach, so well-articulated by Armando Hart, Cuba’s former Minister of Education, and later of Culture, much of which appears in Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History. He explains why both Las Casas AND Columbus are heroes. But Grandin’s views on Las Casas are part of his myth-filled ideas about Latin America which take up a lot of room in the book. Much of the rest is idealist myths about the United States.
Contrary to what Grandin thinks, the US had two genuine revolutions, see America's Revolutionary Heritage and The Civil War in the United States. Other important Marxist works toward understanding US history include Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55, Out Now: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War, and Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. I also recommend the three-volume America in the King Years by Taylor Branch, despite its King-centric views.
One of the words Grandin is fond of is “imperialism.” The word has a long history, but it is only V.I. Lenin who gave it a modern, scientific meaning, which is monopoly capital, a stage of capitalism, NOT a policy. See Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Grandin likes Woodrow Wilson, who supported the first inter-imperialist slaughter (estimate 20 million dead), and his view of self-determination did not include colonial possessions. I don’t really care what he thought, even if there was some way I could know. The war, on both sides was just a war to make the rich richer.
FDR, secular saint of Stalinists and liberals was another imperialist. As befits an idealist, Grandin thinks their words, and what he would like to believe were their thoughts mean more than their actions. Roosevelt needed Latin America on his side as he prepared for a massive slaughter which was almost inevitable based on the terms of the Versailles Treaty, which bled Germany dry.
The German workers rose up against the war, as the Russian workers had, but the Social Democrats prevented revolution from going further than the overthrow of the kaiser and arranged for the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Although the Communist International had approved the perfect tool for fighting fascism—the united front (not to be confused with the later Stalinist policy of the popular front), the Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration in the Soviet Union (see The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky) resulted in a view that the Social Democrats represented a form of fascism, even more dangerous than Hitler’s variety. I suggest people read the Trotsky compilation, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, although they might have an easier time with Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business. Everything both the Stalinists and Social Democrats did, aided the rise of Nazism. Liberals always say that Nazism came to power peacefully, but this only means that they had no need for violence against the bourgeois state—they used massive violence against the Jews and the huge organizations of the working class, which included unions, cooperatives, political parties, athletic clubs, and singing groups.
Anti-Semitism is the only form of racism which can pass itself off as a form of socialism—for years it was called “the socialism of fools.” A lot of fools today who believe they’re still socialists are in fact moving closer to fascism. There is no difference between “left-wing” Jew-hatred and the “right-wing” variety—they’re both based on the same myths and conspiracy theories. What we call Nazis were the National Socialist German Workers Party, although they had few working-class members. Their ranks were filled with the lumpen proletariat (long time out of work, demoralized former workers involved in criminal activity), but primarily layers of the middle class—small bourgeoisie—with a frenzied fear of being forced down into the working class.
If Roosevelt had been interested in fighting fascism, he could have started at home with the Ku Klux Klan, and many similar groups. Sorry, the US didn’t go to war to defeat fascism. Not with a Jim Crow army, Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, a no-strike pledge forced on the unions, and the leaders of the most serious opposition to the war within the labor movement in prison—Leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minneapolis Teamsters. The US refused to bomb the rail lines leading to the death camps and cut Jewish immigration to the bone. They left the fascist dictator of Spain—Franco—in power.
The Socialist Workers Party was on the side of the Soviet Union in the war, despite having no confidence in the Stalinist leadership. It was also on the side of all the colonial people against their oppressors. SWP leader James P. Cannon had it right when he said “It is absolutely true that Hitler wants to dominate the world, but it is equally true that the ruling group of American capitalists has the same idea. We’re not in favor of either of them.” The SWP did not oppose conscription, much less call for sabotage (see Teamster Bureaucracy and Socialism on Trial: Testimony at Minneapolis Sedition Trial.
First, it was an inter-imperialist slaughter—the second in a quarter century waged over the redivision and plunder of the world. The victory in that war by Washington, London, and their allies over Berlin, Tokyo, and Rome did nothing to weaken, let alone eliminate, the worldwide system of imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation, which is the social root of the march toward depression, fascism, and war that has continued to confront humanity to this day. U.S. finance capital used the war to consolidate its position, economically and militarily, as the world’s mightiest (and, I should add, final) dominant imperialist power.
The US fought to dominate the world just as Hitler did. They were more successful against both their “allies” and enemies. But they used utter brutality—two nuclear weapons dropped on Japan, the perhaps even worse firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden, to show the German working class—among the first victims of Nazism-- that this war was not for their benefit.
As I explained, imperialism is not a policy--it is a stage of capitalism. Washington—the self-declared “indispensable nation.” But to Grandin it’s just a question of who the leaders are, and what the bourgeoisie economists say. But he himself admits that “neoliberalism” is nothing new, “In truth, this program was not all that different from the one the U.S. business lobby wanted Truman to press on Latin America in 1948."
