The powerful, untold story of the 1950 revolution in Puerto Rico and the long history of U.S. intervention on the island, that the New York Times says could not be more timely.

In 1950, after over fifty years of military occupation and colonial rule, the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico staged an unsuccessful armed insurrection against the United States. Violence swept through the island: assassins were sent to kill President Harry Truman, gunfights roared in eight towns, police stations and post offices were burned down. In order to suppress this uprising, the US Army deployed thousands of troops and bombarded two towns, marking the first time in history that the US government bombed its own citizens.

Nelson A. Denis tells this powerful story through the controversial life of Pedro Albizu Campos, who served as the president of the Nationalist Party. A lawyer, chemical engineer, and the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard Law School, Albizu Campos was imprisoned for twenty-five years and died under mysterious circumstances. By tracing his life and death, Denis shows how the journey of Albizu Campos is part of a larger story of Puerto Rico and US colonialism.

Through oral histories, personal interviews, eyewitness accounts, congressional testimony, and recently declassified FBI files, War Against All Puerto Ricans tells the story of a forgotten revolution and its context in Puerto Rico's history, from the US invasion in 1898 to the modern-day struggle for self-determination. Denis provides an unflinching account of the gunfights, prison riots, political intrigue, FBI and CIA covert activity, and mass hysteria that accompanied this tumultuous period in Puerto Rican history.

Una novedosa y osada visión de la historia de Puerto Rico, desde la época precolombina, hasta hoy día.

La historia de Puerto Rico ha estado marcada por conquistas y resistencias. A lo largo de los siglos los puertorriqueños han creado y sorteado complejas ideas sobre lo que significa pertenecer a una nación. En este libro, Jorell Meléndez-Badillo ofrece una nueva interpretación de la historia de Puerto Rico que da voz a los habitantes del archipiélago y propone una nueva perspectiva sobre los retos políticos, económicos y sociales a los que se enfrentan hoy en día.

En este extraordinario trabajo de investigación histórica, el autor ilumina la vibrante cultura del archipiélago en los siglos previos a la llegada de Colón, así como la compleja y turbulenta historia de Puerto Rico en los siglos que siguieron, desde la primera insurrección indígena liderada por el poderoso cacique Agueybaná II contra el dominio colonial en 1511, hasta el establecimiento del Estado Libre Asociado en 1952. Meléndez-Badillo también retrata con destreza el periodo contemporáneo, así como la compleja y desigual historia colonial del archipiélago con el territorio
continental de Estados Unidos.

Una historia cautivadora, por momentos personal y siempre sorprendente, del colonialismo, la rebelión y la creación de una identidad nacional, que brinda nuevas perspectivas, no solo sobre Puerto Rico y el Caribe, sino también sobre los Estados Unidos.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A new panoramic history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian
times to today !

For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated
complex ideas about nationhood. Meléndez-Badillo provides a
new history of Puerto Rico, highlighting the vibrant cultures of the
archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus, and
capturing the full sweep of Puerto Rico's turbulent history in the
centuries that followed, from the first indigenous insurrection
against colonial rule by the powerful chieftain Agüeybaná II, to the
establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952.

Puerto Rico is an engaging, sometimes personal, and consistently
surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a
national identity, offering new perspectives not only on Puerto
Rico and the Caribbean but also on the United States and the
Atlantic world.

A groundbreaking investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the American imagination and a dark laboratory of Western experimentation, revealing secrets to racial and environmental progress that impact how we live today.

Dark Laboratory is a gargantuan, soulful work. It obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean's utility to Western Wealth.
--Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands' bounty--including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold--for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands' sacred ecologies.

Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that have led us astray.

Through the lens of the Caribbean, both guide and warning of the man-made disasters that continue to plague our world, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. And in redressing these twin apocalypses, Dark Laboratory becomes a record of the violence that continues to shape the Caribbean today. But it is also a declaration of hope, offering solutions toward a better future based on knowledge gleaned from island ecosystems, and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.

A panoramic history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian times to today

Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago's people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today.

In this masterful work of scholarship, Meléndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus and captures the full sweep of Puerto Rico's turbulent history in the centuries that followed, from the first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511--led by the powerful chieftain Agüeybaná II--to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952. He deftly portrays the contemporary period and the intertwined though unequal histories of the archipelago and the continental United States.

