HTY/POL 301 Career Prep and HTY 339: Historiographical Essays and HTY 499/POL 499 Senior Seminar: US For Pol & D/M Theory in Cold War (LA)

. . . this is a brilliant book . . . It approaches the subject of U.S.-Latin American relations from a totally fresh and unique perspective. --Thomas M. Davies, Jr., Professor of History and Director, Center for Latin American Studies, San Diego State University The lazy greaser asleep under a sombrero and the avaricious gringo with money-stuffed pockets are only two of the negative stereotypes that North Americans and Latin Americans have cherished during several centuries of mutual misunderstanding. This unique study probes the origins of these stereotypes and myths and explores how they have shaped North American impressions of Latin America from the time of the Pilgrims up to the end of the twentieth century. Fredrick Pike's central thesis is that North Americans have identified themselves with civilization in all its manifestations, while viewing Latin Americans as hopelessly trapped in primitivism, the victims of nature rather than its masters. He shows how this civilization-nature duality arose from the first European settlers' perception that nature--and everything identified with it, including American Indians, African slaves, all women, and all children--was something to be conquered and dominated. This myth eventually came to color the North American establishment view of both immigrants to the United States and all our neighbors to the south. For everyone interested in understanding and improving relations between North and Latin America, this book will be required reading.

During the most idealistic years of John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress development program, Bolivia was the highest per capita recipient of U.S. foreign aid in Latin America. Nonetheless, Washington's modernization programs in early 1960s' Bolivia ended up on a collision course with important sectors of the country's civil society, including radical workers, rebellious students, and a plethora of rightwing and leftwing political parties. In From Development to Dictatorship, Thomas C. Field Jr. reconstructs the untold story of USAID's first years in Bolivia, including the country's 1964 military coup d'état.Field draws heavily on local sources to demonstrate that Bolivia's turn toward anticommunist, development-oriented dictatorship was the logical and practical culmination of the military-led modernization paradigm that provided the liberal underpinnings of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. In the process, he explores several underappreciated aspects of Cold War liberal internationalism: the tendency of "development" to encourage authoritarian solutions to political unrest, the connection between modernization theories and the rise of Third World armed forces, and the intimacy between USAID and CIA covert operations. Challenging the conventional dichotomy between ideology and strategy in international politics, From Development to Dictatorship engages with a growing literature on development as a key rubric for understanding the interconnected processes of decolonization and the Cold War.