As for today, Grandin’s epilogue is only correct on one thing—the threat of war—world war in fact—but he’s totally wrong about where it’s coming from. He says “Washington funds and arms dangerous, potentially escalatory wars, in Ukraine and Gaza, in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and the Gulf of Aden, wherever. Yet politicians are clueless about what comes after the guns go silent, or if they ever will go silent.”
Ukraine is fighting a totally defensive war, to prevent Putin from bringing back the tsarist “prison house of nations.” And the main reason they’re able to keep fighting isn’t the high-tech weapons, but the antiwar sentiments of the working class of Russia, especially that of oppressed nationalities, as well as an important layer of intellectuals. This is despite the ferocious repression they face.
And Israel is this time fighting a defensive war against Hamas, who in their own words want to complete the Holocaust. They have nothing to do with the national aspirations of the Palestian people. See The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch. The idea that what Israel is doing is “genocidal” is absurd. People committing genocide don’t warn the population to get out of the line of fire or help feed them. Every war the US has fought has been more “genocidal” than this war in Gaza. Yes, there are racists in high (and low) places in Israel, just like in the US. It’s a capitalist government that I don’t support, but without its survival there will be another Holocaust.
Grandin says that “And so far, the left has held the authoritarian right at bay as it always has, by putting forth a coherent social-democratic agenda.” This is nonsense. Whatever Grandin likes he calls social-democratic; it has no scientific or class content. While he considers Cuba to be authoritarian, there is little as authoritarian as the Stalinist-influenced Woke left. And little as prone to violence. They force people to accept their view that all whites are racist, and they are dismantling the rights women have won, by their “gender politics” which make it OK for males to invade women’s locker rooms and compete in sports against them. Have they never heard of sexual dimorphism? You cannot change the sex of a human being—this is not science—it’s sheer idealism—the opposite of science. Very young women, frequently with no sexual experience, are being brow-beaten to “change gender,” when they have same-sex attraction or reject “girl's toys.” (Why are toys still labeled as male or female? Because the liberation of women still has a long way to go after centuries of being slaves to fathers and then husbands). This is a huge scandal! And it represents totally reactionary politics.
To end with an optimistic book to read: The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward.
Selected reading on Latin America/the Caribbean and the United States
Bolivia
The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara
Fertile Ground: Che Guevara and Bolivia, A First-Hand Account by Rodolfo Saldaña
Pombo: A Man of Che’s guerrilla: With Che Guevara in Bolivia, 1966–68
Colombia
Revolution and the Road to Peace in Colombia: Lessons from the CubanvRevolution
Chile
On Chile
Cuba
Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution: A Marxist Appreciation
The First and Second Declarations of Havana
Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas
October 1962: The 'Missile' Crisis as Seen from Cuba
To Speak the Truth: Why Washington's 'cold War' Against Cuba Doesn't End
Grenada
Maurice Bishop Speaks: The Grenada Revolution and Its Overthrow, 1979-83
New International no 6: The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop
Nicaragua
The Rise and Fall of the Nicaraguan Revolution (New International Series) by Mary-Alice Waters
Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution
Peru
Peru's 'Shining Path': Evolution of a Stalinist Sect
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico: Independence Is a Necessity
May 21, 2025
4.5/5. A phenomenal account of the Americas. Really great breakdown of the links between the US and Latin America surrounding the New Deal and establishment of the post WWII settlement.
August 26, 2025
3.5
Shewwww boy, this took me a long time to read, it is simply massive. Very very interesting but massive. I was particularly interested after reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity and its idea of schismogenesis (how societies define themselves as separate from other societies) in the New World.
I think Grandin explores this idea (or something close to it) well. His central thesis — that the USA and Latin America owe as much if not more of their development to each other rather than their colonizers — I think is proven true. Then we have their complicated relationships since independence.
Unfortunately he seems to explore everything, sometimes in great depth, sometimes he acknowledges other, more comprehensive books have been written about this topic.
I can understand his dilemma, where do you begin to explain the history of two continents and 10-12 countries? Unfortunately I think this would have been better served by either being two volumes or starting as he intended, with the Monroe Doctrine. The first two thirds(!) of this is very in-depth and very sloggy, but it picks up speed in the modern era — exactly when Grandin starts to elide.
I did learn about many characters that were of course never explored in my education: especially Bartolomé de las Casas, Bolívar and Jorge Gaitán — and their rises and falls in influence and optimism.I also was extremely interested in the dashed dreams of New Deal-like reforms in Latin America, I didn’t realize the international reactionary movement once FDR exited the scene. But those characters and concepts are the bookends; the massive page count in between is hard to swallow.
Shewwww boy, this took me a long time to read, it is simply massive. Very very interesting but massive. I was particularly interested after reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity and its idea of schismogenesis (how societies define themselves as separate from other societies) in the New World.
