Project MUSE®: The Americas - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Americas.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 57, no. 2 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: The AmericasTWOProject MUSE®The Americas1533-62470003-1615Latest articles in The Americas. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico's Independence by Lisa G. Materson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985763
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I first encountered the story of Ruth Mary Reynolds in 2012 while attending a meeting of the Puerto Rican Studies Association. There I met Noelle Ghoussaini, a playwright and distant relative of Reynolds, who was there to discuss her recent play about her. Standing in line to grab lunch, we got to chatting, and she introduced me to Reynolds's extraordinary life. At the time I was a graduate student and just starting serious study of Puerto Rican nationalism. Ruth Reynolds, a white pacifist from North Dakota, was a part of a devoted group of activists that joined the civil rights movement and sought an end to British empire. After connecting with independence-minded Puerto Ricans in Harlem, New York, she then
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallRadical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico's Independence by Lisa G. Materson (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USRadical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico's Independence by Lisa G. Materson (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®81892026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Between Communal, Emphyteutic, and Private Property: Liberal Experimentation on Agricultural Land in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985764
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In Lo nacional popular en Bolivia, René Zavaleta presents Bolivian society as "abigarrada" from its very formation. For the author, in the country—and more broadly, in the Andean region—different historical periods and forms of social organization overlapped simultaneously, thereby complicating the homogenization that the liberal model seemed to aspire to,1 a tendency toward unification that he identified in political, social, and economic terms, but which can also be extended to the realm of legal equality and property rights.2 Precisely, this paper aims to analyze one of the attempts to break the abigarrado condition of land property in Bolivia, following the weak post-independence efforts of Antonio José de
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallBetween Communal, Emphyteutic, and Private Property: Liberal Experimentation on Agricultural Land in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia2026-03-24text/htmlen-USBetween Communal, Emphyteutic, and Private Property: Liberal Experimentation on Agricultural Land in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®1269492026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24In Memoriam: Mary Kay Vaughan (1942–2024)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985765
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Although we did not meet until 1990, Mary Kay and I were both born as historians of Mexico in the 1968 student movement. Incensed by the police violence unleashed against Vietnam War protesters at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in late August 1968 and inspired by Mexican students braving riot squads and tanks to demand a political dialogue with an authoritarian regime, we were drawn to the struggles of Latin Americans for social justice. Having already changed my major to the History of Latin America, during the summer of 1968, I was studying at the School for Foreign Students at the National University of Mexico, making up the final credits to graduate. So, by chance, I found myself in the eye of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallIn Memoriam: Mary Kay Vaughan (1942–2024)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USIn Memoriam: Mary Kay Vaughan (1942–2024)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®427622026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Histories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s-2010s ed. by Lina Britto and A. Ricardo López-Pedreros (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985766
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In their preface to Histories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s–2010s, editors Lina Britto and Ricardo López-Pedreros pose a foundational question: "Who is entitled to tell the stories of Colombia?" While the answer may initially appear straightforward—those who have lived through and suffered from the country's violences—the question reveals the deep tensions inherent in Colombia's historical narratives. Is the state a victim or a perpetrator of the violence that has marked the nation's past? Do political elites, scholars, or international observers hold the authority to narrate this history? Or should priority be given to those historically excluded from the nation's official memory?Despite the abundance of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallHistories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s-2010s ed. by Lina Britto and A. Ricardo López-Pedreros (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USHistories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s-2010s ed. by Lina Britto and A. Ricardo López-Pedreros (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®92172026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality by Enrique C. Ochoa (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985767
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Mexico Between Feast and Famine offers a historical contextualization of current food challenges by examining the consequences of coloniality and the commodification of food in Mexicans' diet. Ochoa explores the paradox of having a national cuisine designated as "Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity," while 25% of the population suffers from malnutrition and related diseases. To understand this, Ochoa takes us back to colonial times, the development of capitalism after independence, and the industrialization process that started with the Porfiriato and continued after the Mexican Revolution. By doing so, the author demonstrates how economic practices and policies have shaped the national food system.A key
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallMéxico Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality by Enrique C. Ochoa (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USMéxico Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality by Enrique C. Ochoa (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®70602026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24The Taste of Nostalgia: Women, Race, and Culinary Longing in Peru by Amy Cox Hall (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985768
