Quotes from Greg Grandin

Even before the expansion of slave labor in the South and into the West, slavery was already an important source of northern profit, as was the already exploding slave trade in the Caribbean and South America. Banks capitalized the slave trade, and insurance companies underwrote it.

In 1954, Guatemala's deposed president, the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, was forced to strip down to his underwear and photographed before being allowed to leave the country.

Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn't about the man himself. He is such an outsize figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings.

If Washington was unable to bring prosperity, stability, and meaningful democracy to Latin America, a region that falls squarely within its own sphere of influence and whose population shares many of its values, then what are the chances that it will do so for the world?

The frontier was closed, as Clare Boothe Luce wrote half a century earlier, resources were finite, and political systems should be based on an acceptance of those facts.

Manaus is famous for its hulking Amazonas Theater, an opera house built of Italian marble and surrounded by roads made of rubber so the carriage clatter of late arrivals wouldn't interrupt the voices of Europe's best tenors and sopranos.

Another visitor described them as "midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night, and frequently between midnight and dawn undergoes a fierce siege of heat-provoking nightmares." They seemed to be "designed by Detroit architects who probably couldn't envision a land without snow."19 Ford managers, said the priest, "never really figured out what country they were in.

Having been born into a large litter and raised, as one republican put it, in a shared New World household, Spanish American nations were socialized at an early age. The United States, in contrast, was created lonely and raised thinking it was one of a kind.

The overseas frontier—wars in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti—acted as a prism, refracting the color line abroad back home. In each military occupation and prolonged counterinsurgency they fought, southerners could replay the dissonance of the Confederacy again and again. They could fight in the name of the loftiest ideals—liberty, valor, self-sacrifice, camaraderie—while putting down people of color.

Anglo society moved forward not as a uniform front against Native Americans but more fluidly, as if it were poured into the interstices separating Indian nations and communities.

They pushed the evangelical movement not only to fight what would become known as the culture wars—the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, gay rights, and so forth—but to get more involved in foreign affairs as well.

From the mid-1970s, Christian organizations would begin to play a more prominent role in international politics, supporting causes associated with America's resurgent nationalist right. Some worked with the American Security Council to oppose disarmament treaties and defend Ian Smith's white government in Rhodesia.

In examining the postwar backlash against New Deal internationalism, the opposition between race and class—that is, the question of whether backlashers were motivated by racial hatred or by desire to defend the economic hierarchy—doesn't hold up. Those who feared internationalism as a stalking horse for greater equality made little distinction between the threat of desegregation and the threat of social rights.

Ford's opinion that cows were the crudest, most inefficient machines in the world is not unjustified considering the amount of land and energy it takes to keep one alive. Between 2000 and 2005, cattle ranching accounted for 60 percent of deforestation, and today Brazil is the world's largest exporter of cows, with its 180,000,000-head herd equaling the size of its population.

The Confederate flag stopped flying as the pennant of reconciliation, the joining of the southern military tradition to northern establishment might to spread Americanism abroad. It now was the banner of those who felt that the establishment had sacrificed that tradition, "stabbed it in the back." The battle flag became the banner not of a specific Lost Cause but of all of white supremacy's lost causes.

All told, U.S. allies in Central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile.

IT WOULD BE tempting to read the story of Fordlandia and Belterra as a parable of arrogance

Clinton was Reagan's greatest achievement. He carried forward the Republican agenda by combining a postindustrial fatalism—regulation wasn't possible, austerity was unavoidable, budgets had to be balanced, crime was a condition of culture, not economic policy—with a folksy postmodern optimism.

The war in the Philippines gave English a successor word to "frontier," used to refer to remoteness: "boondocks," from the Tagalog, "a distant, unpopulated place," adopted by U.S. soldiers fighting a shadowy war against hit-and-run enemies. Its usage was expanded in World War II and then shortened in Vietnam to "boonies.

Many historians still consider Jackson's two terms (1829–1837) the fulfillment of the promise of the American Revolution's anti-aristocratic aspirations, a moment of boisterous egalitarianism in which restless white workers armed with the vote became a political force.21 "A

Expansion would break up society "into a greater variety of interests and pursuits of passions, which check each other." The amalgamation of power would be prevented, making it unnecessary to take government action, either to regulate concentrated wealth or to repress movements organized in opposition to concentrated wealth. "Extend the sphere

Many worried that the public was increasingly confusing freedom with debauched egoism. "A new competitiveness was abroad in the land," Wood says, "and people seemed to be almost at war with one another."4 It was a season of "inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for," as the theologian William Ellery Channing described his times.5

In Chile, everything from "kindergarten to cemeteries and community swimming pools were put out for bid." Between 1985 and 1992, over two thousand government industries were sold off throughout Latin America. Much of this property passed into the hands of either multinational corporations or Latin America's "superbillionaires," a new class that had taken advantage of the dismantling of the state to grow spectacularly rich.

It might seem an abstraction to say that the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery. But consider these figures: of the known 10,148,288 Africans put on slave ships bound for the Americas between 1514 and 1866 (of a total historians estimate to be at least 12,500,000), more than half, 5,131,385, were embarked after July 4, 1776.