Tag: Latin America

Women’s History Month 2022 Reading List (Curated by Elaine Maisner)

Happy Women’s History Month! In celebration of this historical month, we’ll be sharing reading lists curated by our staff featuring all authors who identify as women. Today we’re sharing a list from Elaine Maisner, one of our Executive Directors. Click here to see the previously shared lists and learn more about how Women’s History Month came about. If you’re interested in purchasing any of… Continue Reading Women’s History Month 2022 Reading List (Curated by Elaine Maisner)

Negotiating Paradise: Mass Tourism, Empire, and Soft Power

The following is an excerpt from Dennis Merrill’s Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America. Accounts of U.S. empire building in Latin America typically portray politically and economically powerful North Americans descending on their southerly neighbors to engage in lopsided negotiations. Dennis Merrill’s comparative history of U.S. tourism in Latin America in the twentieth century demonstrates that… Continue Reading Negotiating Paradise: Mass Tourism, Empire, and Soft Power

Allison Margaret Bigelow: Mining Language and Political Discourse

Today we welcome a guest post from Allison Margaret Bigelow, author of Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World, out now from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and UNC Press. Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver… Continue Reading Allison Margaret Bigelow: Mining Language and Political Discourse

Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr. : Indigenous Rights in “A Country Without Indians”

Today we welcome a guest post from Jeffrey Erbig, author of Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America, out now from UNC Press. During the late eighteenth century, Portugal and Spain sent joint mapping expeditions to draw a nearly 10,000-mile border between Brazil and Spanish South America. These boundary commissions were the largest ever sent to… Continue Reading Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr. : Indigenous Rights in “A Country Without Indians”

Megan Raby: The Tropical Origins of the Idea of Biodiversity

Today we welcome a guest blog post from Megan Raby, author of American Tropics:  The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science. Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth… Continue Reading Megan Raby: The Tropical Origins of the Idea of Biodiversity

Megan Raby: Ecology and U.S. Empire in the Caribbean

Today we welcome a guest blog post from Megan Raby, author of American Tropics:  The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science. Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth… Continue Reading Megan Raby: Ecology and U.S. Empire in the Caribbean

A UNC Press Reading List to Accompany the PBS series “Black in Latin America”

The UNC Press reading list to accompany Henry Louis Gates Jr’s PBS documentary series “Black in Latin America.” Continue Reading A UNC Press Reading List to Accompany the PBS series “Black in Latin America”

Candombe, Cachila, and Afro-Uruguay

Taking place this week and next week in Chapel Hill and Durham is the NC Latin American Film Festival, put on by the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke. Tomorrow night features a screening of director Sebastián Bednarik’s Cachila: un hombre, una familia y el legado del Candombe/Cachila: a man, a family and the… Continue Reading Candombe, Cachila, and Afro-Uruguay