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.

If you have time, also choose one of the Further Readings that interests you.

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

LANIC database

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)