America, América: A New History of the New World

In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how the United States and Latin America were forged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other. America, América: A New History of the New World traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest — the greatest mortality event in human history — through the eighteenth-century wars for independence; the Monroe Doctrine; the world wars, coups, and revolutions of the twentieth century and beyond.

Grandin’s book sheds new light on well-known historical figures such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as lesser-known actors such as Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of cold war political terror. At once comprehensive and accessible, this monumental work of scholarship shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the Western Hemisphere but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world.

A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.

ISBN: 9780593831250 | Penguin Press

Praise

Dazzling. Sweeping. Mind-altering. World-changing. This is a once-in-a-generation contribution destined to become our new reference for understanding the making of the modern world. With extraordinary depth, erudition and precision, Grandin avenges the dead and fights for the living. — Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of Doppelganger

For nearly a century, historians have attempted to tell a ‘common history’ of ‘Greater America,’ one that brings the history of the United States and Latin America together in a shared and durable conceptualization. In America, América, Greg Grandin does just this and advances an urgent vision of the relational history of the hemisphere. Adding to his already extraordinary corpus of works and reinterpreting five centuries in broad and beautiful strokes, it ends with a chilling conclusion about the diplomatic and moral failures of our current politics and its return to unilateralism and deliberate misunderstandings of the past. A major and desperately needed synthesis of the Americas and the making of modernity. — Ned Blackhawk, author of National Book Award-winning The Rediscovery of America

America, América is the best kind of book: masterful and erudite yet absolutely riveting. By considering the long, sweeping story of Latin America and the United States in the same frame, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin has given us a novel and necessary understanding of a deeply entwined history that is sure to surprise readers, not least because he shows convincingly and urgently how a different past—and with it a different, better present—might have been possible. — Ada Ferrer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History

In his awe-inspiring masterpiece, Greg Grandin shows how hemispheric relationships have defined the history of the United States for five centuries. Latin Americans did more than decry our failures to live up to the new world’s revolutionary ideals. As our country ascended to hegemon in the last century, our neighbors pushed—in part because of their unequal might and wealth—for the reimagination of how the globe itself ought to be governed. — Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself