The tangled legacies of two Americas

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. How have political, economic, and ideological ideas flowed between Latin America and the United States? dates over the centuries. And how have these two powers looked to each other to define themselves? That's the subject of a sweeping new book by Professor Greg Grandin, that begins with the brutal 16th century Spanish conquest of South America and tracks the two hemispheres' relationships

up until the present day. Ellen Evans speaks to Grandin to find out more about how the two Americas have influenced, mirrored and reacted to one another over time. Your central thread is looking at how South and North America have looked to each other and learned from each other and defined themselves against each other through their respective histories. If that's a fair representation of your argument, can you explain what motivated you in this approach? Well, it is a fair representation of the argument.

I would go a little bit further and say it was also an attempt to kind of think about how the interstates, the modern liberal order that emerged after World War II, in the United Nations and all the legal fundamentals that underwrote the United Nations, how that largely emerged out of the experience of the New World from conquest through World War II. There's a through line. that starts with the Spanish conquest and climaxes in in many ways with the first fight against fascism, the World War II, and then there's a considerable aftermath, the Cold War and then economic restructuring. But from Cortes to Hitler, in in some ways, the book runs, you know, and fights over the doctrine of conquest. So the book is about how the US and Latin America

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