The National Book Award-winning epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal, a first-rate drama of the bold and brilliant engineering feat that was filled with both tragedy and triumph, told by master historian David McCullough.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Truman, here is the national bestselling epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal. In The Path Between the Seas, acclaimed historian David McCullough delivers a first-rate drama of the sweeping human undertaking that led to the creation of this grand enterprise.

The Path Between the Seas tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is a story of astonishing engineering feats, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, heroic successes, and tragic failures. Applying his remarkable gift for writing lucid, lively exposition, McCullough weaves the many strands of the momentous event into a comprehensive and captivating tale.

Winner of the National Book Award for history, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, and the Cornelius Ryan Award (for the best book of the year on international affairs), The Path Between the Seas is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the history of technology, international intrigue, and human drama.

The Panama Canal was the costliest undertaking in history; its completion in 1914 marked the beginning of the American Century. Panama Fever draws on contemporary accounts, bringing the experience of those who built the canal vividly to life. Politicians engaged in high-stakes diplomacy in order to influence its construction. Meanwhile, engineers and workers from around the world rushed to take advantage of high wages and the chance to be a part of history. Filled with remarkable characters, Panama Fever is an epic history that shows how a small, fiercely contested strip of land made the world a smaller place and launched the era of American global dominance.

Restores the region's fraught history of repression and resistance to popular consciousness and connects the United States' interventions and influence to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today.

At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of refuge in the United States. In Central America's Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question How did we get here? Centering the centuries-long intertwined histories of US expansion and Indigenous and Central American struggles against inequality and oppression, Chomsky highlights the pernicious cycle of colonial and neocolonial development policies that promote cultures of violence and forgetting without any accountability or restorative reparations.

Focusing on the valiant struggles for social and economic justice in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, Chomsky restores these vivid and gripping events to popular consciousness. Tracing the roots of displacement and migration in Central America to the Spanish conquest and bringing us to the present day, she concludes that the more immediate roots of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras lie in the wars and in the US interventions of the 1980s and the peace accords of the 1990s that set the stage for neoliberalism in Central America.

Chomsky also examines how and why histories and memories are suppressed, and the impact of losing historical memory. Only by erasing history can we claim that Central American countries created their own poverty and violence, while the United States' enjoyment and profit from their bananas, coffee, mining, clothing, and export of arms are simply unrelated curiosities.

The Maya has long been established as the best, most readable introduction to the ancient Maya by experts Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston. In this new edition, this classic has been updated by distilling the latest scholarship for the general reader and student.

This edition incorporates the most recent archaeological and epigraphic findings, which continue to proceed at a fast pace, along with full-color illustrations. The new material includes evidence of the earliest human occupants of the Maya region and the beginnings of agriculture and settled life; analysis from lidar on swampy areas, such as Usumacinta, that show enormous rectangle earthworks, including Aguada Fe nix, dating from 1050 to 750 BCE; and recent advances in decoding Maya writing and imagery. This revised edition also expands information on the roles of women, courtiers, and outsiders; covers novel research about Maya cities, including research into water quality, marketplaces, fortifications, and integrated road systems; and includes coverage of more recent Maya, including their displacement and mistreatment, along with growing affirmations of their cultural identity and legal rights.

The Maya highlights the vitality of current scholarship about this brilliant culture.

The Sandinista Revolution and its victory against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua gripped the United States and the world in the 1980s. But as soon as the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990 and the Iran Contra affair ceased to make headlines, it became, in Washington at least, a thing of the past.

Mateo Jarquín recenters the revolution as a major episode in the history of Latin America, the international left, and the Cold War. Drawing on research in Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica, he recreates the perspective of Sandinista leaders in Managua and argues that their revolutionary project must be understood in international context. Because struggles over the Revolution unfolded transnationally, the Nicaraguan drama had lasting consequences for Latin American politics at a critical juncture. It also reverberated in Western Europe, among socialists worldwide, and beyond, illuminating global dynamics like the spread of democracy and the demise of a bipolar world dominated by two superpowers.

Jarquín offers a sweeping analysis of the last left-wing revolution of the twentieth century, an overview of inter-American affairs in the 1980s, and an incisive look at the making of the post-Cold War order.

Bitter Fruit is a comprehensive and insightful account of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. First published in 1982, this book has become a classic, a textbook case of the relationship between the United States and the Third World. The authors make extensive use of U.S. government documents and interviews with former CIA and other officials. It is a warning of what happens when the United States abuses its power.

