This book is the definitive volume on the counterrevolutionary impetus behind the growth of Latin American studies in the United States as well as the more diverse roots of the discipline elsewhere. It also highlights the limits of Cold Warriors’ control, showing how some scholars forcefully challenged imperial doctrine. Understanding this intellectual history is vital at a time when the Cold War’s legacies continue to loom large in society, academia, and the press—and as today’s Cold Warriors recklessly pound the drums for confrontation with US rivals.

Kevin Young, editor, Making the Revolution: Histories of the Latin American Left

This new look at the Cold War and its global impact on Latin American studies goes beyond the framing of the Cuban Revolution as the singular influence on the boom of interest in Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean to suggest diverse reasons for the international focus on this region of the world. Drawn in part from the lifetime professional experiences of Ronald Chilcote, the prolific political economist and mainstay of the pioneering transnational journal Latin American Perspectives,this volume offers a multidimensional approach to understanding the upsurge of academic scholarship on Latin America and the Caribbean beginning in the 1960s from diverse national vantage points.

James N. Green, Brown University

Chilcote has edited a very useful volume that combines a historical effort at contextualizing the emergence and evolution of what could be called mainstream and critical Latin American studies, with close attention to individual country cases and reports from the field by long-time participants in its development. The book is particularly helpful in assessing the twin sources, US national and Cold War-centered and global or anti-imperialist and human rights-centered, of the field.

H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online