I think Grandin explores this idea (or something close to it) well. His central thesis — that the USA and Latin America owe as much if not more of their development to each other rather than their colonizers — I think is proven true. Then we have their complicated relationships since independence.
Unfortunately he seems to explore everything, sometimes in great depth, sometimes he acknowledges other, more comprehensive books have been written about this topic.
I can understand his dilemma, where do you begin to explain the history of two continents and 10-12 countries? Unfortunately I think this would have been better served by either being two volumes or starting as he intended, with the Monroe Doctrine. The first two thirds(!) of this is very in-depth and very sloggy, but it picks up speed in the modern era — exactly when Grandin starts to elide.
I did learn about many characters that were of course never explored in my education: especially Bartolomé de las Casas, Bolívar and Jorge Gaitán — and their rises and falls in influence and optimism.I also was extremely interested in the dashed dreams of New Deal-like reforms in Latin America, I didn’t realize the international reactionary movement once FDR exited the scene. But those characters and concepts are the bookends; the massive page count in between is hard to swallow.
Read
June 2, 2025shaped the United States. America, América may be his most ambitious effort yet. As Grandin explains, he planned to start with the Monroe Doctrine, but his editor convinced him to begin three centuries earlier with the Spanish Conquest. As a result, America, América is really two books, one nested inside the other.
The ‘inner book’ offers a well-substantiated case for the Latin American origins of an international order rooted in respect for borders and rejection of the right of conquest. Why were these origins Latin American? As Grandin explains, the US was born expansionist, its unrelenting push westward driven by the confluence of geopolitics, cotton capitalism, the opportunities of the frontier, and white supremacy. The republics of Spanish America, in contrast, emerged from their independence wars as a multi-nation community on a continent with fuzzy but mostly settled borders, whose indigenous peoples were treated as part of the national community rather than foreign nations with which one signs and then breaks treaties. Those republics also faced the theoretical threat of recolonisation by Europe and the not-theoretical threat of US annexation. It made sense that they would pioneer the idea of a global order guided by principles they called ‘American International Law’, seeking to constrain great-power ambition and protect the integrity of all nations as sovereign equals.
Read the rest of the review of https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
David S. Parker is Professor of History at Queen’s University, Canada.
The ‘inner book’ offers a well-substantiated case for the Latin American origins of an international order rooted in respect for borders and rejection of the right of conquest. Why were these origins Latin American? As Grandin explains, the US was born expansionist, its unrelenting push westward driven by the confluence of geopolitics, cotton capitalism, the opportunities of the frontier, and white supremacy. The republics of Spanish America, in contrast, emerged from their independence wars as a multi-nation community on a continent with fuzzy but mostly settled borders, whose indigenous peoples were treated as part of the national community rather than foreign nations with which one signs and then breaks treaties. Those republics also faced the theoretical threat of recolonisation by Europe and the not-theoretical threat of US annexation. It made sense that they would pioneer the idea of a global order guided by principles they called ‘American International Law’, seeking to constrain great-power ambition and protect the integrity of all nations as sovereign equals.
Read the rest of the review of https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
David S. Parker is Professor of History at Queen’s University, Canada.
October 6, 2025
Finished it! I learned so much and was able to connect and unify so much in my mind and understanding. Highly recommend. Makes me love our Latin American brothers and sisters even more because it helps me to understand their history even more. The struggle for justice and liberty for Latin America has never ceased, and anyone who knows knows. And this is a great reminder.
This is a brief visceral reaction, and I will try to return to make a proper review some time later. Unbelievably expansive in scope and concise for its comprehensiveness. Truly a history of the past that is incredibly relevant today.
I read Grandin's "End of the Myth" a couple of years ago, and it was amazing as well. Hoping to read all of his books.
This is a brief visceral reaction, and I will try to return to make a proper review some time later. Unbelievably expansive in scope and concise for its comprehensiveness. Truly a history of the past that is incredibly relevant today.
I read Grandin's "End of the Myth" a couple of years ago, and it was amazing as well. Hoping to read all of his books.
June 6, 2025
A magisterial work on the history of the western hemisphere. The USA's inability to commit to social rights has held us back, and rather than allow Latin America to fully act upon their commitment to theirs, we've tied one arm behind the Latinx population's collective back. A must-read to understand the politics of the now.
August 18, 2025
This book is excellent: the history I was never taught, but desperately needed! A must read for sure if you're from the U.S. Totally mind blowing in the best and worst ways. Not the most beginner friendly, but with a pace and prose that allows you to follow along. I won't be able to shut up about this book maybe ever!!
July 30, 2025
A genuine masterwork. Covers hundreds of years of history in unbelievable detail - you can feel a lifetime of scholarship in each page. Required reading!
October 31, 2025
Amazing! Astonishing how much history he can fit in one book and how clearly he can write about it.
