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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Politics & government

AMERICA, AMÉRICA

Greg Grandin

The story of how the United States' identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation's unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south - no less than Latin America's was indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from constant, turbulent engagement with each other.

AMERICA, AMÉRICA traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest - the greatest mortality event in human history - through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century, and beyond. Grandin shows, among other things, how royalist Spanish America, by sending troops and supplies, helped save the republican American Revolution; how in response to U.S. interventions, Latin Americans remade the rules, leading directly to the founding of the United Nations; and how the Good Neighbor Policy allowed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to assume the moral authority to lead the fight against world fascism. Grandin's book sheds new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain; the Colombian Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of Cold War political terror, death squads, and disappearances; and the radical journalist Ernest Gruening, who in championing non-interventionism in Latin America, helped broker the most spectacularly successful policy reversal in U.S. history. This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of slavery and racism, the rise of universal humanism, and the role of social democracy in staving off extremism. At once comprehensive and accessible, AMERICA, AMÉRICA shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World. Greg Grandin is the author of The End of the Myth, which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Empire of Necessity, which won both the Bancroft and Beveridge Prizes in American history; and Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and a number of other widely acclaimed books. He is C. Van Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.

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Book Published 2025-04-01 by Penguin Press

Comments

Greg Grandin's America, América takes José Martí's famous essay, 'Nuestra América' and recasts it as a sweeping historical epic. Here is Our American history, told as it never has been told before, full of staggering violence and loss, unforgettable villains and heroes, and the courageous endurance of the poor multitudes, so many sources of inspiration. Beautifully written, this brilliantly researched and reasoned book helps account for the sorry state of the present while offering historical lessons on how we might reach a better future.

Dazzling. Sweeping. Mind-altering. World-changing. This is a once-in-a-generation contribution destined to become our new reference for understanding the making of the modern world. With extraordinary depth, erudition and precision, Grandin avenges the dead and fights for the living.

In this sweeping and provocative work, Greg Grandin provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the intertwined histories of the two Americas, foregrounding Latin American resistance to the hegemony of the United States. This is a compelling new vision of the relationship between the two continents.

In his awe-inspiring masterpiece, Greg Grandin shows how hemispheric relationships have defined the history of the United States for five centuries. Latin Americans did more than decry our failures to live up to the new world's revolutionary ideals. As our country ascended to hegemon in the last century, our neighbors pushedin part because of their unequal might and wealthfor the reimagination of how the globe itself ought to be governed.

British Commonwealth rights to Torva/Transworld Spanish rights to Debate/PRH

For nearly a century, historians have attempted to tell a 'common history' of 'Greater America,' one that brings the history of the United States and Latin America together in a shared and durable conceptualization. In America, América, Greg Grandin does just this and advances an urgent vision of the relational history of the hemisphere. Adding to his already extraordinary corpus of works and reinterpreting five centuries in broad and beautiful strokes, it ends with a chilling conclusion about the diplomatic and moral failures of our current politics and its return to unilateralism and deliberate misunderstandings of the past. A major and desperately needed synthesis of the Americas and the making of modernity.

America, América is the best kind of book: masterful and erudite yet absolutely riveting. By considering the long, sweeping story of Latin America and the United States in the same frame, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin has given us a novel and necessary understanding of a deeply entwined history that is sure to surprise readers, not least because he shows convincingly and urgently how a different pastand with it a different, better presentmight have been possible."