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An accessible course book on U.S.-Latin American relations \"Our Hemisphere\"? uncovers the range, depth, and veracity of the United States' relationship with the Americas. Using short historical vignettes, Britta and Russell Crandall chart the course of inter‑American relations from 1776 to the present, highlighting the roles that individuals and groups of soldiers, intellectuals, private citizens, and politicians have had in shaping U.S. policy toward Latin America in the postcolonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War eras. The United States is usually and correctly seen as pursuing a monolithic, hegemonic agenda in Latin America, wielding political, economic, and military muscle to force Latin American countries to do its bidding, but the Crandalls reveal unexpected yet salient regional interactions where Latin Americans have exercised their own power with their northern and very powerful neighbor. Moreover, they show that Washington's relationship with the region has relied, in addition to the usual heavy‑handedness, on cooperation and mutual respect since the beginning of the relationship.

Tracing the full arc of U.S.-Brazilian interaction, Hemispheric Giants thoroughly explores the enigmatic and often-misunderstood nature of the relationship between the two largest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Britta H. Crandall asks the crucial question of why significant engagement between the United States and Brazil has been so scarce since the inception of the bilateral relationship in the late 1800s. Especially, she critically examines Washington's so-called \"benign neglect\"—a policy often criticized as unbefitting Brazil's size and strategic importance. Drawing on a rich array of archival sources and personal interviews, Crandall pinpoints the key examples through time of high-level U.S. policy attention to Brazil. Her comprehensive analysis of the ebbs and flows of policy engagement allows Crandall to tease out common threads among her cases. In so doing, she shows that the label \"neglect,\" implying a one-sided, fitful relationship, is far from the reality of a mutual, ongoing policy engagement between the U.S. and Brazilian governments. To be sure, their different relative power positions and foreign policy traditions have limited high-level bilateral engagement. However, Crandall argues convincingly that the diminishing power disparity between the United States and Brazil is leading to closer ties in the twenty-first century—a trend that will bring about growing cooperation as well as competition in the future.

Tracing the full arc of U.S.-Brazilian interaction, Hemispheric Giants thoroughly explores the enigmatic and often-misunderstood nature of the relationship between the two largest countries in the Western Hemisphere.Britta H.

As noted, the United States emerged from the Mexican–American War with possession of California, thanks to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. But what is often left out of that story is how the United States effectively conquered California in 1846, just as the war was breaking out over Texas. The gringo conquest of California was a haphazard affair, the outcome anything but inevitable. The fate of this vast region was ultimately decided more by two intrepid men (and really one of these two) than by two countries. At the still-tender age of thirty-one, the German-speaking Johann August Sutter

Since its emergence as a major global power in the late nineteenth century the United States has played an outsized role in world affairs. It often seems to be everywhere at once, waging wars in the Middle East, part of NATO in Western Europe, going head to head with rival superpowers—the Soviet Union during the Cold War and China in more recent times—in economic, cyber, and interstellar domains. But there is one locale that is often overlooked in the national dialogue: Latin America. At times top US officials have explicitly diminished the importance of the region. In June

On September 21, 1976, an especially sultry morning in Washington, Orlando Letelier, the forty-four-year-old former Chilean ambassador to the United States under Salvador Allende’s government, was driving to work at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning policy think tank. Riding with Letelier was his twenty-five-year-old work colleague Ronni Moffitt and her husband, Michael. As he sped down Massachusetts Avenue a remote-controlled explosive hidden underneath the car detonated. The burning vehicle skidded to a stop near the Romanian embassy. In a commemorative piece marking the fortieth anniversary of the attack the Washington Post painted a graphic picture of the carnage:

Although Richard Nixon is well known for declaring “an all-out war on global drugs” in 1973, his motive was overwhelmingly domestic. He had labeled drugs “public enemy number one” in 1971. It was tackling the supply of drugs into the US, however, that led Nixon to develop a subsidiary component of his antidrug program that addressed “source countries” such as Mexico, which produced marijuana and heroin. While there were several agencies working on the drug issue before 1973, Nixon upped the ante with the establishment of the DEA in 1973, a move that consolidated the often-competing efforts of the multiple

As just about everyone on both sides of the Rio Grande knows, ties between the United States and Mexico run deep and wide. Given the more than thirty-five million Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the United States; a two-thousand-mile border that is crossed, legally or otherwise, more than a million times each year; and hundreds of billions of dollars of annual trade, it is hard to overstate the interconnectedness between the two countries. In some ways the relationship is equal. For example, to policy makers in both countries the neighboring country is simultaneously a domestic and a foreign policy

By the summer of 1999 the situation in Colombia appeared to have reached a nadir. Three American activists had been killed by the FARC; there had been a spike in coca cultivation; and there had been no progress in the putative peace negotiations between President Andrés Pastrana’s administration and the FARC, which had been fighting the Colombian state since 1964. As if that weren’t enough, the country was plagued by paramilitary groups, gangs, and leftist insurgents who collectively controlled large swathes of territory. In 1999 there were approximately two thousand terrorist attacks and three thousand kidnappings in Colombia, and the