America And The Americas

"Energy in the Americas provides a hemispheric perspective on the historical construction of contemporary debates on the role of energy in society Understanding the history of energy and its evolving place of energy in society is essential to face the changing future of energy production. Across North and South America, national and localized understandings of energy as a common, public, or market good have influenced the development of energy industries. Energy in the Americas brings the diverse energy histories of North and South American nations into dialogue with one another, presenting an integrated hemispheric framework for understanding the historical constructions of contemporary debates on the role of energy in society. Rejecting pat truisms, this collection historicizes the experiences of producers and policymakers and assesses the interplay between environmental, technological, political, and ideological influences within and between countries and continents. Breaking down assumptions about the evolution of national energy histories, Energy in the Americas broadens and opens the conversation. De-emphasizing traditional focus on national peculiarities, it favours an international, integrated approach that brings together the work of established and emerging scholars. This is an essential step in understanding the circumstances that have created current energy policy and practice, and the historical narratives that underpin how energy production is conceptualized and understood."--

In this completely revised and updated edition, Langley covers the long period from the colonial era into the twenty-first century, providing an interpretive introduction to the history of U.S. relations with Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada and discusses the formal structures and diplomatic postures underlying U.S. policy making.

This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domingez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara Gonzalez; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today's activists along class, racial, and national lines. Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.

PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS EDITIONS: "Rare is the book in English that provides a general overview of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rarer still is the good, topical, and largely dispassionate book that contributes to a better understanding of the rest of the hemisphere. Peter Winn has managed to produce both."—Miami Herald "This magisterial work provides an accessible and engaging introduction to the complex tapestry of contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean."—Foreign Affairs "A clear, level-headed snapshot of a region in transition…. Winn is most interesting when he discusses the larger issues and to his credit he does this often."—Washington Post Book World "Balanced and wide-ranging…. After canvassing the legacies of the European conquerors, Winn examines issues of national identity and economic development…. Other discussions survey internal migration, the role of indigenous peoples, the complexity of race relations, and the treatment of women." —Publishers Weekly

The author, an expert on business interests in Latin America, examines U.S. efforts, spanning two centuries, to impose economic dominance on the peoples of the Americas and the Latin American responses to these policies.

An illuminating history of North America's eleven rival cultural regions that explodes the red state-blue state myth. North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another ever since. Subsequent immigrants didn't confront or assimilate into an “American” or “Canadian” culture, but rather into one of the eleven distinct regional ones that spread over the continent each staking out mutually exclusive territory. In American Nations, Colin Woodard leads us on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, and the rivalries and alliances between its component nations, which conform to neither state nor international boundaries. He illustrates and explains why “American” values vary sharply from one region to another. Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how intranational differences have played a pivotal role at every point in the continent's history, from the American Revolution and the Civil War to the tumultuous sixties and the "blue county/red county" maps of recent presidential elections. American Nations is a revolutionary and revelatory take on America's myriad identities and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and are molding our future.

Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. Distinctive stone tools belonging to the Clovis culture established the presence of these early New World people. But are the Clovis tools Asian in origin? Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge the old narrative and, in the process, counter traditional—and often subjective—approaches to archaeological testing for historical relatedness. The authors apply rigorous scholarship to a hypothesis that places the technological antecedents of Clovis in Europe and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought. Supplying archaeological and oceanographic evidence to support this assertion, the book dismantles the old paradigm while persuasively linking Clovis technology with the culture of the Solutrean people who occupied France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago.

In this groundbreaking work, leading historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto tells the story of our hemisphere as a whole, showing why it is impossible to understand North, Central, and South America in isolation without turning to the intertwining forces that shape the region. With imagination, thematic breadth, and his trademark wit, Fernández-Armesto covers a range of cultural, political, and social subjects, taking us from the dawn of human migration to North America to the Colonial and Independence periods to the “American Century” and beyond. Fernández-Armesto does nothing less than revise the conventional wisdom about cross-cultural exchange, conflict, and interaction, making and supporting some brilliantly provocative conclusions about the Americas’ past and where we are headed.