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Ceviche, quinoa, causa—dishes and ingredients previously unfamiliar to most outside of Peru (and neighboring nations in the Pacific region of South America) are today sought after in cities across the United States and Europe. In the twenty-first century, Peru has become a beloved "food nation," exporting chefs and luring tourists with promises of its tasty and (supposedly) traditional cuisine.Who is responsible for the contemporary fame of Peru's culinary repertoire? According to the mass media, a new generation of celebrity chefs—all male—deserve credit. However, according to anthropologist Amy Cox Hall, we would be well served to shift our attention to the Peruvian women who have, in fact, done most of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallThe Taste of Nostalgia: Women, Race, and Culinary Longing in Peru by Amy Cox Hall (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USThe Taste of Nostalgia: Women, Race, and Culinary Longing in Peru by Amy Cox Hall (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®75022026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Searching for Memory: Aluízio Palmar and the Shadow of Dictatorship in Brazil by Jacob Blanc (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985769
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Jacob Blanc's Searching for Memory follows the life of Aluízio Palmar, a former Brazilian guerrilla member who had fought against the country's dictatorship (1964–85) and played a significant role in advancing truth and justice initiatives after the return to democracy—particularly in the southern state of Paraná. The biography, which relies on interviews with Palmar, oral histories with his family and activists, and analysis of the dictatorship's intelligence and court records, not only skillfully traces Palmar's personal life trajectory but also sheds light on how Brazilians grappled with the trauma and memory of the dictatorship's repression.The book's first three chapters explore Palmar's politicization as a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallSearching for Memory: Aluízio Palmar and the Shadow of Dictatorship in Brazil by Jacob Blanc (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USSearching for Memory: Aluízio Palmar and the Shadow of Dictatorship in Brazil by Jacob Blanc (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®71262026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24The Cradle of Words: Language and Knowledge in the Spanish Empire by Valeria López Fadul (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985770
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Historians of early modern Spain have often been struck by Antonio de Nebrija's prophetic proclamation on the relationship of language and empire, but we have not fully understood how debates about the history and science of language informed that interlock. In five well-organized chapters Valeria López Fadul addresses that gap by showing how the emerging field of philology (filología) shaped Spanish imperial thought and laid the groundwork for nineteenth-century Latin American republics to claim Castilian Spanish "as a de facto national language" to rewrite their own contested histories of language contact (197).Chapters are organized chronologically and thematically, often structured around a node of scholars
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallThe Cradle of Words: Language and Knowledge in the Spanish Empire by Valeria López Fadul (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USThe Cradle of Words: Language and Knowledge in the Spanish Empire by Valeria López Fadul (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®73502026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535–1660 by Eward Anthony Polanco (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985771
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With Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535–1660, Edward Anthony Polanco provides the first scholarly monograph on the Nahua tiçitl, focusing on the tiçitl's work (tiçiyotl) and standing in the first and a half century of Spanish rule in central Mexico. Through a comprehensive analysis of the Nahuatl-language descriptions of the tiçitl in the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espan˜a, Polanco defines this figure as "a man or woman who heals adults and children using knowledge of the natural world and who performs diverse, complex procedures that often involve propitiation (appeasing and making offerings) of nonhuman life forces." (9)Polanco frames
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallHealing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535–1660 by Eward Anthony Polanco (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USHealing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535–1660 by Eward Anthony Polanco (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®73132026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas by Elena Jackson Albarrán (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985772
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The "Good Neighbor" period of inter-American relations, running from 1933 through the Second World War, is named for a metaphor of social relations and proximity. Under the guise of being neighborly in a diplomatic sense, the United States heavily invested in cultivating goodwill and mutual understanding with Latin America. But layered into this neighborhood schema for hemispheric relations were other metaphors that assigned a childlike state to Latin American nations when compared with the United States, a "mature" elder in this symbolic family. Adults funded Good Neighbor policies and wrote the dominant narratives about their symbolic children, but they gave real children plenty of work to do embodying
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallGood Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas by Elena Jackson Albarrán (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USGood Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas by Elena Jackson Albarrán (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®72822026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology by Christopher Heaney (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985773
