Introduction to Latin America Themes and Problems
Lecture 2025-6
Lecture Slides 2024-5
Required Seminar Reading:
Moya, Jose C.(ed.). "Introduction: Latin America—The Limitations and Meaning of A Historical Category." The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History. : Oxford University Press, September 18, 2012.
Please also identify one of the course textbooks on this page so that you can start using it to follow the whole "story" through week by week.
If you have time, also choose one of the Further Readings (below) to discuss in class.
Discussion questions:
- What do you think of when you think of “Latin America”?
- Is “Latin America” a useful term? What definitions - and problems with the definitions - does historian Jose Moya offer?
- Pull up a map of the Americas on Google maps. Look at it together. What do you know about the different countries? What similarities/ differences do you see in terms of climate, culture, language, politics?
- How might you use any of the below online databases listed for this week’s discussion to help with your presentations and essays?
Early Americas Digital Archive
Vistas: Spanish American Visual Culture, 1520-1820
Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
Slavery Images: A Visual Record
Further Reading:
Carmagnani, Marcello. The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization, University of California Press, 2011.
John Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (any edition) (Introduction.)
Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Blackwell, 2005), “Preface: Uncoupling the Name and the Reference,” and Chapter 1, “The Americas, Christian Expansion and the Modern/ Colonial Foundation of Racism,” pp. 1-50. [e-book at Library]
Edmundo O’Gorman The Invention of America, 1961. (Part 1)
Galeano, Eduardo. Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina : Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Monthly Review Press, 1997. (Preface, Introduction and Chapter 1)