A01=Allen Wells
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Allen Wells
automatic-update
Batista
Betancourt
Camargo
Castro
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HB
Category=JPHV
Category=NHB
Category=NHK
Cold War
COP=United States
Costa Rica
Cuba
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Estenssoro
Figueres
Frei
Language_English
Latin America
Nixon
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
Reformers
softlaunch
Somoza
Trujillo
Venezuela
Washington
Product details
- ISBN 9780300264401
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 14 Nov 2023
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
By emphasizing Latin American reformers’ decades-long struggle to defeat authoritarianism, this transnational history challenges the timeworn Cold War paradigm and recasts the region’s political evolution
Scholars persist in framing the Cold War as a battle between left and right, one in which the Global South is cast as either witting or unwitting proxies of Washington and Moscow. What if the era is told from the perspective of the many who preferred reform to revolution? Scholars have routinely neglected, dismissed, or caricatured moderate politicians. In this book, Allen Wells argues that until the Cuban Revolution, the struggle was not between capitalism and communism—that was Washington’s abiding preoccupation—but between democracy and dictatorship.
Beginning in the 1920s, the fight against authoritarianism was contested on multiple fronts—political, ideological, and cultural—taking on the dimensions of a political crusade. Convinced that despots represented an existential threat, reformers declared that no civilian government was safe until the cancer of dictatorship was excised from the hemisphere. Dictators retaliated, often with deadly results, exporting strategies that had been honed at home to guarantee their political survival. Grafted onto this war without borders was a belated Cold War, with all its political convulsions, the aftershocks of which are still felt today.
Scholars persist in framing the Cold War as a battle between left and right, one in which the Global South is cast as either witting or unwitting proxies of Washington and Moscow. What if the era is told from the perspective of the many who preferred reform to revolution? Scholars have routinely neglected, dismissed, or caricatured moderate politicians. In this book, Allen Wells argues that until the Cuban Revolution, the struggle was not between capitalism and communism—that was Washington’s abiding preoccupation—but between democracy and dictatorship.
Beginning in the 1920s, the fight against authoritarianism was contested on multiple fronts—political, ideological, and cultural—taking on the dimensions of a political crusade. Convinced that despots represented an existential threat, reformers declared that no civilian government was safe until the cancer of dictatorship was excised from the hemisphere. Dictators retaliated, often with deadly results, exporting strategies that had been honed at home to guarantee their political survival. Grafted onto this war without borders was a belated Cold War, with all its political convulsions, the aftershocks of which are still felt today.
Allen Wells is the Roger Howell, Jr. Professor of History, emeritus, at Bowdoin College. The author or coauthor of six previous books, he has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He lives in Bath, ME.
