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Tags: history-the americas

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  Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan

  by Hugh Thomas

  From one of the greatest historians of the Spanish world, here is a fresh and fascinating account of Spain’s early conquests in the Americas. Hugh Thomas’s magisterial narrative of Spain in the New World has all the characteristics of great historical literature: amazing discoveries, ambition, greed, religious fanaticism, court intrigue, and a battle for the soul of humankind. Hugh Thomas shows Spain at the dawn... (more)
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  Cuba : A Short History (Cambridge History of Latin America)

  Cuba: A Short History brings together four chapters from Volumes 3, 5, and 7 of The Cambridge History of Latin America to provide for scholars, students and general readers a concise history of this important island nation. Contributors, top scholars in the field, trace the political, economic, and social development of Cuba from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present day. The concluding chapter,... (more)
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  Slavery

  This new Reader draws on a range of documentary sources to show the origins, history, and realities of slavery and the slave trade. Exploring the economic, cultural, and political role of slavery, the volume shows the similarities as well as the differences in different times and places. While focusing primarily on the Americas, the volume extends to a consideration of slavery in other societies in the classical... (more)
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  Crucible of War : The Seven Years' War and the Fate of the Empire in British North America, 1754 - 1766

  by Fred Anderson

  A masterly narrative history of the Seven Years War, by which the British eliminated French power north of the Caribbean, at the same time igniting the slow-burning fuse of the American revolution. Fred Anderson observes how the war gave American colonists their first conflicts with real Englishmen; and how Americans were consequently emboldened to rally against the men who were once their masters. He offers a... (more)
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  France and England in North America: Part 1. Pioneers of France in the New World

  by Francis Parkman

  This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1907 edition by Little, Brown, and Company, Boston.
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  Bitter fruit : the story of the American coup in Guatemala

  by Stephen C. Schlesinger

  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... (more)
• The lure of Peru : maritime intrusion into the South Sea, 1598-1701Peter T. Bradley

  

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  The lure of Peru : maritime intrusion into the South Sea, 1598-1701

  by Peter T. Bradley

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  Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (Vintage)

  by Fred Anderson

  In this vivid and compelling narrative, the Seven Years' War–long seen as a mere backdrop to the American Revolution–takes on a whole new significance. Relating the history of the war as it developed, Anderson shows how the complex array of forces brought into conflict helped both to create Britain’s empire and to sow the seeds of its eventual dissolution. Beginning with a skirmish in the Pennsylvania... (more)
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  The House of Spirits

  by Isabel Allende

  Bestseller internacional y muy admirado clásico de la literatura latinoamericana, la trascendental novela de Isabel Allende cuenta la historia épica de la numerosa y turbulenta familia Trueba de Chile, con su patriarca angustiado y sus mujeres clarividentes, trazando sus vidas desde los fines del siglo pasado, hasta los días violentos del golpe que derrocó al gobierno de Salvador Allende en 1973. En La casa de... (more)
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  Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (Vintage)

  by John Keegan

  At once a grand tour of the battlefields of North America and an unabashedly personal tribute to the military prowess of an essentially unwarlike people, Fields of Battle spans more than two centuries and the expanse of a continent to show how the immense spaces of North America shaped the wars that were fought on its soil. of photos.
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  Struggle and Survival in Colonial America

  Here are the fascinating stories of twenty-three little-known but remarkable inhabitants of the Spanish, English, and Portuguese colonies of the New World between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Women and men of all the races and classes of colonial society may be seen here dealing creatively and pragmatically (if often not successfully) with the challenges of a harsh social environment. Such extraordinary... (more)
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  The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Vintage)

  by Paul M. Kennedy

  About national and international power in the "modern" or Post Renaissance period. Explains how the various powers have risen and fallen over the 5 centuries since the formation of the "new monarchies" in W. Europe.
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  Betrayed: The Assassination of Digna Ochoa

  by Linda Diebel

  Despite a note beside her body addressed to other "sons-of-bitch" human rights lawyers, the Mexican government ruled Digna Ochoa's violent death "probable suicide" and slammed the case shut in July 2003. But Linda Diebel, a three-time recipient of the Amnesty International Media Award, will not let Ochoa's story die. Betrayed offers her chilling account of a cold-blooded murder and a cover-up that reaches into... (more)
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  The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Latin America Readers)

  Cuba is often perceived in starkly black and white terms—either as the site of one of Latin America’s most successful revolutions or as the repressive regime that is the world’s last bastion of communism. The Cuba Reader multiplies perspectives on the nation many times over, presenting more than one hundred selections about Cuba’s history, culture, and politics. Beginning with the first written account of the... (more)
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  The Zimmerman Telegram

  by Barbara Tuchman

  In January 1917 when World War I was deadlocked and the United States was clinging grimly to neutrality, the British intercepted a telegram from Berlin which they knew would bring America to the aid of the Allies. This is the story of how the message was decoded and how it was put to use by the British - a tale of espionage, secret diplomacy, international politics and personal drama.
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  The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (The Latin America Readers)

  by Ivan Degregori, Robin Kirk

  Sixteenth-century Spanish soldiers described Peru as a land filled with gold and silver, a place of untold wealth. Nineteenth-century travelers wrote of soaring Andean peaks plunging into luxuriant Amazonian canyons of orchids, pythons, and jaguars. The early-twentieth-century American adventurer Hiram Bingham told of the raging rivers and the wild jungles he traversed on his way to rediscovering the “Lost City of... (more)
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  The Way to the Western Sea

  by David Lavender

  Critics have called David Lavender a "master storyteller" ( Library Journal ), his prose "virile, disciplined, yet personal" ( New York Times ), and his book "a balanced, learned, and lively history of an epochal human exploit" ( Choice ). Lavender sets the stage with a lucid account of the imperial rivalries between England, Spain, France, and the United States, and their role in Thomas Jefferson's decision to... (more)
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  New Year in Cuba: Mary Gardner Lowell's Travel Diary, 1831-1832 (New England Diary Series)

  by Mary Gardner Lowell

  In late 1831, at the age of 29, Mary Gardner Lowell and her young son George accompanied her husband, the leading Boston financier and merchant Francis Cabot Lowell II, on a voyage to Cuba, a newly popular destination for the Boston gentry. They spent several weeks on the island travelling from the bustling commercial city of Havanna to the slave plantations of Matanzas province, before making their way up the... (more)
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  Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800

  by Eric Hinderaker

  This book examines and compares the efforts of France, Britain, and the United States to extend imperial dominion over the Ohio Valley, focusing on the relations between Europeans and Indians to tell the story. In a compelling narrative, it considers the ways in which France and Great Britain each attempted to create viable empires in the region, the conflicts that resulted, and the origins and outcome of the... (more)
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  A Brief History of Canada

  by Roger E. Riendeau

  This single volume provides a concise, highly readable introduction to the growth and development of a unique land and its people. Veteran historian Roger Riendeau masterfully surveys the origins of Canada from its First peoples through European contact, the rise and fall of the French Empire, English Conquest, the road to nationhood, and the struggles of a complex society to the end of the second millennium. ... (more)