Includes bibliographical references and index.

"This ... original reinterpretation of the New World ... reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other. [The book] traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest--the greatest mortality event in human history--through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century, and beyond. Grandin shows, among other things, how royalist Spanish America, by sending troops and supplies, helped save the republican American Revolution; how in response to U.S. interventions, Latin Americans remade the rules, leading directly to the founding of the United Nations; and how the Good Neighbor Policy allowed FDR to assume the moral authority to lead the fight against world fascism"--