Russell Crandall
Biographic Data
| ID | 3744887 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Russell Crandall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Russell |
| FAMILY NAME | Crandall |
| SIGNATURE | CRANDALL R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Davidson College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Latin America
Having assumed office in 1948 as Puerto Rico's first elected governor, Luis Muoz Marn oversaw a singularly spectacular time in the island's economic fortunes.His modernisation project, Operation Bootstrap, which capitalised on the island's unique position in relation to the United States and an arcane tax-exemption-driven device, produced rapid industrialisation and significant growth during the 1950s and 1960s (p.2).American president John F. Ke…
Gambling the World: The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited
From North Korea to Ukraine to Iran, the spectre of nuclear war continues to loom over global affairs. In his timely history Nuclear Folly, Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy takes a fresh and intentionally international look at one of the most fraught moments of the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis. Contrary to the conventional view that US president John F. Kennedy brilliantly out-foxed his inept Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, Plokhy pos…
Cold War Redux
In The Twilight Struggle, diplomatic historian Hal Brands urges readers to revisit Cold War history to gain vital insights and lessons regarding the United States’ unfolding geopolitical and ideological competition with Russia and China, which he sees as unfolding in the ‘no-man’s land between peace and war’. The author does not believe that the Cold War is a perfect facsimile of today’s fraught global environment, but the struggles of the twenti…
Latin America
Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and CartelsIoan Grillo. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. £14.99/$28.00. 400 pp.Prisons and Crime in Latin AmericaMarcelo Bergman and Gustavo Fondevila. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. £26.99. 261 pp.The Surrendered: Reflections by a Son of Shining PathJosé Carlos Agüero. Michael J. Lazzara and Charles F. Walker, eds and trans. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. £18.99/$23.95. 152 pp…
Latin America
Conservative Party-building in Latin America: Authoritarian Inheritance and Counterrevolutionary StruggleJames Loxton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. £47.99. 279 pp.City of Omens: A Search for the Missing Women of the BorderlandsDan Werb. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. $28.00. 304 pp.Garibaldi in South America: An ExplorationRichard Bourne. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2020. £25.00. 232 pp.Persuasive Peers: Social Communication and Voting in Lati…
The End of the West
In The Abandonment of the West, Michael Kimmage explores the relationship between American foreign policy and the ‘West’. The concept of the West, once a unifying idea in American culture, has undergone a sharp re-evaluation over the last century. Kimmage does not idealise the West or its history, giving a voice to the many critics of Western civilisation who have pointed out examples of US hypocrisy. At the same time, he notes that the West, esp…
Castroism in Crisis
Since the middle of the twentieth century, Fidel Castro has cast an outsized shadow over all things Cuba, as if the Cuban leader and the communist Caribbean nation were one and the same. Yet, as veteran New York Times correspondent Anthony DePalma contends in his book The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times, this reflex obfuscates the complex society that is increasingly at cross purposes with all things Fidel. The author’s keen profile…
"Our Hemisphere"?: The United States in Latin America, from 1776 to the Twenty-First Century
We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire
The war on drugs has gained renewed attention over the last decade for a variety of reasons. The ongoing economic and social experiments—in some fifteen U.S. states, Uruguay, and, most recently, Mexico—with the legalization of marijuana are evidence of changing attitudes and policies. Latin American leaders such as Colombia's Juan Manuel Santos and Guatemala's Otto Pérez Molina were outspoken advocates in favor of rethinking how the drug war has …
Rebel with a Cause
Simon Hall’s colourful Ten Days in Harlem makes the reasonable case that Fidel Castro’s flamboyantly provocative visit to New York in 1960 elevated the Global South as a Cold War player
Latin America
State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador’s World of ViolenceWilliam Wheeler. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2020. $15.99. 167 pp.No Option but North: The Migrant World and the Perilous Path Across the BorderKelsey Freeman. New York: Ig Publishing, 2020. $17.95. 280 pp.Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in ChiapasLindsay Naylor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. $27.00. 280 pp.US Hegemony and the Ame…
The US–Mexico Border: Asylum, Fear and Trump
In his impassioned book The Dispossessed, John Washington vividly charts how the United States (and the West in general) has eviscerated asylum protections for the world’s most vulnerable people
Colombia’s River of Life and Death
In his latest travel-based volume, Magdalena: River of Dreams, explorer and writer Wade Davis chronicles Colombia’s primary river system, the majestic Magdalena. As the author sees it, the river has had a lasting impact on the country’s geographical, historical, environmental, economic and cultural attributes. Davis, a Canadian polymath who has penned nearly two dozen books, first fell in love with Colombia as a teenager during a school trip. But…
Coffee and Communism
Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug is exquisitely written, if somewhat skewed politically
Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s
As Simon Hall relates in this romp of a Cold War caper, Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s, Fidel Castro and his sizable Cuban delegation, arriving in New York City on September 18, 1960, to attend the 15th United Nations General Assembly, first landed a block of rooms at the Shelburne (each for $20 a night, or $180 in today's money) on Lexington Avenue, in the island's midtown section, while Soviet premier Nikita Khrush…
Drugs and Thugs: The History and Future of America's War on Drugs
How can the United States chart a path forward in the war on drugs? This book uncovers the full history of this war that has lasted more than a century. The book provides an essential view of the economic, political, and human impacts of U.S. drug policies. It takes readers from Afghanistan to Colombia, to Peru and Mexico, to Miami International Airport and the border crossing between El Paso and Juarez to trace the complex social networks that m…
Opium
This chapter begins with Thomas De Quincey, who published a book in 1821 under the title Confessions of an English Opium Eater , an autobiographical telling of his “tortured love affair” with a tincture of 10 percent opium. It analyzes that De Quincey's Confessions confronted the West with a stark description of a novel concept: drug addiction. It also speculates that opium might be humanity's first drug as it was cultivated at the same time as a…
Crackdown
This chapter recounts how the United States in the nineteenth century permitted considerable personal freedom of choice regarding drugs, citing the idiosyncrasies of the U.S. Constitution that helped ensure potent forms of opium, cocaine, and cannabis remained widely available nationwide. It talks about how the American legal system made states responsible for regulating drugs, particularly opium and cannabis, on their own turf. It also discusses…
Drugs and Thugs: The History and Future of America's War on Drugs
A sweeping and highly readable work on the evolution of America's domestic and global drug war
Uncle Sam’s Hidden Empire
In his penetrating How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr considers US treatment of its territories, and chronicles the steep costs of imperial exploitation and neglect
Castro’s Revolutionary Coming of Age
Jonathan M. Hansen’s admirably analytical and detailed Young Castro shows how the revolutionary figure compellingly portrayed in Tony Perrottet’s Cuba Libre! emerged
Northern Exposure
Carrie Gibson’s El Norte vividly demonstrates that the United States would not be what it is today without strong, deep and underappreciated Hispanic influences
Latin America
Deported to Death: How Drug Violence Is Changing Migration on the US–Mexico BorderJeremy Slack. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. £25.00/$29.95. 256 pp.Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo EscobarSteve Murphy and Javier F. Peña. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019. £20.00/$28.99. 345 pp.Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in ColombiaAlexander L. Fattal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019. £21.00/$27.50.…
Exodus from the Northern Triangle
The caravans of migrants that the White House rails against may become larger and more frequent the more it tries to implement its restrictive agenda
Latin America
The Line Becomes a RiverFrancisco Cantú. London: The Bodley Head, 2018. £14.99. 247 pp.Homelands: Four Friends, Two Countries, and the Fate of the Great Mexican–American MigrationAlfredo Corchado. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. $27.00. 304 pp.Our Woman in Havana: A Diplomat's Chronicle of America's Long Struggle with Castro's CubaVicki Huddleston. New York: The Overlook Press, 2018. $29.95. 304 pp.The Tango War: The Struggle for the Heart…
The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror
Journal Article The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror Get access By Joseph Masco. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 273 pp. Cloth, $84.95. Paper, $23.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 102, Issue 4, March 2016, Pages 1252–1253, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav713 Published: 01 March 2016
The Global Economic Crisis, Contagion, and Institutions: New Realities in Latin America and Asia
This article uses the current economic crisis in Asia to analyze the impact that economic turmoil—especially economic contagion—in emerging markets can have on the process of social, political, and economic institutionalization and reform in Asia and Latin America. It argues that continued financial instability will result in increased democratization and transparency in Asia, as has happened in Latin America as a result of its struggles to conso…
Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy toward Colombia
Explicit Narcotization: U.S. Policy Toward Colombia During the Samper Administration
Suspecting that his electoral campaign had received contributions from the Cali drug cartel, the U.S. government considered Colombian president Ernesto Samper (1994–98) an enemy in the drug war. U.S. antidrug policy accordingly targeted not just illicit crop cultivation, traffickers, and money laundering but also the democratically elected president himself. In many ways, U.S. policy became obsessed with bringing down Samper, an “explicit narcoti…