Puerto Rico is an engaging, sometimes personal, and consistently surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a national identity, offering new perspectives not only on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean but on the United States and the Atlantic world more broadly.

Available in Spanish from our partners at Grupo Planeta

La poderosa e inédita historia de la revolución de 1950 en Puerto Rico y la larga historia de la intervención estadounidense en la isla, que el New York Times dice no podría ser más oportuna.

En 1950, después de cincuenta años de ocupación militar y gobierno colonial, el Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico montó una fallida revolución armada contra Estados Unidos. La violencia arraso con la isla: comandos nacionalistas fueron enviados a Washington a ajusticiar al presidente Harry Truman, se desataron tiroteos en ocho municipios, se incendiaron cuarteles policiacos y oficinas de correo. Para sofocar esta insurrección, el Ejército de Estados Unidos desplegó miles de tropas y ametralló dos pueblos desde el aire, marcando la primera vez en su historia que el gobierno estadounidense atacó de esta forma a sus propios ciudadanos.

Por medio de narraciones orales, entrevistas personales, relatos de testigos oculares, testimonios del Congreso de Estados Unidos y archivos recientemente liberados al público por el FBI, Guerra Contra Todos los Puertorriqueños nos relata la historia de una revolución olvidada y su contexto en la historia grande de Puerto Rico, desde la invasión estadounidense de 1898 hasta la lucha actual por la plena autodeterminación de los puertorriqueños.

A powerful and impassioned historical account of the largest successful revolt by enslaved people in history: the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803

One of the seminal texts about the history of slavery and abolition.... Provocative and empowering. --The New York Times Book Review

The Black Jacobins, by Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James, was the first major analysis of the uprising that began in the wake of the storming of the Bastille in France and became the model for liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of plantation owners toward enslaved people was horrifyingly severe.

And it is the story of a charismatic and barely literate enslaved person named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who successfully led the Black people of San Domingo against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces--and in the process helped form the first independent post-colonial nation in the Caribbean.

With a new introduction (2023) by Professor David Scott.

Un recuento crucial y preciso de los 122 anos de Puerto Rico como colonia de los EE. UU.

A dos años del huracán María, Puerto Rico aún sigue recuperándose de la destrucción física de la tormenta y el colapso de la infraestructura resultante. La devastación agravó los efectos dañinos de más de un siglo causados por la explotación de Estados Unidos con sus políticas económicas, sociales y de asuntos políticos, incluido el trauma infligido por su crisis de deuda de 72 mil millones de dólares.
En La isla de la fantasía, el periodista Ed Morales describe cómo, a lo largo de los años, Puerto Rico ha servido como un satélite colonial, una vitrina de la Guerra Fría del Caribe, un vertedero de productos manufacturados en Estados Unidos y un refugio fiscal corporativo. Emprendiendo al lector en un viaje ida y vuelta de San Juan a la ciudad de Nueva York, La isla de la fantasía es un relato crucial y claro de los 122 años de Puerto Rico como colonia de los Estados Unidos.

One of Puerto Rico's leading historians, Fernando Pic has had tremendous influence over our currect understanding of Puerto Rican society. Here, he examines the ways in which developments in the courts and commercial centers of the Americas, Europe, and Africa have affected the common people, who have tried since the nineteenth century to take control of their political, social and economic lives. Pic expands his landmark 1986 book, Historia General, for this first updated American edition to include movements and events as recent as the fight for Vieques. This English edition has been updated and translated by the author.

Because many of the documents and books about Puerto Rico have been written by the island's colonizers, only the victors were celebrated. With this in mind, the author has expressly composed this book from the viewpoint of the colonized, suppressed, and exploited. She challenges a previously-held notion that the Ta nos simply gave up at the first sight of the Spaniards, and shows that they not only fought the intruders, but continued to resist them for more than sixty years after the battle of Yag ecas. The author discusses the fate and contributions of Africans who, as slaves or as free persons, became instrumental in Puerto Rico's social and economic development and shows how this multi-cultural Caribbean island brings together the global traditions of the Americas, Africa, and Europe.

