Contact and clash, amalgamation and accommodation, resistance and change have marked the history of the Caribbean islands. It is a unique region where people under the stress of slavery had to improvise, invent and literally create forms of human association through which their pasts and the symbolic interpretation of their present could be structured.Caribbean Transformations is divided into three major parts, each preceded by a brief introductory chapter. Part One begins with a look at the African antecedents of the Caribbean, then discusses slavery and the plantation system. Two chapters de... View More...
This new series of country guides is designed for travellers and students who want to understand the wider picture and build up an overall knowledge of a country. Each In Focus guide is a lively and thought-provoking introduction to the country's people, politics and culture.The In Focus guides will brief you on: The history: Conquest, life as a colony, quest for independence and the building of a modern nation. How history can help explain today's society and politics.The people: Who lives where, how they live. The different worlds of the poor and the rich; blacks, Indians and whites; Arabs a... View More...
A vivid and mesmerizing memoir of the six months the author spent in Cuba in 1970, a time when she began to develop her own fervent political conscience. Alma Guillermoprieto--an award-winning journalist and arguably our most clear-eyed observer of Latin America--now turns her keen powers of observation onto her own, younger self. In this richly evocative chronicle, Guillermoprieto describes the remarkable, transforming journey she made as a twenty-year-old, when her love of dance--which had led her from her native Mexico to the New York dance studios of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Tw... View More...
Dignity is Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's compelling story of his three years of exile, from the coup that deposed him (September 30, 1991) to the U.N. Security Council vote in favor of military intervention (July 31, 1994). He offers an intensely personal journal of events, one that records his doubts as well as his determination in the face of criticism and uncertainty. Introductory materials familiarize the reader with events from the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier (January 1986) through the first months of Aristide's presidency. The afterword provides information on the period s... View More...
The 1965 U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic remains a unique event: the only time the Organization of American States has intervened with force on a member state's territory. It is also a classic example of a U.S. military operation that drew in America's hemispheric allies. Finally, its outcome was that rare feat in the annals of diplomacy -- a peaceful political settlement of a civil war.Here for the first time is the full story of that action, as told by one of its leading participants. General Palmer was the U.S. Army's operations chief in Washington in April 1965 when the Dominic... View More...
From the Pentagon's war room to the bitter infighting in the dangerously divided U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince and its on again/off again relationship with terrorists, Shacochis chronicles what the military calls OTW Operations -- other than war. Most enduring, from his eighteen months in the field in Haiti where he lived with a team of Special Forces commandos, Shacochis brings us the stories of soldiers, their exploits and frustrations, their inner lives as well as their heroic deeds, as they struggle to bring democracy to a country ravaged by tyranny. Not since Michael Herr's Dispatches ha... View More...
"A good history of a sordid intervention that submitted a people to autocratic rule and did little for economic development." --The New York Times "From Schmidt we get the full details . . . of the brutal racist practices inflicted on the Haitians for nearly all of the nineteen-year American presence in the country." --American Historical Review "The only thoroughgoing study of one of the more discreditable American interventions overseas." --Journal of Interdisciplinary History "Should become the standard work on the subject. . . .required reading for specialists in Caribbean studies and U.S.... View More...