The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas -- and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control. There was never a single, unified Maya state or empire, but always numerous, evolving ethnic groups speaking dozens of distinct Mayan languages. The people we call Maya never thought of themselves as such; yet something definable, unique, and endlessly fascinating - what we call Maya culture - has clearly existed for millennia. So what was their self-identity and how did Maya civilization come to be invented?

With the Maya historically subdivided and misunderstood in so many ways, the pursuit of what made them the Maya is all the more important. In this Very Short Introduction, Restall and Solari explore the themes of Maya identity, city-state political culture, art and architecture, the Maya concept of the cosmos, and the Maya experience of contact with -- including invasion by -- outsiders. Despite its brevity, this book is unique for its treatment of all periods of Maya civilization, from its origins to the present.

An unforgettable account of how misguided and illegal U.S. policies in Central America during the 1980s resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, created many of today's problems along America's Southern Border, and helped perpetuate a legacy of hawkish militarism at the expense of democracy and diplomacy.

During the 1980s, the United States financed and directed wars against popular movements in Central America. Vowing to block Soviet expansion, the U.S. waged a Vietnam-style counterinsurgency in El Salvador while orchestrating a covert and illegal war to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Some 75,000 died in El Salvador, and more than 30,000 were killed in Nicaragua, most of them civilians. Countless more were displaced. Meanwhile, with tacit U.S. support, the Guatemalan military razed hundreds of Indigenous communities and killed more than 200,000 people during a civil war that claimed the lives of 100,000 Mayan villagers.

Scott Wallace arrived in Central America in 1983 to cover these conflicts as a freelance stringer for CBS News and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as well as Newsweek, The Independent, and The Guardian. Traveling along the frontlines of war, Wallace evolved a distinctive reporting style that included photojournalistic portraits of startling intimacy, page-turning tales of high adventure, and incisive analysis of the events he witnessed. The result is this unforgettable account of a reporter coming of age on the battlefield as he seeks the truth amid a landscape rife with death and deception.

Introduced by the Honorable Christopher J. Dodd, readers will find within these pages a compelling and eye-opening narrative and visual record of the conflicts that continue to reverberate in the crisis on America's southern border with Mexico and in policy decisions made in Washington that impact families at home and throughout the world. Situating the exercise of U.S. power on a continuum running from Vietnam through Central America to Iraq, where he later reported, Wallace provides a rare look into the real-life consequences of morally dubious policies while offering a gripping primer for aspiring foreign correspondents and field reporters.

In Central America in the Crosshairs of War, Scott Wallace presents a compelling memoir that not only reboots America's history of misadventures overseas since Vietnam, but also restores faith in the importance and power of journalism at a time when disinformation and alternate realities abound in America and abroad. As Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Debrorah Nelson observers: Scott Wallace takes us along his harrowing journey into the Central American jungles for an important historical accounting that draws a sharp line from the U.S. proxy wars of the 1980s to today's crises in those countries and at our own southern border.

On April 29, 1981 American journalist George Thurlow was shot by members of the El Salvador Treasury Police on a jungle road in San Salvador. His 29-year-old driver, Gilberto Moran, was killed and Associated Press photographer Joaquin Zuniga was seriously injured in the shooting. Thurlow left El Salvador two days later to receive medical treatment in the U.S. In 2000 he began a more than two-decade search to find Gilberto Moran's grave and some form of personal redemption.

El Salvador: Blood On All Our Hands details that search and introduces us to those who fought in the civil war, U.S. aid workers helping to rebuild the tiny country, as well as every day Salvadorans who suffered through a war that killed 70,000 of their fellow citizens. Many Salvadorans have decided it is time to move on from focusing on the war as their country enters a new era.

The U.S. officials who supplied weapons and encouragement to the Salvadoran government, its security forces and the murderous death squads have never been held accountable. In El Salvador a Truth Commission has identified those most responsible for the assassinations and murder of priests, journalists and opposition leaders. This book is intended to document a moment in Salvadoran history when the United States government was responsible for a cruel carnage and to illustrate how American citizens are attempting to repair the damage.

Estados Unidos invadió Panamá en 1989 y el mundo entero tuvo algo que decir.