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In Empires of the Dead, Christopher Heaney asserts that the development of American anthropology was largely due to the study of hundreds of thousands of "mummies" extracted from Peru's dry deserts and high mountain caves. The book is organized in three sections (Opening, 1525–1795; Exporting, 1780–1893; Healing, 1863–1965) with three chapters in each. Only the first chapter in Opening discusses Andean funerary customs, mostly of the Inca, though references throughout the volume mention older practices when relevant to Heaney's larger concerns. Told chronologically, his story quickly moves to Spanish conquerors' reactions to Andean treatments of their dead and then follows the entanglements with larger cultural
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallEmpires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology by Christopher Heaney (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USEmpires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology by Christopher Heaney (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®91082026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Transatlantic Bondage: Slavery and Freedom in Spain, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico ed. by Lissette Acosta Corniel (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985774
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In Transatlantic Bondage, the editor brings together eight historical studies that highlight the Black experiences of race, freedom, and enslavement in Spanish Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century (with one chapter on slavery and laws in Iberia and another on Extremadura). Ranging from 20 to 40 pages each, with notes and bibliographies, these chapters examine daily life and community, families, men's and women's roles, slavery laws, and resistance and punishment, and they pose new questions and invite further archival research.The editor introduces the Spanish Caribbean and its relation to Spain, "Afro-Spain," as central to "the formation of Black identities and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallTransatlantic Bondage: Slavery and Freedom in Spain, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico ed. by Lissette Acosta Corniel (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USTransatlantic Bondage: Slavery and Freedom in Spain, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico ed. by Lissette Acosta Corniel (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®66602026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Histories of Solitude: Colombia, 1820s-1970s ed. by Lina Britto and A. Ricardo López-Pedreros (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985775
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The greatest irony—and central strength—of this book lies in its title: These Histories of Solitude emerged from deep collaboration, workshop dialogue, and collective scholarship by dozens of scholars from multiple countries and regions. They are also histories that are best told together. Closely linked to the companion Histories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s–2010s and Colombian initiatives such as Historias de lo político: Ilusiones nacionales y disputas por el orden, the book addresses long-standing questions about democracy, violence, and belonging through a wide range of perspectives and methods.The result is a highly original re-examination of how inclusion, exclusion, and violence have been produced and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallHistories of Solitude: Colombia, 1820s-1970s ed. by Lina Britto and A. Ricardo López-Pedreros (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USHistories of Solitude: Colombia, 1820s-1970s ed. by Lina Britto and A. Ricardo López-Pedreros (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®86042026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798's Tailors' Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil by Greg L. Childs (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985776
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In 1798, Portuguese officials in Bahia, Brazil, accused more than thirty Pardos (free African-descended men), 12 enslaved people, and 12 white men of plotting to overturn colonial rule. This movement later came to be known as the "Tailors' Conspiracy," in reference to the occupation of many of those involved in the movement. Through a careful reading of the trial proceedings, Greg L. Childs offers a nuanced portrayal of the participants, their aspirations, and the true nature of their coalition. Most notably, Seditious Spaces invites us to understand this and similar uprisings not only as driven by radical ideas but as sustained by relations of care and healing.The author traces the origins of the conspiracy to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallSeditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798's Tailors' Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil by Greg L. Childs (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USSeditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798's Tailors' Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil by Greg L. Childs (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®69152026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24The New Kingdom of Granada: The Making and Unmaking of Spain's Atlantic Empire by Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985777
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The New Kingdom of Granada is a landmark work in the field of colonial Latin American history. Until relatively recently, there was scant literature in English on the early colonial history of what is now the nation of Colombia. A new generation of scholars has changed that while pushing the historiography emanating from Colombia in exciting new directions. Among this innovative body of scholarship, Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez's book stands out for its sharp, multifaceted analysis—cultural, economic, political, ecological, and spatial—of the dynamic early period of Spanish rule.Dr. Muñoz-Arbeláez keys in on a defining element of the region's Indigenous history to reveal the challenges that Spanish colonizers faced. The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallThe New Kingdom of Granada: The Making and Unmaking of Spain's Atlantic Empire by Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USThe New Kingdom of Granada: The Making and Unmaking of Spain's Atlantic Empire by Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®82782026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24La fiesta de los negros. Una historia del antiguo carnaval de Buenos Aires y su legado en la cultura popular by Ezequiel Adamovsky (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985778