September 7, 2025
Brilliant; depressing; required reading
August 7, 2025
Spectacular
August 5, 2025
I grabbed this book with both interest and fear and trepidation, all for the same reason. I know that Greg Grandin is a leftist, but, like the late David Graeber (about whom I knew even more of my disagreements before his last book), a leftist of a different stance than I.
The fear and trepidation were warranted, it turns out, but largely for reasons beyond politics. At bottom line, contra the subtitle, this is NOT a history of the New World, whether new or not. And there's errors, as well as framing problems even within taking it as something much more narrow than a history of the new world.
Grandin has a thesis, which is always good in a history book. Though not explicitly stated, it’s clear that Yanqui America of the United States and Latin America have been a sort of yin and yang. And with that sort of narrowing of focus, he avoids the Jill Lepore error of trying to cram a theoretically comprehensive history of the United States of America into one massive volume.
That said, this means he has to be selective. (And with that, framing problems and errors come first, good tidbits later.)
First, and yes, technically, it would be prehistory, but pre-Columbian Contact American Indians are omitted. That’s especially strange for a leftist. VERY strange. And, after the dialogue between Latin America and the United States is established, American Indian rights and issues in the USofA are entirely undiscussed. Indians / Indigenous south of the United States are just about as undiscussed.
Second, several European nations get omitted. Denmark’s and Sweden’s small New World forays? Fine. Even the Netherlands? OK. But France? Really? And, other than playing off the United States in battling for Latin American influence, we’re going to omit Britain, including Canada? Yes we are, if we’re Greg Grandin.
And by that, the subtitle, “A New History of the New World,” is wrong and this is not a history of the New World. It’s a history of Latin American-United States relations as the New World developed. In other words, the “New” is like David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s book — spinning.
One more issue of framing, then on to some straight errors.
Pre-Revolutionary US is reduced not just to New England but specifically just to Massachusetts.
Spain may have entered the American Revolution with hopes of regaining Gibraltar and Minorca. Sicily? Ruled by King Charles’ younger son, and per Wiki, by treaties, could not be united with the Spanish crown. So, Grandin’s going down the path of errors.
Some claims seem overstated, like a battle of Nicaragua greatly affecting British ship repair capability. Ditto for the idea that Spanish control of the Mississippi kept Britain from attacking the US from the west. Really? A country that couldn’t get its generals to coordinate as it was, was going to send 10,000 troops up the Mississippi, then the Ohio, to backdoor Pennsylvania and Virginia? And where would those troops be coming from?
So, by this time, I’m figuring the book is between 4 and 3 stars.
Latin America’s fight for freedom becomes reduced to Bolivar (with help from Miranda) and Venezuela. (This is a precursor; the Latin American portion of the book is often reduced to its Caribbean Lake section fighting off American meddling.)
It’s normally Scottish rite, not Scotch rite, in Masonry. And, it’s not “so-called,” at least not today.
Andrew Jackson won a plurality, not a majority, of popular and electoral votes in 1824. Yikes, does Grandin not know the difference between these? At this point, I am thinking, I don’t see howw he can get more than 3 stars, good things though the book may have.
And, it gets worse.
No, Greg, contra librul historians, Lincoln in all likelihood did NOT abandon colonization with Vache Isle.
Maybe Mexico’s 1916 constitution was the first *constitution* to mention minimum wage, equal pay and other things, but minimum wage laws had been around decades earlier. Bismarckian Germany was the first place to have something like national health care.
By this point, I know we're between 3 and 2 stars.
And even a simple factual error, like claiming Woodrow Wilson died in 1923, not 1924. That’s next to larger errors of interpretation. Wilson, a fake neutral from the start of WWI, was never the degree of idealist Grandin claimed. Or “William Howard Taft,” not “Robert” as a senator in the 1940s.
Beyond errors, getting back to omissions in framing? Juan Peron only mentioned once. Ditto on Alberto Fujimori. Hugo Chavez, of whom Grandin once said that his problem was not being too authoritarian but not authoritarian enough? Not mentioned at all. The Contras of Nicaragua are mentioned, but Daniel Ortega by name is not. It’s like modern Latin American authoritarians that couldn’t be pigeonholed get bypassed in the narrative. Also, back to the omission of Indian / Indigenous? Where's Evo Morales? Not here! Post-Bay of Pigs Cuba (vs the US)? Not here! Very little on the coup against Allende here. The OAS stance on Castro's Cuba (and the US versus it), on Chavez's Venezuela (etc) and Morales' Bolivia (etc)? Not here. Nothing of the worst of Reagan and later US interventionism is here.
Could Grandin think this is all too new to need coverage? If so, he doesn't say so, and much of it is not THAT new.
Also missing? Discussion of something like Aztlan in the US Southwest's borderlands.
Modern battles for Indigenous rights missing everywhere. (See observation near the start of this review.) That includes battles against allegedly leftist Latin American governments at times. (See Sandinista Nicaragua.)
Also?
