Kategoria BISAC: History >> Latin America - Central America

Panama is an ethnically diverse country with a recent history of political conflict which makes the representation of historical memory an especially complex and important task for the country's museums. This book studies new museum projects in Panama with the aim of identifying the dominant narratives that are being formed as well as those voices that remain absent and muted. Through case analyses of specific museums and exhibitions the author identifies and examines the influences that form and shape museum strategy and development.

Based on years of field research conducted in the rural highlands, Fear as a Way of Life traces...

Long-distance trade of obsidian in the Maya realm has been documented as early as the Middle Formative Period (1000-400 BC). Obsidian exchange continued in each succeeding period, through the Post-Classic (AD 900-1525), varying in both intensity and source of origin. It is the temporal variations in source utilisation that have formed the basis for obsidian research in the Maya area. By focusing on the origin of the obsidian and the temporal context these studies provide valuable information in documenting shifts in source utilisation. This work focuses on the distribution and consumption...

Among Mesoamericanists, the agricultural basis of the ancient Maya civilization of the Yucatan Peninsula has been an important topic of research--and controversy. Interest in the agricultural system of the Maya greatly increased as new discoveries showed that the lowland Maya were not limited to slash-and-burn technology, as had been previously believed, but used a variety of more sophisticated agricultural techniques and practices, including terracing, raised fields, and, perhaps, irrigation. Because of the nature of the data and because this form of agricultural technology had been key...

El Salvador's civil war, which left at least 75,000 people dead and displaced more than a million, ended in 1992. The accord between the government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) has been lauded as a model post-Cold War peace agreement. But after the conflict stopped, crime rates shot up. The number of murder victims surpassed wartime death tolls. Those who once feared the police and the state became frustrated by their lack of action. Peace was not what Salvadorans had hoped it would be. Citizens began saying to each other, "It's worse than the war."

"El...

Euro-Americans see the Spanish conquest as the main event in the five-century history of Mesoamerica, but the people who lived there before contact never gave up their own cultures. Both before and after conquest, indigenous scribes recorded their communities histories and belief systems, as well as the events of conquest and its effects and aftermath. Today, the descendants of those native historians in modern-day Mexico and Guatemala still remember their ancestors stories. In "Mesoamerican Memory," volume editors Amos Megged and Stephanie Wood have gathered the latest scholarship from...

During only a few months in 1980, 125,000 Cubans entered the United States as part of a massive migration known as the Mariel boatlift. The images of boats of all sizes, in various conditions, filled with Cubans of all colors and ages, triggered a media storm. Fleeing Cuba's repressive government, many homosexual men and women arrived in the United States only to face further obstacles. Deemed "undesirables" by the U.S. media, the Cuban state, and Cuban Americans already living in Miami, these new entrants marked a turning point in Miami's Cuban American and gay histories.

In...