Ezra's Bookshelf

America, América

by Greg Grandin · 769 pages · ~14 hrs

HistoryForeign Policy

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Greg Grandin offers the first comprehensive history treating North and South America as a single interconnected region. From the colonial encounter through the present, he argues, the two continents have been bound together in ways that shaped both. The United States and Latin America forged their identities in constant engagement with each other: through wars, migrations, trade, interventions, and the movement of ideas. Grandin, a historian at Yale who has written extensively on Latin American history, challenges the exceptionalist narrative that treats the United States as fundamentally different from its southern neighbors. He shows how debates over slavery, labor, race, and democracy played out across the hemisphere, with developments in one region shaping possibilities in others. The book reframes familiar U.S. history by placing it in hemispheric context: the Mexican-American War, the Panama Canal, Cold War interventions, and contemporary immigration all look different when viewed from this perspective. Grandin writes with narrative drive and interpretive boldness, synthesizing centuries of history into a coherent story. This is revisionist history in the best sense, changing how readers see both Americas.

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