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"Central America is a region defined primarily by its geographical configuration as a canal-friendly isthmus, and its three-century history as the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala. Having gained independence in 1821, the Kingdom broke up into the nations of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica after two turbulent decades as a federated republic. Political instability and violence, poverty and inequality, ethnic strife, military rule, and a historic economic dependence on the export of coffee and bananas marked the region's history. Owing both to its isthmian geography and habitual political strife, Central America became the most frequent target of US government intervention. Intense US political, economic and military action both preceded and accompanied the revolutionary civil wars of the 1970s and '80s. Devastating in their human costs, they delivered modest political reforms but world-record levels of criminal violence tied to drug trafficking. With British Honduras' independence from Great Britain in 1981 as Belize, and the acquisition by Panama of full sovereignty over its territory in 1999, Central America increasingly defined itself as region of seven countries. The Oxford Handbook of Central American History offers critical analyses of major themes in the historiography of this seven-nation region of Latin America. Essays written by leading scholars of Central America engage both the neophyte's search for basic orientation and context, and the experienced scholar's interest in evaluative critiques of the historical literature. Individual chapters interpret the histories of each of the seven countries, but most focus on themes that cut across national boundaries, beginning with the history of the region's extraordinarily diverse natural environment, and continuing with the indigenous peoples, the Spanish conquest and colonial rule, and the independence process. Other chapters interpret economic history, US relations, the armed forces, the Cold War, religion and literature, illuminating Central America's regional coherence within Latin America while emphasizing its diversity within and across national boundaries"--

Public violence, scarcely analyzed and little understood, is the subject of this pathbreaking research into the histories of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Robert Holden shows how the national and international dimensions of public violence intersected there to produce "armies without nations

As Latin America's most well-defined multinational region, Central America stands apart primarily for its distinctive status as an isthmus between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, surely its most historically consequential feature, but not its only one. Ever since its separation from the Spanish monarchy two centuries ago, Central America's fraught political history has been marked by antagonistic tendencies within the region both for and against unification, by successive national and regional movements in favor of reform, revolution and counter-revolution, and by the intervention of external powers, particularly the United States. As a result, a persistent pattern of violence, instability and lawlessness has also distinguished its political history, as its economy continues to rank among the poorest of Latin America. This introductory essay interprets the region's largely unsought separation from Spain (a process that spanned the years 1808 to 1821) as the hinge event of the last 500 years, having launched what the author calls Central America's ongoing, two-century "crisis of order." The cross-regional and country-level essays that follow this introduction reach back to the period before the Spanish conquest and proceed to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each chapter aims to both synthesize and evaluate the main directions of the historiography related to its particular theme. The overall purpose of the volume is to highlight both Central America's distinctiveness as a region and the attributes it shares with the rest of Latin America, while encouraging the comparative study of national, cross-national, and subnational historical experiences both within Central America, and between it and other places within and beyond Latin America.

This essay reviews the following works: Centroamérica: Filibusteros, estados, imperios y memorias. By Víctor Hugo Acuña. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica, 2014. Pp. xv + 151. $5.99 paperback. ISBN: 9789968684408. I Ask for Justice: Maya Women, Dictators, and Crime in Guatemala, 1898–1944. By David Carey Jr. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Pp. xxv + 335. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780292748682. A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a Banana Republic. By Kevin Coleman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 312. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477308554. Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America. By Michel Gobat. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 367. $39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780674737495. Solidarity under Siege: The Salvadoran Labor Movement, 1970–1990. By Jeffrey L. Gould. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii + 262. $29.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781108410199. Banana Cowboys: The United Fruit Company and the Culture of Corporate Colonialism.By James W. Martin. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018. Pp. x + 252. $58.10 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826359421. Breve historia de Centroamérica, 5th ed. By Héctor Pérez Brignoli. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2018. Pp. 352. ISBN: 9788491811923. El laberinto centroamericano: Los hilos de la historia. By Héctor Pérez Brignoli. San José, Costa Rica: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central, 2017. Pp. x + 163. $4.40 paperback. ISBN: 9789968919326. Las luchas de los trabajadores hondureños organizados (1880–1993). By Mario Posas. Tegucigalpa: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras, 2017. Pp. 523. ISBN: 9789992632987. Historia de las desigualdades sociales en América Central: Una visión interdisciplinaria, siglos XVIII–XXI. Edited by Ronny Viales y David Díaz. San José, Costa Rica: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central, 2016. Pp. xix + 634. $8.79 paperback. ISBN: 9789968919241.

