Revolution and Counterrevolution in Modern Latin America

Catalog description

This course will examine the history of revolution and counterrevolution in Latin America from the late 18th century to the end of the Cold War. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolt in modern history, students will examine how challenges to colonial domination, chattel slavery, racial hierarchies, economic deprivation, and political repression upended powerful governing regimes and provoked blowback from those regimes’ defenders. Over the semester, we will examine some of the most significant revolutionary movements in the Western Hemisphere, including the early 19th-century wars for independence in what was then Spanish America, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Chile’s democratic-socialist project under Salvador Allende (1970–1973), and the 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. In each case, we will analyze the social and economic conditions that gave rise to these movements, the ideologies that inspired them, and the often-violent responses that they provoked from local and foreign powers. The course will also investigate the broader counterrevolutionary forces that have shaped modern Latin America’s political landscape, from military coups and dictatorships to US interventions and Cold War anticommunism. Through a combination of secondary literature and primary sources, students will become familiar with key historical concepts, including class conflict, nationalism, imperialism, political violence, and the possibilities and limits of revolutionary change. Modern Violence: War, Terror, and Genocide