A typical way of telling the history of the United States is to frame it as involving a series of key periods: Colonial America, the American Revolution, the Age of Expansion, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and so on. This is the way US history is typically taught in high schools and college survey courses, which usually present the country’s historical self-understanding and founding political identity in a rather self-contained way, with the exception of looking to Europe and England. The historian Greg Grandin challenges this approach to US history in America, América: A New History of the New World. It offers a groundbreaking 500 year history that shows how the United States’ identity and historical self-understanding are inseparable from those of Latin America—and in turn, it offers a comprehensive history of how Latin America was “indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the North.”
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