Exceptionally high levels of state-centered or "public" violence have been a distinguishing feature of the nineteen Latin American republics ever since the separation of nearly all of them, two centuries ago, from the monarchies of Spain and Portugal. Largely unbidden by those upon whom it was conferred, independence proceeded from 1808 to 1824 in ways that strongly conditioned the secular crisis of order that followed. Four phases of state making can be correlated with shifts in the nature and intensity of the violence that accompanied each of them. By the early twenty-first century, expansive state institutions nominally subject to the authority of liberal-democratic ideas appeared to be firmly entrenched in most of the region. If an organized and strictly political kind of violence had largely faded, other kinds of violence, newly contoured, surged to historic highs, within and around state institutions that for the most part flaunted their customary tolerance for varying levels of nonfeasance, incompetence and venality. The underlying, historically patterned failure was not that of the state per se. Rather, it was the shallowness of allegiance, across society, to the authority (in the contemporary case, that of liberal democracy) to which the state appealed as the source of its legitimacy.

La historiografía de la mujer, desde el comienzo de su etapa contemporánea en los años setenta del siglo pasado, es analizada en dos vertientes relacionadas: Una, su politización al servicio del movimiento social que aboga por la extensión de los derechos de la mujer y que dió luz a dicha historiografía; dos, el papel central que ha jugado la pregunta antropológica, '¿Qué es la mujer'?, y la variedad de respuestas que esta pregunta ha generado. El autor sostiene que tanto la intensa politización como el desarrollo de una antropología cada vez más materialista, como tendencias interdependientes, han llegado a caracterizar la historiografía de la mujer. Las mismas tendencias pueden verse en otras especialidades historiográficas, debido en gran parte a la influencia de la primera. Por otra parte, en la última década, ha aparecido un 'nuevo feminismo' basado en una antropología realista que augura una 'nueva historiografía de la mujer'. La literatura a la que hace freferencia es principalmente, pero no exclusivamente, la angloparlante.

Public violence, a persistent feature of Latin American life since the collapse of Iberian rule in the 1820s, has been especially prominent in Central America. Robert H. Holden shows how public violence shaped the states that have governed Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Linking public violence and patrimonial political cultures, he shows how the early states improvised their authority by bargaining with armed bands or montoneras. Improvisation continued into the twentieth century as the bands were gradually superseded by semi-autonomous national armies, and as new agents of public violence emerged in the form of armed insurgencies and death squads. World War II, Holden argues, set into motion the globalization of public violence. Its most dramatic manifestation in Central America was the surge in U.S. military and police collaboration with the governments of the region, beginning with the Lend-Lease program of the 1940s and continuing through the Cold War. Although the scope of public violence had already been established by the people of the Central American countries, globalization intensified the violence and inhibited attempts to shrink its scope. Drawing on archival research in all five countries as well as in the United States, Holden elaborates the connections among the national, regional, and international dimensions of public violence. Armies Without Nations crosses the borders of Central American, Latin American, and North American history, providing a model for the study of global history and politics. [Amazon.com] ; https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/history_books/1007/thumbnail.jpg

The US.-sponsored programs of military and police collaboration with the Central American governments during the Cold War also contributed to the surveillance capacity of those states during the period when the Central American state formation process was being completed. Guatemala is used as a case study. Washington's contribution was framed by the conventional discourse of "security against communism" but also by an underlying technocratic ethos in which "modernization" and "security" were higher priorities than democratization.

AbstractThis analysis of the historically high level of state-sponsored violence in Central America, typically explained in terms of 'authoritarianism' or 'civil-military relations', argues for according it a more independent research status. Three historic dimensions of state-sponsored violence – the mechanisms by whichcaudilloviolence was displaced upward in the late 19th century, the level of subaltern collaboration with the agents of state violence as a function of clientelist politics, and the intrusion of US military power after 1940 – are proposed. The implications for the utility of political culture theory and for a reevaluation of the literature on civil-military relations are developed.