Las opiniones de entonces reflejaban juicios apresurados sobre las dos noticias más relevantes: un país ocupado y la caída del dictador Manuel Antonio Noriega, aquel exjefe de inteligencia y fiable colaborador de la CIA que resultó más listo y goloso de lo que los norteamericanos esperaban.

Las multitudinarias protestas ciudadanas contra la dictadura, seguidas por una sangrienta invasión estadounidense, representan la etapa más dolorosa, cruenta y humillante de la historia de esta nación. Los panameños no la han olvidado, aunque la conocen fragmentada, recuerdan incidentes aislados o anécdotas puntuales. El tiempo ha hecho que queden más dudas que respuestas. Imperdonable sería obviarla.

Historia rigurosamente documentada es la que Fernando Berguido nos ofrece en El colapso de Panamá. La historia de la invasión y del fin de la dictadura. Han pasado ya treinta y cinco años de aquellos acontecimientos, y hasta ahora no se había abordado el periodo comprendido entre 1984 y 1989 de forma tan completa y fluida, con entrevistas inéditas a sus protagonistas, relatos desconocidos y documentos confidenciales que ven la luz por primera vez. Puede que quienes vivieron y sufrieron aquellos años descubran hechos que les sorprendan; los más jóvenes encontrarán en esta crónica, que a menudo parece sacada de la más pura ficción, las raíces de su pasado y claves que les ayuden a entender el presente.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

The United States invaded Panama in 1989, and the whole world had something to say about it.

Opinions at the time reflected a rush to judgement about the two biggest news stories: the occupation of a country and the fall of dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega, the one-time head of intelligence and CIA informant who turned out to be shrewder and greedier than the US bargained for.

The mass protests against the dictatorship, followed by the bloody US invasion, were the most painful, brutal and humiliating episodes in Panama's history. Its citizens have not forgotten what happened, although their accounts are fragmented and revolve around isolated incidents. Time has brought more questions than answers, but forgetting would be unforgivable.

To fill the gap, Fernando Berguido offers us this meticulously documented history of the invasion and the end of the dictatorship. In the thirty-five years since these events, no one has produced such a complete and fluid account of the period between 1984 and 1989, with never-before-published interviews, reports and confidential documents revealed here for the first time. In this review of facts that are often stranger than fiction, those who suffered through those years may discover elements that will surprise them, while younger generations will uncover their country's past and the keys for understanding its present.

Terror is the given of the place. The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. Didion brings the country to life (The New York Times), delivering an anatomy of a particular brand of political terror--its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy.

As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, Didion interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb to disappear. Here, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

The Panama Canal's untold history--from the Panamanian point of view. Sleuth and scholar Marixa Lasso recounts how the canal's American builders displaced 40,000 residents and erased entire towns in the guise of bringing modernity to the tropics.

The Panama Canal set a new course for the modern development of Central America. Cutting a convenient path from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, it hastened the currents of trade and migration that were already reshaping the Western hemisphere. Yet the waterway was built at considerable cost to a way of life that had characterized the region for centuries. In Erased, Marixa Lasso recovers the history of the Panamanian cities and towns that once formed the backbone of the republic.

Drawing on vast and previously untapped archival sources and personal recollections, Lasso describes the canal's displacement of peasants, homeowners, and shop owners, and chronicles the destruction of a centuries-old commercial culture and environment. On completion of the canal, the United States engineered a tropical idyll to replace the lost cities and towns--a space miraculously cleansed of poverty, unemployment, and people--which served as a convenient backdrop to the manicured suburbs built exclusively for Americans. By restoring the sounds, sights, and stories of a world wiped clean by U.S. commerce and political ambition, Lasso compellingly pushes back against a triumphalist narrative that erases the contribution of Latin America to its own history.

In A SHORT HISTORY OF GUATEMALA, Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr. (Ph.D., Tulane University, 1962) briefly synthesizes the exciting history of Guatemala from its ancient Maya heritage to the present. Based on nearly a half-century of research on the history of this Central American republic, the work highlights the political, economic, and social evolution of Guatemala, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With keen insight into the struggle for economic and social development since national independence in 1821, Woodward offers a new interpretation of the country's past and present

An honest judge in Medellin, a Maoist guerilla of Peru's Shining Path, the fair-haired Angel of Death in Argentina's Dirty War, the pool-party rich of El Salvador, the disabused revolutionaries of Nicaragua, and the ordinary Chileans who became silent partners in Pinochet's dictatorship--these people live in Latin America, but their stories illuminate the human face of violence all over the world.

Tina Rosenberg spent five years trying to understand their world and learning to live with these children of Cain. Their stories are disturbing precisely because these people are not monsters; the faces in Children of Cain are not those of strangers.

In 13 Colors of the Honduran Resistance, feminist author and activist Melissa Cardoza tells 13 stories about women from the Honduran resistance in the aftermath of the June 28th, 2009 coup against President Manuel Zelaya. On that day, led by a U.S.-trained General, the Honduran military barged in to the president's house and took him in his pajamas into a helicopter, flying him first to a U.S. base in Honduras and then on to Costa Rica. It was the first coup of the 21st century in Central America. The military and Honduran oligarchy quickly imposed an interim government, undid most of the progressive reforms underway, and passed hundreds of concessions to corporate interests. To the surprise of the coup's backers, however, thousands of people around the country spontaneously came out into the streets. Their numbers and the depth of their vision and commitment kept growing during hundreds of days of consecutive protest, with fearless women at the forefront.

Melissa calls those the times when protests were poetry in the streets. 13 Colors of the Honduran Resistance is her most intimate and impactful work to date. It is a book about the multiple and intersectional identities of those who found each other in the streets through the resistance. It is a book about what they share, not just with each other but with all people who struggle for a more just world. Melissa weaves the stories of 13 women together in a way that leaves readers unfamiliar with the events surrounding the coup and resistance in Honduras convinced of their fundamental importance to liberation struggles everywhere.

This bilingual edition is the product of collaboration with translator Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, who was introduced to the author by assassinated indigenous leader Berta C ceres, to whom this edition is dedicated.

---- En 13 Colores de la Resistencia Hondure a, la luchadora feminista y autora Melissa Cardoza cuenta 13 historias de mujeres de la resistencia hondure a despu s del golpe de Estado del 28 de julio de 2009 en contra del Presidente Manuel Zelaya. Ese d a, los militares hondure os allanaron la casa del Presidente y lo llevaron en pijamas a un helic ptero, pasando primero por una base militar de EE.UU. en Honduras y luego a Costa Rica. Dirigidos por el General Hondure o Romeo V squez Vel squez, entrenado en la Escuela de las Am ricas en EE.UU., llevaron a cabo el primer golpe de Estado del siglo veintiuno en Centroam rica. Los militares y la oligarqu a hondure a r pidamente impusieron un gobierno interino, deshicieron la mayor parte de las reformas progresivas que hab an empezado y aprobaron cientos de concesiones para las empresas privadas.

Pero los golpistas fueron sorprendidos cuando miles de personas en todo el pa s salieron espont neamente a las calles. El n mero de gente, as como la profundidad de su visi n y compromiso durante cientos de d as de movilizaci n consecutiva, continuaron creciendo con mujeres valientes siempre en las primeras filas.

Melissa describe esa etapa como los tiempos cuando las manifestaciones eran poes a en las calles. 13 Colores de la Resistencia Hondure a es su obra m s ntima e impactante hasta la fecha. Como sugiere el t tulo, es un libro sobre las identidades plurales e interseccionales de quienes se encontraron en las calles por medio de la resistencia. Es un libro sobre lo que comparten, no solamente entre s , sino con todos los pueblos que luchan por un mundo m s justo. Melissa teje las historias de estas 13 mujeres juntas de tal forma que el lector o la lectora, sin conocimiento previo de los eventos del golpe de Estado y de la resistencia en Honduras, termina convencid@ de su importancia fundamental para las luchas de liberaci n en todas partes.

Esta edici n biling e es producto de una colaboraci n con traductor Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, quien conoci a la autora a trav s de la lideresa ind gena asesinada Berta C ceres, a quien esta edi

Authority--whether royal, divine, material, fleeting, or enduring--varied across space and time in the Maya region, from its Preclassic dynastic origins through the colonial encounters of the sixteenth century. The changing faces of Maya rulership and their foundational ties to symbolic material objects, architecture, ancestral beings, deities, and written monuments are fully explored in the fifteen chapters of Faces of Rulership in the Maya Region. The contributors track rulership--beyond the prevalent paradigm of divine kingship--by considering the power of queens and unravelling codes embedded in art and public buildings. Through the close study of the agency of rulers who often sought to distinguish themselves from other dynasts, the contributors come to an enhanced understanding of the relational dynamics between rulers and subject peoples. The book reveals that rulership was perpetually challenged in ways that impacted adjacent institutions of nobles and literati. Applying concepts of rulership outlined in On Kings by David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, this volume brings Maya history and archaeology into the current, anthropological conversation about rulership in premodern times.

This is the first complete version in English of the Book of the People of the Quiche Maya, the most powerful nation of the Guatemalan highlands in pre-Conquest times and a branch of the ancient Maya, whose remarkable civilization in pre-Columbian America is in many ways comparable to the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. Generally regarded as America's oldest book, the Popol Vuh, in fact, corresponds to our Christian Bible, and it is, moreover, the most important of the five pieces of the great library treasures of the Maya that survived the Spanish Conquest.

Long characterized as an exceptional country within Latin America, Costa Rica has been hailed as a democratic oasis in a continent scorched by dictatorship and revolution; the ecological mecca of a biosphere laid waste by deforestation and urban blight; and an egalitarian, middle-class society blissfully immune to the violent class and racial conflicts that have haunted the region. Arguing that conceptions of Costa Rica as a happy anomaly downplay its rich heritage and diverse population, The Costa Rica Reader brings together texts and artwork that reveal the complexity of the country's past and present. It characterizes Costa Rica as a site of alternatives and possibilities that undermine stereotypes about the region's history and challenge the idea that current dilemmas facing Latin America are inevitable or insoluble.

This essential introduction to Costa Rica includes more than fifty texts related to the country's history, culture, politics, and natural environment. Most of these newspaper accounts, histories, petitions, memoirs, poems, and essays are written by Costa Ricans. Many appear here in English for the first time. The authors are men and women, young and old, scholars, farmers, workers, and activists. The Costa Rica Reader presents a panoply of voices: eloquent working-class raconteurs from San José's poorest barrios, English-speaking Afro-Antilleans of the Limón province, Nicaraguan immigrants, factory workers, dissident members of the intelligentsia, and indigenous people struggling to preserve their culture. With more than forty images, the collection showcases sculptures, photographs, maps, cartoons, and fliers. From the time before the arrival of the Spanish, through the rise of the coffee plantations and the Civil War of 1948, up to participation in today's globalized world, Costa Rica's remarkable history comes alive. The Costa Rica Reader is a necessary resource for scholars, students, and travelers alike.

Anti-Catholicism in the Mexican Revolution, 1913-1940 examines anti-Catholic leaders and movements during the Mexican Revolution, an era that resulted in a constitution denying the Church political rights. Anti-Catholic Mexicans recognized a common enemy in a politically active Church in a predominantly Catholic nation. Many books have elucidated the popular roots and diversity of Roman Catholicism in Mexico, but the perspective of the Church's adversaries has remained much less understood.

This volume provides a fresh perspective on the violent conflict between Catholics and the revolutionary state, which was led by anti-Catholics such as Plutarco Elías Calles, who were bent on eradicating the influence of the Catholic Church in politics, in the nation's educational system, and in the national consciousness. The zeal with which anti-Catholics pursued their goals--and the equal vigor with which Catholics defended their Church and their faith--explains why the conflict between Catholics and anti-Catholics turned violent, culminating in the devastating Cristero Rebellion (1926-1929).

Collecting essays by a team of senior scholars in history and cultural studies, the book includes chapters on anti-Catholic leaders and intellectuals, movements promoting scientific education and anti-alcohol campaigns, muralism, feminist activists, and Mormons and Mennonites. A concluding afterword by Matthew Butler, a global authority on twentieth-century Mexican religion, provides a larger perspective on the themes of the book.

Concise yet thorough, this engaging book provides an overview of the unique history of an increasingly important Central American nation.

The History of Costa Rica provides a thorough, straightforward narrative of a Central American country that has become increasingly more visible since the end of the 20th century. Written for students and the general reader, this book covers the nation from its pre-Colombian origins to the present day.

This chronologically organized volume documents the area's earliest inhabitants, then moves on through the colonial period, the process of nation-state formation in the 19th century, the volatile period of liberal reform, and the era of civil war and its aftermath. More recent times are also explored, including the role of Costa Rica in the Cold War, the peace process of the 1980s, and the development of the strong tourism industry that flourishes today. Among the prominent themes running through the book are the unique historical development of the country, the importance of its democratic tradition, and Costa Rica's role in a global context.