Problems And Alternatives In The Modern Americas

This volume explores several notable themes related to political processes in Latin America and offers insightful historical perspectives to understand national, regional, and global issues in the continent from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. The collected essays focus on Latin American politics such as: political cycles, left-wing political parties, nationalism, progressivism, crime and resistance, violence, authoritarianism, and relationships with the United States, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, and Paraguay. The perspectives of the chapters presented an attempt to seek lines of continuity by highlighting traditional interpretations of new scenarios and refusing to impose a traditional and uncritical linear historical narrative. The fundamental objective of the volume is to provide a rational and critical political-historical explanation of Latin America since the early 20th century with the purpose, among others, of deepening understanding of the present.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.”—Lawrence O’Donnell How did we get here? In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw “[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of America’s cultural history.”—Newsday “Compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice “A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian “This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding America in the age of Trump.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci

This is a completely revised and updated edition of SR Books' classic text, Problems in Modern Latin American History. This book has been brought up to date by Professors John Charles Chasteen and James A. Wood to reflect current scholarship and to maximize the book's utility as a teaching tool. The book is divided into 13 chapters, with each chapter dedicated to addressing a particular "problem" in modern Latin America-issues that complement most survey texts. Each chapter includes an interpretive essay that frames a clear central issue for students to tackle, along with excerpts from historical writing that advance alternative-or even conflicting-interpretations. In addition, each chapter contains primary documents for students to analyze in relation to the interpretive issues. This primary material includes passages of Latin American fiction in translation, biographical sketches, and images. Designed as a supplemental text for survey courses on Latin American history, this book's provocative "problems" approach will engage students, evoke lively classroom discussion, and promote critical thinking.

"A trenchant analysis of how the wealthiest 9.9 percent of Americans -- those just below the tip of the wealth pyramid -- have exacerbated the growing inequality in our country and distorted our social values"--

Problems in Modern Latin American History: A Reader is the long-awaited successor to Joseph S. Tulchin's Problems in Latin American History, which was published more than twenty years ago and has been out of print for ten. Realizing how the field has changed in the past two decades, Professors Chasteen and Tulchin have compiled a work that addresses new topics and issues to serve both faculty and students alike.p The authors examine nine problems in modern Latin America-issues that complement most survey texts and create geographical and chronological spans maximizing the book's applicability to various classroom needs. Each of the book's nine chapters, compiled by an expert in the field, begins with an introduction that provides an overview of the problem to be examined.p

Now in its fourth edition, this leading reader has been updated to tighten the focus of each chapter on a major interpretive problem. This edition includes an entirely new chapter, “Historical Memory,” which allows readers to revisit the era of the Cold War from a contemporary perspective, and the chapters on nationalism and globalization have been thoroughly revised. The book continues to offer a rich variety of materials that can be tailored to the needs of individual instructors. The reader’s unique and successful chapter organization provides a thematic complement to narrative accounts of modern Latin American history. By focusing each chapter on a single concept or interpretive problem—such as nationalism, women’s rights, or social revolution—the text engages students in the analysis of historical sources and, at the same time, introduces them to the twists and turns of historiography. Each chapter in this new edition includes at least two primary sources. With its innovative combination of primary and secondary sources and editorial analysis, this text is designed specifically to stimulate critical thinking in a wide range of courses on Latin American history since independence.

This volume surveys the moral landscape of the American past from slavery to the Vietnam War. The 14 contributing historians illuminate this critical dimension of American history, showing how historical study contributes to present-day debates about values and the moral life.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.