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Book Reviews Nevertheless, this is a deeply researched, clearly argued case study of the intersection of class, ethnic, and gender identities that should be of interest to historians and graduate students interested not only in Nicaragua but all of Latin America. Alan McPherson History Department Howard University THE HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA: COLLISION OF CULTURES. By Marshall C. Eakin. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, p. 448, $19.95. The task with any introductory history text that covers an entire region stretching across national boundaries and vast historical time frames is to synthesize common patterns and processes that bind the region and its peoples together, without erasing the diversity that makes local peoples , places and histories unique. Some authors get trapped into an evolutionary mindset that views current historical outcomes as the inevitable consequence of past events. Marshall Eakin’s interpretive history of Latin America achieves the prior, without succumbing to the latter. The author narrates the longue durée of the “always evolving and shifting region” (4) of Latin America, while voicing a multiplicity of stories from the creation of the region (Columbus’s encounter with the New World) to the present. The principal narrative running throughout the book is the collision of African, European, and Native American peoples in the creation of Latin America. The author uses the metaphor of “three (cultural) streams” converging into one (Latin American) river to signify this collision of cultures. In the post-colonial era, immigrants from Asia and the Middle East introduced new cultural streams into the region. Secondary themes describe a tendency towards highly centralized and lightly representative political systems, economic development creating staggering poverty and gross inequality , a syncretic racial and religious system, and the on-going search for identity, at the regional, national, and local level. Frequent references to Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities are sprinkled throughout the text. The author uses the recurring processes of conquest and resistance to colonization to describe the essence of Latin America; the main external protagonists in this drama shift from the Iberian Peninsula in the colonial era to the Untied States today. The book is arranged into four sections organized chronologically: pre-colonial and conquest, colonial, post-colonial nineteenth century, and twentieth century. The first half of the book is dedicated to the period through independence from Europe, while the last half of the book covers the post-colonial period to the present. The first two sections of the book describe the conquest and colonial system that laid the framework for the political, economic and social structures that exist today. The most important of these were the cross and the sword tandem of the Catholic 89 The Latin Americanist, June 2008 Church and the military apparatus, the large landed estates, and forced indigenous and African slave labor. The search for a national and cultural (mestizo) identity coinciding with the “Second Conquest” of the sparsely inhabited interior regions in Latin America are key topics in the nineteenth century throughout the region. The twentieth century finds Latin American nations attempting to stabilize their political and economic institutions in the midst of confronting the hegemonic reach of the Untied States. Since the 1980s, a return to democracy across the region has been accompanied by the “Third Conquest” of globalization. The author leaves open for interpretation if increasing hemispheric economic integration in the twenty-first century will lead to a common future for the Americas. A more general division, that may be helpful in university courses that cover narrower Latin American historical periods, would be to use the first half of the book in a colonial Latin American survey class (sections 1 and 2), and the second half of the book for a post-colonial Latin American survey course (sections 3 and 4). Although the author may argue that all sections of the book build upon each other and are necessary in the resulting Latin American story he tells, professors in academic departments that divide Latin American Studies courses into colonial and post-colonial studies may be tempted to utilize the half of the book that corresponds to the more limited time scale of these courses. This is not to diminish the value of this work as...

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