In Disciplinary Conquest Ricardo D. Salvatore rewrites the origin story of Latin American studies by tracing the discipline's roots back to the first half of the twentieth century. Salvatore focuses on the work of five representative U.S. scholars of South America-historian Clarence Haring, geographer Isaiah Bowman, political scientist Leo Rowe, sociologist Edward Ross, and archaeologist Hiram Bingham-to show how Latin American studies was allied with U.S. business and foreign policy interests. Diplomats, policy makers, business investors, and the American public used the knowledge these and other scholars gathered to build an informal empire that fostered the growth of U.S. economic, technological, and cultural hegemony throughout the hemisphere. Tying the drive to know South America to the specialization and rise of Latin American studies, Salvatore shows how the disciplinary conquest of South America affirmed a new mode of American imperial engagement.

In Disciplinary Conquest Ricardo D. Salvatore rewrites the origin story of Latin American studies by tracing the discipline's roots back to the first half of the twentieth century. Salvatore focuses on the work of five representative U.S. scholars of South America-historian Clarence Haring, geographer Isaiah Bowman, political scientist Leo Rowe, sociologist Edward Ross, and archaeologist Hiram Bingham-to show how Latin American studies was allied with U.S. business and foreign policy interests. Diplomats, policy makers, business investors, and the American public used the knowledge these and other scholars gathered to build an informal empire that fostered the growth of U.S. economic, technological, and cultural hegemony throughout the hemisphere. Tying the drive to know South America to the specialization and rise of Latin American studies, Salvatore shows how the disciplinary conquest of South America affirmed a new mode of American imperial engagement.

Latin America s widespread poverty and multi-dimensioned inequalities have long perplexed and provoked observers.

Until recently, economic historians could not contribute much to the discussion of living standards and inequality, because quantitative evidence for earlier eras was lacking. Since the 1990s, historians, economists, and other social scientists have sought to document and analyze the historical roots of Latin America s relatively high inequality and persistent poverty.

This edited volume with eight compelling chapters by preeminent economists and social scientists brings together some of the most important results of this work: scholarly efforts to measure and explain changes in Latin American living standards as far back as the colonial era. The recent work has focused on physical welfare, often referred to as biological well-being. Much of it uses novel measures, such as data on the heights or stature of children and adults (a measure of net nutrition) and the Human Development Index (HDI). Other work brings to the discussion new and more reliable measurements that can be used for comparing countries, often with unexpected and startling results.

New concerns with the intersections of culture and power, historical agency, and the complexity of social and political life are producing new questions about the United States' involvement with Latin America. Turning away from political-economic models that see only domination and resistance, exploiters and victims, the contributors to this pathbreaking collection suggest alternate ways of understanding the role that U.S. actors and agencies have played in the region during the postcolonial period. Exploring a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century encounters in Latin America, these theoretically engaged essays by distinguished U.S. and Latin American historians and anthropologists illuminate a wide range of subjects. From the Rockefeller Foundation's public health initiatives in Central America to the visual regimes of film, art, and advertisements; these essays grapple with new ways of conceptualizing public and private spheres of empire. As such, Close Encounters of Empire initiates a dialogue between postcolonial studies and the long-standing scholarship on colonialism and imperialism in the Americas as it rethinks the cultural dimensions of nationalism and development.

Opening a new area in Latin American studies, The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America showcases the most recent historical outlooks on prison reform and criminology in the Latin American context. The essays in this collection shed new light on the discourse and practice of prison reform, the interpretive shifts induced by the spread of criminological science, and the links between them and competing discourses about class, race, nation, and gender. The book shows how the seemingly clear redemptive purpose of the penitentiary project was eventually contradicted by conflicting views about imprisonment, the pervasiveness of traditional forms of repression and control, and resistance from the lower classes.

The essays are unified by their attempt to view the penitentiary (as well as the variety of representations conveyed by the different reform movements favoring its adoption) as an interpretive moment, revealing of the ideology, class fractures, and contradictory nature of modernity in Latin America. As such, the book should be of interest not only to scholars concerned with criminal justice history, but also to a wide range of readers interested in modernization, social identities, and the discursive articulation of social conflict. The collection also offers an up-to-date sampling of new historical approaches to the study of criminal justice history, illuminates crucial aspects of the Latin American modernization process, and contrasts the Latin American cases with the better known European and North American experiences with prison reform.

Crowning a decade of innovative efforts in the historical study of law and legal phenomena in the region, "Crime and Punishment in Latin America" offers a collection of essays that deal with the multiple aspects of the relationship between ordinary people and the law. Building on a variety of methodological and theoretical trends--cultural history, subaltern studies, new political history, and others--the contributors share the conviction that law and legal phenomena are crucial elements in the formation and functioning of modern Latin American societies and, as such, need to be brought to the forefront of scholarly debates about the region's past and present.
While disassociating law from a strictly legalist approach, the volume showcases a number of highly original studies on topics such as the role of law in processes of state formation and social and political conflict, the resonance between legal and cultural phenomena, and the contested nature of law-enforcing discourses and practices. Treating law as an ambiguous and malleable arena of struggle, the contributors to this volume--scholars from North and Latin America who represent the new wave in legal history that has emerged in recent years-- demonstrate that law not only produces and reformulates culture, but also shapes and is shaped by larger processes of political, social, economic, and cultural change. In addition, they offer valuable insights about the ways in which legal systems and cultures in Latin America compare to those in England, Western Europe, and the United States.
This volume will appeal to scholars in Latin American studies and to those interested in the social, cultural, and comparative history of law and legal phenomena.

"Contributors. "Carlos Aguirre, Dain Borges, Lila Caimari, Arlene J. Diaz, Luis A. Gonzalez, Donna J. Guy, Douglas Hay, Gilbert M. Joseph, Juan Manuel Palacio, Diana Paton, Pablo Piccato, Cristina Rivera Garza, Kristin Ruggiero, Ricardo D. Salvatore, Charles F. Walker "
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