Greg Grandin teaches history at NYU. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America will be published on 5 March.
‘The people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans...
Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik, with its moral relativism and easy acceptance of American limits, is often contrasted with the neocon evangelism that took off after the attacks of 9/11. Kissinger had long served as a foil for the New Right. The secretary of state ‘sounds like Churchill’ but ‘acts like Chamberlain’, Norman Podhoretz wrote in 1976. And even before conservatives came to condemn Kissinger for his dealings with China and Moscow, they distrusted his associates, particularly Nelson Rockefeller.
In 1805 there was a slave rebellion aboard the Tryal, a Spanish ship sailing from Valparaíso to Lima. This wasn’t unusual: hundreds of similar revolts broke out across the shipping...
It was clear that Henry Ford’s audacious attempt to establish a vast rubber plantation in Amazonia had failed long before the first shipment of latex from Singapore arrived in Brazil in...
On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.