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La fiesta de los negros es una gran contribución a una inquietud de largo plazo que Ezequiel Adamovsky viene desplegando sobre la cultura popular argentina y, en particular, sus dimensiones étnico-raciales —largamente desatendidas. Si en su libro anterior la figura del gaucho y el criollismo fueron el locus de esa indagación, en el presente, el centro es el carnaval de Buenos Aires. Esas fiestas, sostiene el autor, fueron un espacio de encuentro "crucial para procesar las agudas tensiones de clase, de género y étnico raciales que se produjeron en el momento de formación de la Argentina moderna" (p. 13). Sin negar esos conflictos, Adamovsky vislumbra en el carnaval un predominio de "afectos positivos" (240) y un
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallLa fiesta de los negros. Una historia del antiguo carnaval de Buenos Aires y su legado en la cultura popular by Ezequiel Adamovsky (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USLa fiesta de los negros. Una historia del antiguo carnaval de Buenos Aires y su legado en la cultura popular by Ezequiel Adamovsky (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®98382026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24The Women Who Threw Corn. Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico by Martin Austin Nesvig (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985779
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Martin Austin Nesvig's book offers a well-documented contribution to the study of cultural exchange in early colonial Mexico. The book's central argument focuses on acculturation, but rather than emphasizing how Spanish culture reshaped Indigenous practices, it explores the reverse dynamic: how Nahua and other Indigenous frameworks were adopted – or adapted – by non-Indigenous people, particularly women. Two main objectives guide the work: to show how Nahua culture influenced settler practices from the start of colonization, and to highlight the agency of Spanish, African, and mixed-race women who used hybrid ritual, healing, and magical knowledge in New Spain.The title encapsulates this argument. It refers to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallThe Women Who Threw Corn. Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico by Martin Austin Nesvig (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USThe Women Who Threw Corn. Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico by Martin Austin Nesvig (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®86052026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400 Year History by Felipe Fernánez-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985780
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How the Spanish Empire Was Built is essentially a book about the infrastructure of empire over the course of 400 years of Spain's imperial presence across the globe. It is not, however, a mere erudite account of the major infrastructure projects carried out by Spain across its global possessions, nor is it a collective biography of the engineers who designed and built the empire's infrastructure. Rather, it is an attempt to use the study of imperial infrastructure "as the scaffolding, as it were, on which the empire was erected" (30).Taken on its own, the previous statement seems a bit cryptic. To bring the argument into sharper relief, we must first understand the historical question that drives the book. Although
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallHow the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400 Year History by Felipe Fernánez-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USHow the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400 Year History by Felipe Fernánez-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®77442026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Informal Metropolis: Life on the Edge of Mexico City, 1940–1976 by David Yee (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985781
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Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, or "Neza", is one of Mexico's most maligned and misunderstood places. For a time, it was Latin America's largest and quintessential shantytown, synonymous with unchecked urban growth, poverty, and crime. That ignominious and, by the early twenty-first century, anachronistic reputation was cemented in Mike Davis's 2005 book, Planet of Slums, which identified Ciudad Neza and Mexico City's southeastern periphery as the world's largest "megaslum." David Yee's Informal Metropolis offers a far more nuanced appraisal. By following the people, policies, and institutions that have shaped it, his book traces Ciudad Neza's transformation from a small collection of shacks in the 1940s to a city of more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallInformal Metropolis: Life on the Edge of Mexico City, 1940–1976 by David Yee (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USInformal Metropolis: Life on the Edge of Mexico City, 1940–1976 by David Yee (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®71462026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop by Emma McDonell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985782
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Few books have been more influential in the history of the Americas than Sweetness and Power. Thirty years ago, Sidney Mintz laid the foundation for generations of scholars interested in the political economy of agriculture and the role of crops as pivotal commodities in global capitalism. Since then, researchers across the hemisphere—and throughout the Global South—have sought to identify other commodities whose multidimensional trajectories mirror that of sugar, linking themes such as imperialism, colonialism, enslavement, land dispossession, and the cyclical booms and busts of commodity-based economies. The Quinoa Bust, anthropologist Emma McDonell's debut work, stands out as one of the most compelling examples
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallThe Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop by Emma McDonell (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USThe Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop by Emma McDonell (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®99132026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop by Emma McDonell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985783
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/tam.2025.10113. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History, 1 October 2025.Cambridge University Press apologies for an error in the originally published version of this article. The title of the book under review was previously missing the word 'Miracle'. This has now been
