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| Cover of the second edition of Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, by John Charles Chasteen, 2006. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor) |
While I generally pride myself on being a well-rounded
individual, I will readily confess that knowledge of Latin American history is
one of my blind spots. For whatever reason, I don’t remember learning much
about Latin America throughout my educational journey. Now that I’m teaching
World History to 10th graders, I decided I needed to learn more
about this part of the world, and a fellow teacher recommended John Charles
Chasteen’s Born in Blood and Fire: A
Concise History of Latin America. I read the second edition, published in
2006, but the most recent edition is the fourth, which just came out in June,
2016.
Chasteen’s book is an excellent overview of Latin American history
from 1492, when the Old and New Worlds first collided, to the present day. As
an overview, it certainly helped me to understand more about the historical
trends of Latin America, and the difficult journey that many countries in the
region have faced since winning their independence nearly two hundred years
ago. There were many people and events that I wanted to learn more about-for
example, Simon Bolivar, who gets the briefest of mentions in the text, or
Getulio Vargas, the longtime President of Brazil who committed suicide in
office in 1954. It would have been nice to get a little more insight into some
of these leading players, but I understand the difficulty in recapping five
hundred years of history for more than twenty countries in less than 350 pages.
If you’re looking to start learning about the rich and
vibrant history of Latin America, Born in
Blood and Fire is a very good place to start.
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