Confronting the American Dream

Confronting the American Dream

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Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the midanineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912a33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the countryas wealthiest and most Americanized elites were transformed from leading supporters of U.S. imperial rule into some of its greatest opponents. Gobat focuses primarily on the reactions of the elites to Americanization, because the power and identity of these Nicaraguans were the most significantly affected by U.S. imperial rule. He describes their adoption of aspects of athe American way of lifea in the midanineteenth century as strategic rather than wholesale. Chronicling the U.S. occupation of 1912a33, he argues that the anti-American turn of Nicaraguaas most Americanized oligarchs stemmed largely from the efforts of U.S. bankers, marines, and missionaries to spread their own version of the American dream. In part, the oligarchsa reversal reflected their anguish over the 1920s rise of Protestantism, the amodern woman, a and other avices of modernitya emanating from the United States. But it also responded to the unintended ways that U.S. modernization efforts enabled peasants to weaken landlord power. Gobat demonstrates that the U.S. occupation so profoundly affected Nicaragua that it helped engender the Sandino Rebellion of 1927a33, the Somoza dictatorship of 1936a79, and the Sandinista Revolution of 1979a90.One of the earliest and most influential eaorts to misrepresent Conservative oligarchs as antientrepreneurial was Historia de ... Given their modernizing bent and economic prowess, why were Granadaa#39;s Conservative oligarchs so successfullyanbsp;...

Title:Confronting the American Dream
Author: Michel Gobat
Publisher:Duke University Press - 2005-12-06



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