The Sandinista Revolution and its victory against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua gripped the United States and the world in the 1980s. But as soon as the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990 and the Iran Contra affair ceased to make headlines, it became, in Washington at least, a thing of the past.
In The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (UNC Press, 2024), Mateo Jarquin recenters the revolution as a major episode in the history of Latin America, the international left, and the Cold War. Drawing on research in Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica, he recreates the perspective of Sandinista leaders in Managua and argues that their revolutionary project must be understood in international context. Because struggles over the Revolution unfolded transnationally, the Nicaraguan drama had lasting consequences for Latin American politics at a critical juncture. It also reverberated in Western Europe, among socialists worldwide, and beyond, illuminating global dynamics like the spread of democracy and the demise of a bipolar world dominated by two superpowers. Jarquin offers a sweeping analysis of the last left-wing revolution of the twentieth century, an overview of inter-American affairs in the 1980s, and an incisive look at the making of the post-Cold War order.
Mateo Jarquín is assistant professor of history at Chapman University.
Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
Klaus Schmider, "Hitler's Fatal Miscalculation: Why Germany Declared War on the United States" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Kerstin Bree Carlson, "The Justice Laboratory: International Law in Africa" (Brookings Institution Press, 2022)
Putin's Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia
Beatrice Heuser, "War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Erin R. Graham, "Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at the United Nations" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)
Calder Walton, "Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West" (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
Paddy Walker and Peter Roberts, "War's Changed Landscape?: A Primer on Conflict's Forms and Norms" (Howgate, 2023)
Cornelia Woll, "Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Politics of Negotiated Justice in Global Markets" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Simon Shuster, "The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky" (William Morrow, 2024)
Democracy, Great Powers, and the Russia-Ukraine War. A Discussion with Stefan Wolff
Uri Kaufman, "Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)
Justine Nolan and Martijn Boersma, "Addressing Modern Slavery" (UNSW Press, 2019)
Jeffrey A. Friedman, "The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image-Making in US Foreign Policy" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Yaroslav Trofimov, "Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence" (Penguin, 2023)
Rita Kesselring, "Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa" (Stanford UP, 2017)
Paul F. Diehl et al., "When Peacekeeping Missions Collide: Balancing Multiple Roles in Peace Operations" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Emma Kuby, "Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, "Decolonizing Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Chinmay Tumbe, "The Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World" (Harper Collins, 2020)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Maverick Show with Matt Bowles
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies