America, América

About this book

A New York Times bestseller - A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, 2025 Kirkus Prize, 2025 Cundill History Prize, and 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction - Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Mother Jones "Greg Grandin's argument is compelling and written with zest. His history is punchy, the array of sources is vast, and the narrative pace is superb." --Financial Times "An extraordinarily ambitious book . . . America, América reads at times as the historical equivalent of the great epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez." --Irish Times From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how the United States and Latin America were forged from a 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 world wars, coups, and revolutions of the twentieth century and beyond. Grandin's book sheds new light on well-known historical figures such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as lesser-known actors such as Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of cold war political terror. At once comprehensive and accessible, this monumental work of scholarship shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the Western Hemisphere 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.