Michel Gobat

Confronting the American Dream

Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the mid-nineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912-33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the country's wealthiest and most Americanized elites were transformed from leading supporters of U.S. imperial rule into some of its greatest opponents. Gobat focuses primarily on the reactions of the elites to Americanization, because the power and identity of these Nicaraguans were the most significantly affected by U.S. imperial rule. He describes their adoption of aspects of "the American way of life" in the mid-nineteenth century as strategic rather than wholesale. Chronicling the U.S. occupation of 1912-33, he argues that the anti-American turn of Nicaragua's most Americanized oligarchs stemmed largely from the efforts of U.S. bankers, marines, and missionaries to spread their own version of the American dream. In part, the oligarchs' reversal reflected their anguish over the 1920s rise of Protestantism, the "modern woman," and other "vices of modernity" emanating from the United States. But it also responded to the unintended ways that U.S. modernization efforts enabled peasants to weaken landlord power. Gobat demonstrates that the U.S. occupation so profoundly affected Nicaragua that it helped engender the Sandino Rebellion of 1927-33, the Somoza dictatorship of 1936-79, and the Sandinista Revolution of 1979-90.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 392
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Dezember 2005
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 21mm
• Gewicht: 566g
• ISBN-13: 9780822336471
• ISBN-10: 0822336472
• Artikelnr.: 21007362

Autorenporträt

Michel Gobat

Inhaltsangabe

Illustrations ix
Tables x
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part I: Manifest Destinies, 1849–1910 19
1. Americanization through Violence: Nicaragua under Walker 21
2. Americanization from Within: Forging a Cosmopolitan Nationality 42
Part II: Restoration, 1910–1912 73
3. Challenging Imperial Exclusions: Nicaragua under the Dawson Pact 75
4. Bourgeois Revolution Denied: U.S. Military Intervention in the Civil War
of 1912 100
Part III: Dollar Diplomacy, 1912–1927 123
5. Economic Nationalism: Resisting Wall Street’s “Feudal” Regime 125
6. Anxious Landlords, Resilient Peasants: Dollar Diplomacy’s Socioeconomic
Impact 150
7. Cultural Anit-Americanism: The Caballeros Catolicos’ Crusade against
U.S. Missionaries, the “Modern Woman,” and the “Bourgeois Spirit” 175
Part IV: Revolution, 1927–1933 203
8. Militarization via Democratization: The U.S. Attack on Caudillismo and
the Rise of Authoritarian Corporatism 205
9. Revolutionary Nationalism: Elite Conservatives, Sandino, and the
Struggle for a De-Americanized Nicaragua 232
Epilogue: Imperial Legacies: Dictatorship and Revolution 267
Notes 281
Selected Bibliography 325
Index 351