A Promise of Historiographical Renewal for a New Generation of Radical Historians. A Review of Michel Gobat's <em>Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule</em> (Durham: Duke UP, 2005)

Authors

  • Louis Segal University of California—Berkeley

Keywords:

radical historians, Nicaraguan history, Imperialism

Abstract

There was a time—and it wasn’t so long ago—when many historians chose to write social history. The tools of the trade were often Marxist terms of analysis. These historians tried to tell the history ‘from the bottom rail up.” They tried to narrate their histories from the perspective of class and, in that process, rescue lost or unheard voices from “the enormous condescension of posterity,” as E.P. Thomson famously put it. In short, these historians tried to review the past from the vantage point of those who struggled for power, for identity, for sovereignty, for liberty, for dignity, and for historical agency.

Author Biography

Louis Segal, University of California—Berkeley

Louis Segal se doctoró en historia de la Universidad de California—Davis en 1997 con la tesis doctoral “Images of Conquest in Imaginative Nineteenth-Century North American Literature: Mexico and Peru”. Desde 1993 ha dado cursos en varias universidades, entre ellas la Universidad de California—Davis, Stanford University, y la Universidd de California—Santa Cruz. Actualmente enseña estudios latinoamericanos en la Universidad de California—Berkeley.

Published

2007-08-01

How to Cite

Segal, L. (2007). A Promise of Historiographical Renewal for a New Generation of Radical Historians. A Review of Michel Gobat’s <em>Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule</em> (Durham: Duke UP, 2005). A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 5(1), 327–338. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/394

Issue

Section

Reviews: The U.S. and Latin America