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallThe Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop by Emma McDonell (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USThe Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop by Emma McDonell (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®34502026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Spatial Histories Of The South American Borderlands
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985784
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Patagonia, a region in the southern tip of the Americas where the Andes meet the ocean in present-day Argentina and Chile, takes its name after Europeans thought it a land populated by giants, based on the large footprints left by Indigenous peoples' footwear. Nineteenth-century Argentinian and Chilean intellectuals defined it as a desert, characterized by the absence of the rule of law. But it was far from "empty"; it was inhabited by a plurality of Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century (and well before). Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, Patagonia became increasingly populated by transnational fur seal hunting corporations that threatened the very existence of the seals, selling their furs
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallSpatial Histories Of The South American Borderlands2026-03-24text/htmlen-USSpatial Histories Of The South American Borderlands2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®414072026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Afro-Indigenous Boatmen in the Freshwater Caribbean: Environmental Knowledge in the Magdalena River (Eighteenth-Century New Granada)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985785
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From 1799 to 1804, Prussian naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt, reputed today as one of the founders of modern geography, traveled extensively throughout Spanish America. He visited Cuba, New Granada, Peru, New Spain, and explored two of the major rivers in northern South America, the Orinoco and the Magdalena. Unlike the Orinoco, the Magdalena was not a backland river. In fact, by the time of Humboldt's travel, it was the main fluvial artery of the viceroyalty of the New Granada. From its source in the Colombian Massif, this river flows northward for about 950 miles, pouring its water into the Caribbean Sea, connecting the Andean highlands with the Caribbean plains, and finally, with the Atlantic Ocean. During the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallAfro-Indigenous Boatmen in the Freshwater Caribbean: Environmental Knowledge in the Magdalena River (Eighteenth-Century New Granada)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USAfro-Indigenous Boatmen in the Freshwater Caribbean: Environmental Knowledge in the Magdalena River (Eighteenth-Century New Granada)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®1696712026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Paths to Deregulating the Slave Trade in the Spanish Empire, 1748–1789
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985786
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The War of Jenkins' Ear (from 1739 to 1748), more appropriately known in Spanish as the "Guerra del Asiento," marked the end of the Spanish Crown's permission for the Britain's asiento (monopoly), held by the South Sea Company, on delivering enslaved Africans to the Spanish Americas. The end of the British Asiento led to four decades of experimentation by various players within the Spanish Empire trying to reestablish and expand the slave trade, which many strategists of the Spanish political economy increasingly saw as vital to the metropole and the colonies. This article examines some of the currents, undercurrents, and countercurrents of the deregulation of the slave trade, linking these debates with the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallPaths to Deregulating the Slave Trade in the Spanish Empire, 1748–17892026-03-24text/htmlen-USPaths to Deregulating the Slave Trade in the Spanish Empire, 1748–17892026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®1441362026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Santo Domingo's Unrealized Plantation Complex: A Prelude to Cuba's Sugar Revolution, 1760–1795
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985787
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That Cuba experienced a sugar revolution from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century is a fact with which almost every historian of the Spanish Caribbean is deeply familiar. This has been the case at least since the publication of Manuel Moreno Fraginals's and Franklin W. Knight's classic books, El ingenio (1964) and Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (1970) respectively.1 One only has to consider the exponential increase in the number of enslaved Africans on the island to grasp the nature and extent of this sugar revolution. From about 44,333 enslaved Africans in 1774, the number rose to a whopping 436,500 in 1841.2 Sugar exports followed a similar trend. In 1750, the island
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallSanto Domingo's Unrealized Plantation Complex: A Prelude to Cuba's Sugar Revolution, 1760–17952026-03-24text/htmlen-USSanto Domingo's Unrealized Plantation Complex: A Prelude to Cuba's Sugar Revolution, 1760–17952026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®1674652026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24In Dialogue: Introducing a New Section of the Americas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985788
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With this issue, The Americas inaugurates a new section, In Dialogue, dedicated to fostering scholarly exchange through the publication of clusters of articles that speak directly to one another. This format is designed as a space between a traditional special issue and the standard publication of individual research articles. By presenting paired or grouped pieces that clearly intersect, we hope to highlight conversations already emerging across historical fields, disciplines, geographies, and methodological approaches.The premise of In Dialogue is straightforward: When articles reveal overlapping questions, complementary findings, shared bodies of archival materials, or productive points of tension, they may be
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/192/image/coversmallIn Dialogue: Introducing a New Section of the Americas2026-03-24text/htmlen-USIn Dialogue: Introducing a New Section of the Americas2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®54902026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24