Revolution and Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: A Special Teaching and Research Collection of The Americas

This curated collection of The Americas explores revolution and revolutionary movements in Latin American history from the colonial period to the present. This theme embraces events and processes contributing to the courses, outcomes, and reactions to both moments conventionally labeled "revolutions" in Latin American history, such as large-scale events like the Mexican Revolution, and more disparate efforts to secure—or resist—sociopolitical change.

The choice of this theme is designed to spotlight the ways in which articles appearing in The Americas have engaged with, and intervened in, the historiography on revolution in Latin America. The compilation takes a broad geographic and temporal approach, and includes scholarship devoted to a variety of Latin American countries in the late-colonial and national periods. This collection highlights how conceptual and analytical trends—the cultural turn, for instance—and methodologies—material or visual culture studies, for example—have contributed to historians' different approaches to the study of revolution over the years, influencing the questions asked and the conclusions drawn. In addition to citing journal articles published from the late 1940s to the 2010s, we include references to monographs and articles published elsewhere, to give readers a sense of other historical scholarship produced contemporaneously with a given article.

In this introduction, I draw out three main themes—resistance, reaction, and solidarity—that flow out of a reading of the articles included in this collection and may be useful frameworks for orienting readers' engagement with the curated compilation's contents.

In his classic study of the Haitian Revolution, C. L. R. James outlined the multiplicity of factors to which historians might direct their critical attention when unraveling the intricacies of revolutionary movements. To excavate the "subsoil" from which revolution emanated at "moments when society is at a boiling point and therefore fluid," James advised scholars to attend to a plethora of interacting forces: economics, society and politics, and the actions of both individuals and "the masses." Mapping these causal factors and their connections would render the apparently "meaningless chaos" of revolutions legible.¹

This curated collection of The Americas works in the tradition of James's approach, spotlighting scholarship published since the journal's inception in 1944 that has explored, from a variety of methodological and analytical approaches, the constellation of forces that have propelled moments at which Latin American societies have been exceptionally fluid. This compilation embraces an expansive definition of the term "revolution," attending to study of diffuse instances of popular mobilization and events conventionally labelled "revolutions" by placing scholarship dedicated to movements that sought to alter fundamental characteristics of Latin American societies in the colonial and national periods into dialogue. The collection thus illuminates the roots of resistance, reaction, and solidarity that animated the origins, processes, and outcomes of revolutionary currents. Simultaneously, the collection demonstrates The Americas' critical interventions into the historiography of revolution. The selected articles, ordered by date of publication, provide a snapshot of how pivotal historiographic shifts—the rise of women's history, the cultural turn—and transformative moments—the Cuban Revolution of 1959 or the proliferation of reactionary military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s—in Latin American history shaped historians' questions and conclusions regarding revolution's nature, and conditioned the methodological strategies through which they attempted to access the histories of revolutionary moments.

The first trio of articles illustrates an early tendency to examine revolution through its leaders. Bernard Bobb's (1947) study of José Artigas's Independence-era exploits in the Banda Oriental, William H. Gray's (1950) analysis of José San Martín's social reforms, and Mary Aquinas Healy's (1953) discussion of Toussaint L'Ouverture's contributions to independence movements in the Americas reflect a slant toward "great-man histories." These biographic accounts foregrounded leaders' personalities, thought, and goals. Overlaid with the contemporary emphasis in the United States on opposing dictatorships in the post World War II and early Cold War periods, these studies veered close to adulation of Independence-era leaders as heroic champions of liberty. Bobb, for example, praised Artigas as "the most gaucho among...