WHERE are the photos? There is an occasional photo or line drawing in a couple of chapters, and that's it. And there are ZERO pages of photo plates. A serious history book like this should have at least 8 pages of plates; preferably 12, and really, 16.
Now the good.
The best section was probably post-World War I Latin America. With the USSR out, the US saying no, most of Asia besides Japan and China being European colonies and about all of Africa, the League of Nations was Old Europe and Latin America. Without the US involved, these nations struggled against Old Europe. The warring countries of Old Europe had massive debts for foodstuffs, nitrates and more owed to Latin America. Pawning off old weapons, including now-outlawed poison gas, was how they paid off. Not wanting to be left out of cash markets, the US joined in on weapons sales.
Cordell Hull’s travels to the Montevideo conference that drafted the convention of that name also good. Going off Wiki’s page, it’s interesting that Canada and the UK, with its Caribbean holdings (Canada by Westminster 1931 had its own foreign policy power) didn’t sign, let alone ratify, the convention.
Henry Wallace’s 1943 trip across Latin America (which I had not read about before) is handled well. Herein lay seeds of the Democratic Party establishment opposition to him being renominated for Veep in 1944.
And the material on George Marshall’s 1948 visit to Bogota for the formation of the Organization of American States at a Pan-American Conference meeting, complete with him delivering an official US “no” about a Marshall Plan for Latin America, the assassination of a Columbian left-liberal presidential candidate near the end of the meeting, and more? All good.
But not enough to get this off the 2-star schneid.
I’ve said about three or four 3-star books, that “this is the best 3-star book I’ve read.” We’re at that here, with 2-star books. There’s interesting, informative and good stuff here. But, the mix of errors and framing issues are just too much.
The book could have been made better by:
1. Fact checking, obviously
2. Dumping the subtitle and framing issues related to that. Seriously, this is a huge issue, as huge an issue as with Graeber / Wengrow.
3. Honestly addressing even part of the framing by omission issues on some modern leftists
(Related: Did Grandin, re problem 1, have a fair chunk of individual chapters researched, and rough-draft written, by students? I've called out Douglas Brinkley for that, because with him, it's obvious, even if he never says it.)
The fear and trepidation were warranted, it turns out, but largely for reasons beyond politics. At bottom line, contra the subtitle, this is NOT a history of the New World, whether new or not. And there's errors, as well as framing problems even within taking it as something much more narrow than a history of the new world.
Grandin has a thesis, which is always good in a history book. Though not explicitly stated, it’s clear that Yanqui America of the United States and Latin America have been a sort of yin and yang. And with that sort of narrowing of focus, he avoids the Jill Lepore error of trying to cram a theoretically comprehensive history of the United States of America into one massive volume.
That said, this means he has to be selective. (And with that, framing problems and errors come first, good tidbits later.)
First, and yes, technically, it would be prehistory, but pre-Columbian Contact American Indians are omitted. That’s especially strange for a leftist. VERY strange. And, after the dialogue between Latin America and the United States is established, American Indian rights and issues in the USofA are entirely undiscussed. Indians / Indigenous south of the United States are just about as undiscussed.
Second, several European nations get omitted. Denmark’s and Sweden’s small New World forays? Fine. Even the Netherlands? OK. But France? Really? And, other than playing off the United States in battling for Latin American influence, we’re going to omit Britain, including Canada? Yes we are, if we’re Greg Grandin.
And by that, the subtitle, “A New History of the New World,” is wrong and this is not a history of the New World. It’s a history of Latin American-United States relations as the New World developed. In other words, the “New” is like David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s book — spinning.
One more issue of framing, then on to some straight errors.
Pre-Revolutionary US is reduced not just to New England but specifically just to Massachusetts.
Spain may have entered the American Revolution with hopes of regaining Gibraltar and Minorca. Sicily? Ruled by King Charles’ younger son, and per Wiki, by treaties, could not be united with the Spanish crown. So, Grandin’s going down the path of errors.
Some claims seem overstated, like a battle of Nicaragua greatly affecting British ship repair capability. Ditto for the idea that Spanish control of the Mississippi kept Britain from attacking the US from the west. Really? A country that couldn’t get its generals to coordinate as it was, was going to send 10,000 troops up the Mississippi, then the Ohio, to backdoor Pennsylvania and Virginia? And where would those troops be coming from?
So, by this time, I’m figuring the book is between 4 and 3 stars.
Latin America’s fight for freedom becomes reduced to Bolivar (with help from Miranda) and Venezuela. (This is a precursor; the Latin American portion of the book is often reduced to its Caribbean Lake section fighting off American meddling.)
It’s normally Scottish rite, not Scotch rite, in Masonry. And, it’s not “so-called,” at least not today.
Andrew Jackson won a plurality, not a majority, of popular and electoral votes in 1824. Yikes, does Grandin not know the difference between these? At this point, I am thinking, I don’t see howw he can get more than 3 stars, good things though the book may have.
