Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the mid-nineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912-33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the country's wealthiest...

Michel Gobat traces the first U.S. overseas empire to William Walker, a believer in the nation's manifest destiny to spread not only westward but abroad. In the 1850s Walker and a band of expansionists migrated to Nicaragua to free the masses from allegedly despotic elites. But what began with promises of liberation devolved into a reign of terror.