The Global Economic Crisis, Contagion, and Institutions: New Realities in Latin America and Asia
This article uses the current economic crisis in Asia to analyze the impact that economic turmoil—especially economic contagion—in emerging markets can have on the process of social, political, and economic institutionalization and reform in Asia and Latin America. It argues that continued financial instability will result in increased democratization and transparency in Asia, as has happened in Latin America as a result of its struggles to conso…
Books in review
Explicit Narcotization: U.S. Policy Toward Colombia During the Samper Administration
Suspecting that his electoral campaign had received contributions from the Cali drug cartel, the U.S. government considered Colombian president Ernesto Samper (1994–98) an enemy in the drug war. U.S. antidrug policy accordingly targeted not just illicit crop cultivation, traffickers, and money laundering but also the democratically elected president himself. In many ways, U.S. policy became obsessed with bringing down Samper, an “explicit narcoti…
Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy toward Colombia
Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy toward Colombia
Drugs and Democracy in Latin America: The Impact of U.S. Policy (review)
Reports from the Revolution
Requiem for the Farc
Irreconcilable Differences
A Hot Cold War
Latin America’s Cold War eschews ideologically rigid, morally soothing caricatures for a more balanced, and ultimately more powerful and lasting interpretation
The Cold War and Cuban Intelligence
In Castro's Secrets, former CIA officer Brian Latell reveals how Cuban intelligence ran circles around its much larger and better-funded American counterpart
Drug Wars
The ‘war on drugs’ has failed in its stated goals, but has indirectly helped secure a huge victory in Colombia. We must think carefully before abandoning it altogether
America's Dirty Wars: Irregular Warfare from 1776 to the War on Terror
This book examines the long, complex experience of American involvement in irregular warfare. It begins with the American Revolution in 1776 and chronicles big and small irregular wars for the next two and a half centuries. What is readily apparent in dirty wars is that failure is painfully tangible while success is often amorphous. Successfully fighting these wars often entails striking a critical balance between military victory and politics. A…
America's Dirty Wars
Maxed Out
Democracy and the Mexican Cartels
In El Narco, journalist Ioan Grillo provides an overview of the history and dynamics of the Mexican drug war
Delusions of Grand
Hal Brands's valuable book, What Good is Grand Strategy?, shows it is far easier to desire a grand strategy than to design one
Michael E. Donoghue. Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone
Journal Article Michael E. Donoghue. Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone. Get access Michael E. Donoghue. Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone. (American Encounters/Global Interactions.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 349. Cloth $94.95, paper $25.95. Russell Crandall Russell Crandall Davidson College [email protected] Search for other wor…
The Salvador Option: The United States in El Salvador, 1977–1992
El Salvador's civil war between the Salvadoran government and Marxist guerrillas erupted into full force in early 1981 and endured for eleven bloody years. Unwilling to tolerate an advance of Soviet and Cuban-backed communism in its geopolitical backyard, the US provided over six billion dollars in military and economic aid to the Salvadoran government. El Salvador was a deeply controversial issue in American society and divided Congress and the …
Latin America’s Invisible War
Ioan Grillo's Gangster Warlords and Aldo Civico's The Para-State draw deserved attention to the violence of Latin America's drug war
History and Policy: Please Think Responsibly
The Power of the Past, a stellar collection of essays edited by Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri, shows how loosely politicians use history, intentionally and unintentionally
The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror
Journal Article The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror Get access By Joseph Masco. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 273 pp. Cloth, $84.95. Paper, $23.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 102, Issue 4, March 2016, Pages 1252–1253, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav713 Published: 01 March 2016
When Americans Loved Simón Bolívar
Caitlin Fitz’s Our Sister Republics uncovers a potent sense of American kinship towards Latin America’s nineteenth-century independence movements
America’s Path from Malaise to Primacy
Hal Brands’s Making the Unipolar Moment is a breath of fresh air on a topic politicised, or as often romanticised, for far too long
The Black Bonaparte
Philippe Girard’s exhaustively researched book, Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life, is a reminder that even the greatest among us reflect the constraints of our own times
Political science (48 works) · Law (32 works) · History (30 works) · Law (25 works) · History (24 works) · Politics (23 works) · Economic history (20 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Latin Americans (12 works) · Political economy (12 works)