And, it gets worse.
No, Greg, contra librul historians, Lincoln in all likelihood did NOT abandon colonization with Vache Isle.
Maybe Mexico’s 1916 constitution was the first *constitution* to mention minimum wage, equal pay and other things, but minimum wage laws had been around decades earlier. Bismarckian Germany was the first place to have something like national health care.
By this point, I know we're between 3 and 2 stars.
And even a simple factual error, like claiming Woodrow Wilson died in 1923, not 1924. That’s next to larger errors of interpretation. Wilson, a fake neutral from the start of WWI, was never the degree of idealist Grandin claimed. Or “William Howard Taft,” not “Robert” as a senator in the 1940s.
Beyond errors, getting back to omissions in framing? Juan Peron only mentioned once. Ditto on Alberto Fujimori. Hugo Chavez, of whom Grandin once said that his problem was not being too authoritarian but not authoritarian enough? Not mentioned at all. The Contras of Nicaragua are mentioned, but Daniel Ortega by name is not. It’s like modern Latin American authoritarians that couldn’t be pigeonholed get bypassed in the narrative. Also, back to the omission of Indian / Indigenous? Where's Evo Morales? Not here! Post-Bay of Pigs Cuba (vs the US)? Not here! Very little on the coup against Allende here. The OAS stance on Castro's Cuba (and the US versus it), on Chavez's Venezuela (etc) and Morales' Bolivia (etc)? Not here. Nothing of the worst of Reagan and later US interventionism is here.
Could Grandin think this is all too new to need coverage? If so, he doesn't say so, and much of it is not THAT new.
Also missing? Discussion of something like Aztlan in the US Southwest's borderlands.
Modern battles for Indigenous rights missing everywhere. (See observation near the start of this review.) That includes battles against allegedly leftist Latin American governments at times. (See Sandinista Nicaragua.)
Also?
WHERE are the photos? There is an occasional photo or line drawing in a couple of chapters, and that's it. And there are ZERO pages of photo plates. A serious history book like this should have at least 8 pages of plates; preferably 12, and really, 16.
Now the good.
The best section was probably post-World War I Latin America. With the USSR out, the US saying no, most of Asia besides Japan and China being European colonies and about all of Africa, the League of Nations was Old Europe and Latin America. Without the US involved, these nations struggled against Old Europe. The warring countries of Old Europe had massive debts for foodstuffs, nitrates and more owed to Latin America. Pawning off old weapons, including now-outlawed poison gas, was how they paid off. Not wanting to be left out of cash markets, the US joined in on weapons sales.
Cordell Hull’s travels to the Montevideo conference that drafted the convention of that name also good. Going off Wiki’s page, it’s interesting that Canada and the UK, with its Caribbean holdings (Canada by Westminster 1931 had its own foreign policy power) didn’t sign, let alone ratify, the convention.
Henry Wallace’s 1943 trip across Latin America (which I had not read about before) is handled well. Herein lay seeds of the Democratic Party establishment opposition to him being renominated for Veep in 1944.
And the material on George Marshall’s 1948 visit to Bogota for the formation of the Organization of American States at a Pan-American Conference meeting, complete with him delivering an official US “no” about a Marshall Plan for Latin America, the assassination of a Columbian left-liberal presidential candidate near the end of the meeting, and more? All good.
But not enough to get this off the 2-star schneid.
I’ve said about three or four 3-star books, that “this is the best 3-star book I’ve read.” We’re at that here, with 2-star books. There’s interesting, informative and good stuff here. But, the mix of errors and framing issues are just too much.
The book could have been made better by:
1. Fact checking, obviously
2. Dumping the subtitle and framing issues related to that. Seriously, this is a huge issue, as huge an issue as with Graeber / Wengrow.
3. Honestly addressing even part of the framing by omission issues on some modern leftists
(Related: Did Grandin, re problem 1, have a fair chunk of individual chapters researched, and rough-draft written, by students? I've called out Douglas Brinkley for that, because with him, it's obvious, even if he never says it.)
October 28, 2025
I loved this book and learned a great deal from it. America, América is rich with information and, at times, challenging, but in the best possible way. Growing up, I was taught history in silos: the United States on one side and Latin America on the other, each with its own isolated story. This book presents a more complete picture of the Western Hemisphere, where the histories of the Anglo and Latin Americas are deeply intertwined.
Grandin does not shy away from the brutality, exploitation, and ambition that shaped both regions. He shows how conquest, colonization, and political ideology spread across borders and centuries, connecting the fates of nations that are often taught as unrelated. I appreciated how he wove historical context into present-day politics, reminding us that the story is far from over. Today, we see echoes of those divisions as the United States aligns itself with right-wing governments while distancing from left-wing movements across South America.
America, América is the kind of book that rewards patience and reflection. It is ambitious, eye-opening, and offers a broader understanding of what “America” truly means. This is one I will revisit again.
