HIST 243
Modern Latin America, 1822 to the Present
Last Offered Fall 2008
Division II
This course is not offered in the current catalog

This course will examine salient issues in the history of the independent nations of Latin America. The first section of the course will focus on the turbulent formation of nation-states over the course of the nineteenth century. In this regard the course will analyze the social and economic changes of the period up to World War I and the possibilities they offered for both political order and disorder. Key topics addressed will include caudillismo, the role of the Church in politics, economic dependency and development, and the place of indigenous and African Latin-American peoples in new nations. The second section will move us to questions in twentieth-century Latin-American history, including industrialization and urbanization; the emergence of workers’ and women’s movements and the rise of mass politics; militarism, democracy, and authoritarian governments; the influence of the U.S. in the region; and the construction of cultural modernism in these “Third World” societies. Here and throughout the course we will strive for an understanding of how social conflicts shaped and were shaped by economic and political forces.