This book interprets Puerto Rico's first and most significant attempt to end its colonial dependence on Spain. Looking at the imperial policies and conditions within Puerto Rico that led to the 1868 rebellion known as El Grito de Lares, the author compares the colonization of Puerto Rico with that of Spanish America and explores why the island's independence movement began decades after Spain's other colonies of the region had revolted. Through the extensive use of previously unresearched archival materials of the rebel movement, she corrects many errors found in earlier accounts of the revolt, and offers new interpretations of the movement's impact on Spanish-Puerto Rican relations.

In this work, Gonz lez dismantles the myth of a dominant Spanish and racially white national culture in Puerto Rican history. He claims that the national identity is primarily Mestizo (mixed race) with a significant contribution from Africa. Gonz lez calls the African slaves and Mestizo peasantry the first Puerto Ricans because they were the first inhabitants who had to make the island their home. Having witnessed successful uprisings in neighboring Haiti, the Spanish authorities encouraged white immigrants to settle in Puerto Rico in an attempt to whiten the population, then thought to be tilting dangerously to the advantage of the Afro-Antilleans. These immigrants became the small but influential class of landowners and, later, urban professionals. According to the author's grand metaphor, Afro-Antilleans and Mestizos constitute the first storey, or tier, of the Puerto Rican house of the title, landowners the second, urban professionals the third, and the managerial class the fourth.

Now part of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck

The 20th anniversary edition of a pioneering classic that explores the contexts in which history is produced--now with a new foreword by renowned scholar Hazel Carby

Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution--the most successful slave revolt in history--alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.

This modern classic resides at the intersection of history, anthropology, Caribbean, African-American, and post-colonial studies, and has become a staple in college classrooms around the country. In a new foreword, Hazel Carby explains the book's enduring importance to these fields of study and introduces a new generation of readers to Trouillot's brilliant analysis of power and history's silences.

This book is a new edition of the most beautifully written history of the Caribbean from the European discovery through the nineteenth century. Commonweal wrote of the 1946 edition, Arciniegas has written a most informative and entertaining book...the student of political and social morals will find in it much to ponder. The New Republic concurred, writing, Senor Arciniegas has a flair for bits of colorful detail and the kind of gossip which makes history come alive. Not the least of the book's virtues are a series of thumbnail biographies of such figures as Amerigo Vespucci, Raleigh, Toussaint, Miranda, Lafitte, William Walker and de Lessep. This edition also features an introduction by Norman Arciniegas.

From the arrival of the first Europeans in the region until the 1930s, plantations -- building their fortunes on sugar, and to a lesser extent on cotton, indigo, tobacco, coffee, and bananas -- brought unprecedented wealth to Old World owners, effected a fundamental shift in the landscape and economy of the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, saw the enslavement of first indigenous populations and then imported Africans, and led to bloody wars on both sides of the Atlantic over control of the lucrative sugar market. In this comprehensive volume, Frank Moya Pons explores the history, context, and consequences of the major changes that marked the Caribbean between Columbus' initial landing and the Great Depression. He investigates indigenous commercial ventures and institutions, the rise of the plantation economy in the 16th century, and the impact of slavery. He discusses the slave revolts and struggles for independence, seen by European landowners not as a matter of human or political rights but as an expensive interruption to their profit flow. History of the Caribbean traces the fate of a group of small islands whose natural resources transformed them first into some of the wealthiest places on earth and then into some of the poorest. This book intertwines the socioeconomics of the Caribbean with Atlantic history in a captivating narrative that will fascinate a general audience and provide new insights for specialists.

An urgent, fascinating, and impassioned (Daniel Immerwahr) history of Puerto Rico's 122 years as a colony of the United States

Since its acquisition by the US in 1898, Puerto Rico has served as a testing ground for the most aggressive and exploitative US economic, political, and social policies. The devastation that ensued finally grew impossible to ignore in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane María, as the physical destruction compounded the infrastructure collapse and trauma inflicted by the debt crisis. In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests.

Taking readers from San Juan to New York City and back to his family's home in the Luquillo Mountains, Morales shows us the machinations of financial and political interests in both the US and Puerto Rico, and the resistance efforts of Puerto Rican artists and activists. Through it all, he emphasizes that the only way to stop Puerto Rico from being bled is to let Puerto Ricans take control of their own destiny, going beyond the statehood-commonwealth-independence debate to complete decolonization.

The Virgin Islands in the course of centuries have witnessed the coming and going of Ciboney, Arawak and Carib peoples, European discovery by Christopher Columbus, temporary occupation by pirates and adventurers, colonization, commercial and plantation development by Danes and other North European settlers, African slavery and its abolition, American purchase, colonial government, social and political change, and in recent years remarkable tourist and industrial developments.