Grandin does not shy away from the brutality, exploitation, and ambition that shaped both regions. He shows how conquest, colonization, and political ideology spread across borders and centuries, connecting the fates of nations that are often taught as unrelated. I appreciated how he wove historical context into present-day politics, reminding us that the story is far from over. Today, we see echoes of those divisions as the United States aligns itself with right-wing governments while distancing from left-wing movements across South America.
America, América is the kind of book that rewards patience and reflection. It is ambitious, eye-opening, and offers a broader understanding of what “America” truly means. This is one I will revisit again.
September 3, 2025
What is it?
If I say, “There are two Americas,” you think, “Well, obviously. North and South America.” But Greg Grandin divides the Americas differently. There is America, and then there is América.
Grandin starts the clock at approximately 1492, with the colonization of the Americas by Iberia (Spain and Portugal) and England. The initial part of the book compares the colonial efforts of the Spanish and English, observing how differences in religion, economics and philosophy informed their approach.
Each approach to colonialism, Grandin shows, has left an imprint on the minds of the colonizers’ descendants and colonialism’s critics, starting with the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas who famously advocated on behalf of Indigenous rights, and later for the rights and dignity of Africans held hostage as chattel slaves.
From there, the book evolves into a discussion primarily on the differences between the United States of America and the nations of Latin America, and is largely critical of the expansionist principles of the Monroe Doctrine.
Who will like it?
* Anyone interested in liberation theology
* Anyone who has already read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and longs for more.
* Anyone interested in understanding the philosophical undercurrents that inform U.S. and Latin American politics, as well as the relation between the two.
Anyone who has enjoyed reading An Indigenous People's History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
* Anyone who would like to put an end to imperialism once and for all.
What could have been better
No Canada — The title’s first half is awesome. The second half, not so much. The intent of Grandin’s broad historical approach is ultimately to criticize the mindset of the leaders and imperialist systems in the U.S. And as far as that goes, good for him. The U.S. needs a good scolding. But that hardly makes this book a “History of the New World.” I couldn’t possibly expect an encyclopedic covering of every nation from Antigua to Venezuela, but it’s worth noting that Canada is notably absent from the picture. Since the book is set up to compare the Iberian and British approaches to colonialism and their results, Canada seems to me a very useful case study. Canada is, after all, what the U.S. would have been like in the multiverse had the 13 colonies never rebelled. Had the 13 colonies remained with Great Britain, it is likely that North American expansion would have evolved more slowly. It is quite possible that slavery would have ended sooner across North America, and subsequent world events may have taken a far different direction. Grandin has noted, for example, that Adolf Hitler had cited the Monroe Doctrine to justify his own expansionist goals. What would Hitler be, then, without the Monroe Doctrine? Would there even be a Hitler? All idle speculation, of course, but leaving out Canada as the “forgotten America” is a major oversight of Grandin.
What happened to the Indigenous folk? — Again, this book can’t be a history of everyone and everything. That’s the role of encyclopedias. That said, the absence of more Indigenous voices and perspectives feels like another notable oversight. Indigenous people are certainly cited in the book, but when they are, it’s often to show them as victims of one form of brutal colonial oppression or another. How they continue to exist and even influence the politics, culture and philosophy of the Americas, however, is not something that Grandin spends much time considering. Indigenous folk do get mentioned once again in the Epilogue to highlight their advances into the political sphere in nations like Bolivia, but who’s paying attention to any of that by the time you get to the Epilogue? I’d hope that Volume 2, if there ever is one, would address the impact that Indigenous people have made and continue to make.
Protestant vs. Catholic — Grandin’s book excels in calling out the injustice and sheer hypocrisy of U.S. expansion. Case in point, following the Spanish-American War, after combined U.S. and Cuban forces drove out Spain, the U.S. took over Cuba and undid the work of the island nation’s own revolutionaries to integrate its diverse population, and introduced segregationist Jim Crow laws. Fuck everything about that. Grandin is great at coming up with all sorts of examples like this. What I’m less certain about, though, is his philosophical premise. Are we indeed two different Americas because the U.S. is primarily Protestant and Latin America is primarily Catholic? I grew up Catholic with Mexican and Irish heritage, and although I no longer practice the faith, I still greatly admire my teachers in liberation theology. So perhaps there is something about Catholicism, and Grandin is right. But then for every Bartolomé de las Casas, there is also a John Brown or Martin Luther King, right? I’m willing to entertain Grandin’s argument, but I would love to hear someone more knowledgeable than me offer a counterargument. Grandin would have it that while Catholicism certainly inspires rigid hierarchical and reactionary thinking, it also creates space for communal and communitarian thought as well. OK, but if we’re going to go there, please explain how and why Marx and Engles produced their best work in Protestant England? I don’t know. I think this all needs further consideration.
