A Fervent Crusade for the National Soul examines the implementation of cultural policies in relation to the contested configuration of citizenship in Colombia between 1930 and 1946. At a time when national identities were re-imagined all over the Americas, progressive artists and intellectuals affiliated with the liberal governments that ruled Colombia established an unprecedented bureaucratic apparatus for cultural intervention that celebrated so-called “popular culture” and rendered culture a social right. This book challenges pervasive narratives of state failure in Colombia, attending to the confrontations, negotiations, and entanglements of bureaucrats with everyday citizens that shaped the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Catalina Muñoz argues that while culture became an instrument of inclusion, the liberal definition of popular culture as authentic and static was also a tool for domination that reinforced enduring structures of inequality founded on region, race, and gender. Liberals crafted the state as the paternalistic protector of acquiescent citizens, instead of a warden of political participation. Muñoz suggests that this form of governance allowed the elites to rule without making the structural changes required to craft a more equal society.

Battles for Belonging: Women Journalists, Political Culture, and the Paradoxes of Inclusion in Colombia, 1943-1970 examines women journalists who conceived of their publications as political interventions in mid-twentieth-century Colombia. These journalists committed to shaping justice and opportunity for women in society through writing while battling within the publishing realm to also transform and professionalize the practice of journalism in their own terms. By analyzing the contentious narratives of gender and class these women crafted as well as their conflicting efforts to maintain their stature in the printing and public worlds, it reveals the ongoing negotiations involved within their disputes over inclusion and democracy in a country still finding its way to equality, peace, and stability between the 1940s and 1960s. This book challenges oversimplified portrayals of struggles for power that either glorify or vilify these historical processes by erasing the complexity of the political and social actors involved in them. It stresses the importance of women, but not to the expense of a balanced critique of their historical reality, actions, and endeavors. This is a history of paradoxical political manifestations and a redefinition of power struggles as multidirectional, intersectional, non-monolithic historical processes, from the viewpoint of women.

By combining chronological coverage, analytical breadth, and interdisciplinary approaches, these two volumes—Histories of Solitude and Histories of Perplexity—study the histories of Colombia over the last two centuries as illustrations of the histories of democracy across the Americas. The volumes bring together over 40 scholars based in Colombia, the United States, England, and Canada working in various disciplines to discuss how a country that has been consistently presented as a rarity in Latin America provides critical examples to re-examine major historical problems: republicanism and liberalism; export economies and agrarian modernization; populism and cultural politics of state formation; revolutionary and counterinsurgent Cold War violence; neoliberal reforms and urban development; popular mobilization and counterhegemonic public spheres; political ecologies and environmental struggles; and labors of memory and the challenge of reconciliation. Contributors are sensitive to questions of subjectivity and discourse, observant of ethnographic details and micro-politics, and attuned to macro-perspectives such as transnational and global histories. These volumes offer fresh perspectives on Colombia and will be of great value to those interested in Latin American and Caribbean history.

By combining chronological coverage, analytical breadth, and interdisciplinary approaches, these two volumes—Histories of Solitude and Histories of Perplexity—study the histories of Colombia over the past two centuries as illustrations of the histories of democracy across the Americas. The volumes bring together over 40 scholars based in Colombia, the United States, England, and Canada working in various disciplines to discuss how a country that has been consistently presented as a rarity in Latin America provides critical examples to re-examine major historical problems: republicanism and liberalism; export economies and agrarian modernization; populism and cultural politics of state formation; revolutionary and counterinsurgent Cold War violence; neoliberal reforms and urban development; popular mobilization and counterhegemonic public spheres; political ecologies and environmental struggles; and labors of memory and the challenge of reconciliation. Contributors are sensitive to questions of subjectivity and discourse, observant of ethnographic details and micro-politics, and attuned to macro-perspectives such as transnational and global histories. These volumes offer fresh perspectives on Colombia and will be of great value to those interested in Latin American and Caribbean history.

In November 2017, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at its headquarters outside Palmira, Colombia. As an important research center of the so-called Green Revolution in agricultural science and technologies, CIAT emphasizes its contributions to sustainability, food security, gender equity, inclusive markets, and resilient, climate-smart agriculture. Yet these terms hardly describe the Cauca Valley where CIAT is physically located, a place that has been transformed into an industrial monoculture of sugarcane where thirteen Colombian corporations oversee the vast majority of this valley's famously fertile soil. This exemplifies the paradox Timothy W. Lorek describes in Making the Green Revolution: an international research center emphasizing small-scale and sustainable agricultural systems sited conspicuously on a landscape otherwise dominated by a large-scale corporate sugarcane industry. Utilizing archives in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the United States, Lorek tracks the paradoxical but intertwined twentieth-century processes that produced both CIAT and sugar in the Cauca Valley. This history reveals how Colombians contributed to the rise of a global Green Revolution and how that international process in turn intersected with a complex and long-running rural conflict in Colombia.

Since 2006, Venezuela has witnessed an explosion of different forms of popular power and participatory democracy. Over 47,000 grassroots neighborhood-based communal councils and 3,000 communes have been constructed. In Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis, Anderson Bean offers a critical analysis of these experiments in popular and workers' power and their potential for societal transformation within and beyond Venezuela. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Bean demonstrates how workers and peasants, through networks of popular power, exercise agency over their own development while facing challenges from the capitalist state. Most importantly, this book connects with the far-reaching implications that the communal movement in Venezuela has for building a society responsive more to the needs of ordinary people than to the desires of the elites.

God's Marshall Plan tells the story of the American Protestants who sought to transform Germany into a new Christian and democratic nation in the heart of twentieth-century Europe. James D. Strasburg follows the American pastors, revivalists, diplomats, and spies who crossed the Atlantic in an era of world war, responded to the rise of totalitarian dictators, and began to identify Europe as a continent in need of saving. He examines their far-reaching campaigns to make Germany into the European cornerstone of a new American-led global spiritual order. God's Marshall Plan illuminates the dramatic ramifications of these efforts by showing how the mission to remake Germany in America's image actually remade American Protestantism itself. American Protestants realized they had come to dramatically different conclusions about how to rebuild the West out of the ruins of war. European Protestants, meanwhile, began to sharply protest America's spiritual advance. Forsaking their wartime nationalism, a growing number of ecumenical Protestants championed a new ethic of global fellowship, reconciliation, and justice. However, a fresh wave of evangelical Protestants emerged and ensured that the religious struggle would continue into the Cold War. Strasburg argues that the spiritual struggle for Europe ultimately forged two competing visions of global engagement Christian nationalism and Christian globalism that transformed the United States, diplomacy, and politics in the Cold War and beyond.

How do we explain the surprising trajectory of the Chinese Communist revolution? Why has it taken such a different route from its Russian prototype? An answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists’ creative development and deployment of cultural resources – during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful "cultural positioning" and "cultural patronage," on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, helped to construct a polity in which a once alien Communist system came to be accepted as familiarly "Chinese." Perry traces this process through a case study of the Anyuan coal mine, a place where Mao and other early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party mobilized an influential labor movement at the beginning of their revolution, and whose history later became a touchstone of "political correctness" in the People’s Republic of China. Once known as "China’s Little Moscow," Anyuan came over time to symbolize a distinctively Chinese revolutionary tradition. Yet the meanings of that tradition remain highly contested, as contemporary Chinese debate their revolutionary past in search of a new political future.