These and other topics have been narrated and interpreted by Dr. Isaac Dookhan in this first comprehensive history of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Dr. Dookhan is eminently well qualified for this undertaking. He was born in the British colony of British Guiana, now independent Guyana, where he was educated in the public schools and served as teacher and headmaster. The author has drawn upon primary and secondary sources in recounting the experience of the Virgin Islands and their peoples. He is concerned with successive waves of immigrants, how they affected the physical environment and cultural life of the islands, the impact of international wars and politics, commodity price movements, and technological changes.

From a noted archeologist/anthropologist, the story of the Tainos--the first people Columbus encountered when he arrived in the Americas--from their earliest days to their rapid decline after European contact
A model of clarity and lightly worn erudition, and it contains the best and most straightforward description of the four Columbus voyages and their implications for the Amerindians I have seen.--Kenneth Maxwell, New York Times Book Review
Drawing on archeological and ethno-historical evidence, Irving Rouse sketches a picture of the Tainos as they existed during the time of Columbus, contrasting their customs with those of their neighbors. He then moves backward in time to the ancestors of the Tainos--two successive groups who settled the West Indies and who are known to archeologists as the Saladoid peoples and the Ostionoid peoples. By reconstructing the development of these groups and studying their interaction with other groups during the centuries before Columbus, Rouse shows precisely who the Tainos were. He vividly recounts Columbus's four voyages, the events of the European contact, and the early Spanish views of the Tainos, particularly their art and religion. The narration shows that the Tainos did not long survive the advent of Columbus. Weakened by forced labor, malnutrition, and diseases introduced by the foreigners, and dispersed by migration and intermarriage, they ceased to exist as a separate population group.

As Rouse discusses the Tainos' contributions to the Spaniards--from Indian corn, tobacco, and rubber balls to art, artifacts, and new words--we realize that their effect on Western civilization, brief through their contact, was an important and lasting one.

Establishes the central role of Afro-Puerto Ricans in the island's history and the creation of its capital city, San Juan.

Originally published in Spanish in 1985 as part of a book series commissioned by Banco Popular, this slim volume makes an invaluable contribution to the history of Black people in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean more broadly. Today, San Mateo de Cangrejos is known as Santurce-a stylish district in the capital of San Juan, birthplace of Harlem Renaissance intellectual and collector Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, and home of the Santurce Cangrejeros for which baseball legends Roberto Clemente and Willie Mays once played. Gilberto Aponte Torres's brief yet transformative history is not about the feats of such great men but rather the human foundations of this unique municipality. San Mateo de Cangrejos was founded in the seventeenth century by cimarrones, or maroons, who were fleeing enslavement on neighboring islands and were later recognized as free by local authorities. Never losing sight of the significance of this fact, Aponte Torres details the religious life of Cangrejos, its economic and urban development, demography, military contributions, and eventual annexation by San Juan in 1862. Thoughtfully translated by Karen Juanita Carrillo, the English edition of San Mateo de Cangrejos includes photographs, a glossary, and other new features to help situate readers and further illuminate the deep roots of Black culture on the island.

For decades, the Hispanic Caribbean has eluded attempts by historians striving to view and analyze Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic as a region rather than as isolated insular units. Focusing on similarities instead of differences and applying comparative methods, the author makes a forceful case for a regional perspective that sheds new light on important historical phenomena such as the evolution of sugar plantations and slavery, persistent colonialism and economic dependence, and the interplay among revolutionary, authoritarian, and lobbyist political cultures. Composed of seven pioneering articles and essays, this book provides key pieces to solving the puzzle of the Hispanic Caribbean's fascinating and often-convulsed history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Hispanic Caribbean was fundamentally a plantation economy, dominated mainly by the world sugar market. The politics were shaped by revolutions, political coups, wars, and elections, resulting in an end of Spanish power, independent states, and the domination of the region by the United States. The author follows these developments throughout the main Hispanic islands and provides a fascinating picture of a region in turmoil.

Toussaint L'Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, in which slaves rebelled against their masters and established the first black republic. In this collection of his writings and speeches, former Haitian politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide demonstrates L'Ouverture's profound contribution to the struggle for equality.