The Americas in the Modern Age

by Lester D. Langley

• ISBN13: 9780300100082
• ISBN10: 0300100086
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2003-09-10
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

In this wide-ranging book, historian Lester D. Langley offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the modern Western hemisphere since the mid-nineteenth century. He evaluates the dynamics of hemispheric history, commencing with the articulation of the "two Americas" (Theodore Roosevelt's America and the contrasting America described by Cuban revolutionary, essayist, and poet Jose Marti) and culminating with recent controversial efforts to forge a united hemisphere. Tracing the interactions and influences among the nations of South, Central, and North America, including Canada, Langley departs from other accounts of the past 150 years. He argues that the seedtime for today's Americas was not the Cold War but the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also contends that it is not what the countries and people of the Americas have in common that binds them; instead, their cultural, political, and economic conflicts tie them together. Comprehensive and balanced, this history of the nations of the Americas offers new insights into both the past and t

Author Biography

Lester D. Langley is professor emeritus of the Department of History, University of Georgia.

Table of Contents

List of Maps	viii
Acknowledgments	ix
A Note on Usage	xi
Introduction	1	(14)
Part 1
1 Theodore Roosevelt's America	15	(23)
2 José Marti's America	38	(31)
Part 2
3 The End of the Long Century	69	(29)
4 The Fractured Continent	98	(31)
5 The Decade of Global War	129	(30)
Part 3
6 The Cold War	159	(30)
7 The Critical Decade	189	(35)
8 Order and Progress	224	(31)
Epilogue	255	(18)
Notes	273	(26)
Select Bibliography	299	(8)
Index	307