HY444      One Unit
Latin America in the Cold War

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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This seminar is designed to introduce students to new historical approaches to Latin America and the Cold War.  It responds to new research and debates that have arisen in recent years regarding the meaning of the Cold War in a Latin American context. Students will examine the conflict’s origins, who its protagonists were, the extent to which the superpowers were involved in it and its significance at a local, regional, and global level.  The course places particular emphasis on the role of ideas and ideological struggles; the intersection between these ideas and the challenges of modernity and economic development; the causes of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary upheaval; debates about gender, morality and sexuality; the manifestations of violence and its effects; and the cultural Cold War; and memory. Students will be encouraged to explore the intra-regional and transnational dynamics of the Cold War in Latin America. They will study how events in one part of Latin America (for example, the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, the Cuban Revolution, the Brazilian and Chilean coups or the Central American crises in the 1980s) impacted upon other areas of region. The seminar will also devote time to looking at Latin America’s experience of the Cold War from a global comparative perspective, particularly in contrast to other parts of the Third World. Although the seminar will mostly involve intensive reading and discussion of secondary sources, students will also be encouraged to reflect on new online archival material, published writings of principal thinkers and oral histories as a means of understanding key concepts and ideas.

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Students are required to write one 3,000 word formative essay in the Autumn Term and weekly discussion posts on Moodle.

· Michelle Chase, Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962 (2015)
· Benjamin Cowan, Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (2016)
· John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: The New Press, 2004);
· Thomas Field, Stella Krepp and Vanni Pettina, Latin America and the Global Cold War (2020)
· Cindy Forster, The Time of Freedom: Campesino Workers in Guatemala’s October Revolution (2001)
· Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (2003);
· Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser (eds.), In From the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War (2007);
· Greg Grandin and Gilbert Joseph (eds.), A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America's Long Cold War (2011);
· Renata Keller, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (2015)
· Michael Löwy (ed.), Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present: An Anthology (1992);
· Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005);

Course participation (15%)

Essay (50%, 5000 words)

Essay (35%, 3500 words)