Kategoria BISAC: History >> Latin America - Central America

The Panama Canal was the costliest undertaking in history; its completion in 1914 marked the beginning of the American Century. Panama Fever draws on contemporary accounts, bringing the experience of those who built the canal vividly to life. Politicians engaged in high-stakes diplomacy in order to influence its construction. Meanwhile, engineers and workers from around the world rushed to take advantage of high wages and the chance to be a part of history. Filled with remarkable characters, Panama Fever is an epic history that shows how a small, fiercely contested strip of...

Central America provocatively challenges the myths of Central American democracy, development, and change--concepts traditionally maligned and oversimplified, but here presented analytically through a unique series of first-hand accounts. Incorporating essays by a variety of well-known academics and Central American specialists, this work considers each of the three concern areas separately. Part I includes five essays on democracy in the context of such nations as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Part II explores the idea of development, the development of democratic education, U.S....

By tracing the history of El Salvador from pre-Columbian times to the present, Osborne provides the background necessary to an understanding and appreciation of the country.

A collection of essays that analyzes the historical antecedents of the current political crises in Central America. The essays provide a balanced interpretation of such themes as international power politics in Central America since the 19th century and the effects of cultural diversity and local interests in preventing the development of enduring political unity and economic integration. Latin Americanists and those interested in international politics at the upper-division undergraduate level and above will value this informative analysis of the volatile region. "Choice"

This volume...

Guatemala was first published in 1940. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume collects leading scholarship on one of the most important archaeological complexes in the ancient Maya world. The authors-internationally renowned experts who participated in the long-running Copan Acropolis Archaeological Project-address enduring themes in Maya archaeology. In addition to site-specific breakthroughs involving dynastic sequences, epigraphy, and chronologies, these essays explore questions of broad interest to archaeologists and other anthropologists, including state formation, architecture and space, and the relationship between history and archaeology as well...

Tracing the history of the Mayan peoples in Central America, from their origins to the present day, the author (a former UNRG guerrilla) shows how the conquest, racist abuse, and super-exploitation of a highly developed society and culture led to a thirty-year struggle to regain land, liberty, and dignity.

In the Candelaria, San Francisco, and Hun Nal Ye cave systems, many important trade shrines were in use from the beginning of complex society in Mesoamerica to...

The species found in the Petexbatun faunal collections are compared as proxy evidence for the ancient habitats and landscapes that would have existed around the sites. They reveal that the ancient landscape of the Petexbatun region was not significantly deforested or otherwise destroyed at the end of the...

Since the late 1970s, Protestantism has emerged as a major force in the political and economic life of rural Guatemala. Indeed, as Sheldon Annis argues in this book, Protestantism may have helped tip Guatemala's guerrilla war in behalf of the army during the early 1980s.

But what is it about Protestantism--and about Indians-- that has led to massive religious conversion throughout the highlands? And in villages today, what are the dynamics that underlie the competition between Protestants and Catholics?

Sheldon Annis addresses these questions from the perspective of San Antonio...

Assemblies of rectangular stone pillars, or stelae, fill the plazas and courts of ancient Maya cities throughout the lowlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras. Mute testimony to state rituals that linked the king's power to rule with the rhythms and renewal of time, the stelae document the ritual acts of rulers who sacrificed, danced, and experienced visionary ecstasy in connection with celebrations marking the end of major calendrical cycles. The kings' portraits are carved in relief on the main surfaces of the stones, deifying them as incarnations of the...

The Maya of Santiago Chimaltenango have experienced increasingly rapid, even violent, integration into Guatemalan society in the last fifty years, yet they still distinguish themselves ethnically from Spanish-speaking Guatemalans and other Maya. Why this sense of ethnic identity persists--and also changes--over time is the focus of Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World, a beautifully written ethnography of a Mam-speaking Maya town in the western highlands of Guatemala.

John Watanabe uniquely explores how Chimaltecos themselves define their local distinctiveness....