Final thoughts
The fact that I’m even thinking about this book and that I have so much to say is a testimony to Grandin’s success. This is a book that is going to leave a major impact on me for years to come. You read something like this, and you want to change the world and purge it of corrupt officials and oligarchs who rule our nation like mafia dons.
If I say, “There are two Americas,” you think, “Well, obviously. North and South America.” But Greg Grandin divides the Americas differently. There is America, and then there is América.
Grandin starts the clock at approximately 1492, with the colonization of the Americas by Iberia (Spain and Portugal) and England. The initial part of the book compares the colonial efforts of the Spanish and English, observing how differences in religion, economics and philosophy informed their approach.
Each approach to colonialism, Grandin shows, has left an imprint on the minds of the colonizers’ descendants and colonialism’s critics, starting with the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas who famously advocated on behalf of Indigenous rights, and later for the rights and dignity of Africans held hostage as chattel slaves.
From there, the book evolves into a discussion primarily on the differences between the United States of America and the nations of Latin America, and is largely critical of the expansionist principles of the Monroe Doctrine.
Who will like it?
* Anyone interested in liberation theology
* Anyone who has already read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and longs for more.
* Anyone interested in understanding the philosophical undercurrents that inform U.S. and Latin American politics, as well as the relation between the two.
Anyone who has enjoyed reading An Indigenous People's History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
* Anyone who would like to put an end to imperialism once and for all.
What could have been better
No Canada — The title’s first half is awesome. The second half, not so much. The intent of Grandin’s broad historical approach is ultimately to criticize the mindset of the leaders and imperialist systems in the U.S. And as far as that goes, good for him. The U.S. needs a good scolding. But that hardly makes this book a “History of the New World.” I couldn’t possibly expect an encyclopedic covering of every nation from Antigua to Venezuela, but it’s worth noting that Canada is notably absent from the picture. Since the book is set up to compare the Iberian and British approaches to colonialism and their results, Canada seems to me a very useful case study. Canada is, after all, what the U.S. would have been like in the multiverse had the 13 colonies never rebelled. Had the 13 colonies remained with Great Britain, it is likely that North American expansion would have evolved more slowly. It is quite possible that slavery would have ended sooner across North America, and subsequent world events may have taken a far different direction. Grandin has noted, for example, that Adolf Hitler had cited the Monroe Doctrine to justify his own expansionist goals. What would Hitler be, then, without the Monroe Doctrine? Would there even be a Hitler? All idle speculation, of course, but leaving out Canada as the “forgotten America” is a major oversight of Grandin.
What happened to the Indigenous folk? — Again, this book can’t be a history of everyone and everything. That’s the role of encyclopedias. That said, the absence of more Indigenous voices and perspectives feels like another notable oversight. Indigenous people are certainly cited in the book, but when they are, it’s often to show them as victims of one form of brutal colonial oppression or another. How they continue to exist and even influence the politics, culture and philosophy of the Americas, however, is not something that Grandin spends much time considering. Indigenous folk do get mentioned once again in the Epilogue to highlight their advances into the political sphere in nations like Bolivia, but who’s paying attention to any of that by the time you get to the Epilogue? I’d hope that Volume 2, if there ever is one, would address the impact that Indigenous people have made and continue to make.
Protestant vs. Catholic — Grandin’s book excels in calling out the injustice and sheer hypocrisy of U.S. expansion. Case in point, following the Spanish-American War, after combined U.S. and Cuban forces drove out Spain, the U.S. took over Cuba and undid the work of the island nation’s own revolutionaries to integrate its diverse population, and introduced segregationist Jim Crow laws. Fuck everything about that. Grandin is great at coming up with all sorts of examples like this. What I’m less certain about, though, is his philosophical premise. Are we indeed two different Americas because the U.S. is primarily Protestant and Latin America is primarily Catholic? I grew up Catholic with Mexican and Irish heritage, and although I no longer practice the faith, I still greatly admire my teachers in liberation theology. So perhaps there is something about Catholicism, and Grandin is right. But then for every Bartolomé de las Casas, there is also a John Brown or Martin Luther King, right? I’m willing to entertain Grandin’s argument, but I would love to hear someone more knowledgeable than me offer a counterargument. Grandin would have it that while Catholicism certainly inspires rigid hierarchical and reactionary thinking, it also creates space for communal and communitarian thought as well. OK, but if we’re going to go there, please explain how and why Marx and Engles produced their best work in Protestant England? I don’t know. I think this all needs further consideration.
Final thoughts
The fact that I’m even thinking about this book and that I have so much to say is a testimony to Grandin’s success. This is a book that is going to leave a major impact on me for years to come. You read something like this, and you want to change the world and purge it of corrupt officials and oligarchs who rule our nation like mafia dons.
June 16, 2025
This is a long, very long, unrelenting indictment of the wrongdoing of, first, the colonizing powers in the Western hemisphere and then of the United States in the following centuries. The author attributes the actions of politicians and governments almost exclusively to greed and malfeasance.
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