A Mcpherson
Biographic Data
| ID | 4646 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Mcpherson |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcpherson |
| SIGNATURE | MCPHERSON A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Temple University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6388-7399 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Reflections on Imperialism, Anti-Americanism, and New Diplomatic Histories: A Dialogue with Alan McPherson on the Dominican Crisis of 1965
Revista de la Universidad de Montevideo with a detailed reflection on the Dominican Crisis of 1965, six decades after this critical event in inter-American history.Given his academic trajectory and expertise in U.S.-Latin American relations, we sought his reflections on the Dominican Crisis of 1965 and its broader implications.McPherson, a historian and professor at Temple University, is renowned for his extensive work on anti-Americanism and U.S…
Two Visions of Government: Iran-Contra and the Congressional Debate over American Democracy
Above the Written Law”: Iran-Contra and the Mirage of the Rule of Law
Why have scandalous sprees of lawbreaking by U.S. government officials proven so seductive yet so difficult to prosecute? This article takes the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan–Bush era as an instructive case study and red flag in the attitudinal erosion of the belief in the rule of law among American conservatives. Before the scandal broke, officials and legal counsels willfully mis-interpreted a clear prohibition to fund counter-revolutionari…
“The Most Marketable Political Commodity”: Oliver North, Iran-Contra, and American Domestic Politics
From Oliver North's congressional testimony in 1987 to his near-successful Senate run in 1994, this article assesses the significance of the Iran-Contra scandal to the American domestic political landscape. It positions Iran-Contra at a transitional moment in right-wing politics, torn between loyalty to Reagan on one hand and the combativeness of the 1990s’ New Right on the other. In four stages—denial, fame, fundraising, and forgetting—defenders…
The Historical Presidency: Protecting a president and graymailing courts: Iran‐Contra and the obstruction of justice
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's 2019 refusal to charge President Donald Trump with crimes resulted not only from what Mueller deemed insufficient evidence but also from the obstruction of the investigation itself, indicating an all‐too‐common pattern mitigating the independence of the judiciary when investigating the executive. The Iran‐Contra scandal of the Reagan–Bush era stands as a key antecedent when officials repeatedly destroyed evidence …
Eric Rutkow. The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas
It is remarkable that no monograph has ever been written on the Pan-American Highway, the longest road in the world, almost uninterrupted from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. This especially when the other massive US engineering project in Latin America, the Panama Canal, has attracted countless histories. The historiography of highway design in the Americas is still in its infancy; Eric Rutkow’s The Longest Line on the Map stands as a significant co…
Brazil's Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century
Book Review| February 01 2021 Brazil's Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century Brazil's Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century. By Woodard, James P.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Tables. Notes. Bibliographic essay. Index. xvi, 524 pp. Paper, $37.50. Alan McPherson Alan McPherson Temple University Search for other works by this author on: This Site G…
Progressivism Reclaimed: Despite a long history of intervention, U.S. policy toward Latin America has contained the occasional progressive impulse. recalling those moments of illumination—and how easi…
Counterterrorism in American Civil Courts: The Role of Letelier v. Republic of Chile
The very rarity of these situations makes the legislation all the more important. Samuel Buffone, lawyer for Isabel Letelier On September 21, 1976, former Chilean Ambassador and Minister Orlando Letelier drove to his job in Washington, DC, in his Chevelle, accompanied by his coworkers, Ronni Moffitt and Michael Moffitt. As the Chevelle veered off Massachusetts Avenue into Sheridan Circle, the bottom of the car exploded upward, blowing off Letelie…
Modern Panama: From Occupation to Crossroads of the Americas
Michael L. Conniff and Gene E. Bigler (a scholar and a diplomat, respectively), examine Panamanian history from the early 1980s to the administration of President Juan Carlos Varela up to 2018. They ask how the country has fared during and since the transition from client of the United States to independent republic managing the Panama Canal by itself. Theirs is a largely positive assessment. Politically, Panama ended the tumultuous Manuel Norieg…
Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal
Between 1913 and 1916, the US-run Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) expelled some 40,000 people from Panamanian towns in the Canal Zone. Marixa Lasso is the first to unpack this fascinating story, usually only mentioned alongside the greater epic of the construction of the Panama Canal. She debunks the myth that this depopulation was necessary to building the waterway; some towns were flooded, but many could have remained and were dismantled after …
Letelier Diplomacy: Nonstate Actors and U.S.-Chilean Relations
Strange bedfellows at the end of the Cold War: The Letelier assassination, human rights, and state sovereignty
Based in part on newly released documents and interviews, this article asks about the impact of the 1976 assassination of Chilean exile Orlando Letelier in Washington. It finds that the case contributed to the end of the Cold War in Latin America by uniting strange bedfellows: advocates of human rights and defenders of national sovereignty. Human rights proponents found allies among US diplomats shocked at an Augusto Pinochet regime that thought …
Caribbean Taliban: Cuban American Terrorism in the 1970s
Most scholars have not taken Cuban-American terrorism in the 1970s seriously, despite the unprecedented campaign of terror it unleashed. Borrowing a framework of self-identity usually applied to other terrorist groups and using case studies of the Cuban Nationalism Movement in New Jersey and of Alpha 66 in Florida, this article argues that Cuban-American political ideology was the key to its impact and its support from communities in Florida and …
Alejandro Bendaña. Sandino: Patria y libertad
Nicaraguan historian Alejandro Bendaña has written the most engaging biography of the guerrilla leader Augusto César Sandino, who resisted the occupation of his country from 1927 to 1933 only to be assassinated in 1934 on the orders of soon-to-be dictator Anastasio Somoza. This magnum opus seals Bendaña’s reputation as the preeminent Sandino biographer anywhere. Sandino: Patria y libertad is not a full account, for it largely leaves aside the mil…
Latin America’s Hot Cultural Cold Wars
In Latin America, not only has public culture long been prominent, but intellectuals have also played an outsized role in politics. These two books trace the efforts of left-wing intellectuals and artists to make their talents prominent in politics and vice versa from the 1930s to the 1970s. Both authors find some successes but also note disillusionment in those efforts. Of the two books, Patrick Iber’s is the superior work of research and writin…
Terror on Embassy Row, Revisited: Forty years ago, the Pinochet regime’s assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington marked a Cold War watershed
On September 21, 1976, a deafening boom shattered a drizzly Washington, D.C., morning commute. It emanated from Sheridan Circle, a posh roundabout along Embassy Row in Northwest Washington. Upon en
British Diplomacy and US Hegemony in Cuba, 1898–1964 ‐ by Hull, Christopher
In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, The United States, and the Nature of a Region , by Seth Garfield
In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, The United States, and the Nature of a Region, by Seth Garfield. Durham. Duke University Press, 2013. xiii, 343 pp. $94.95 (cloth). $26.95 (paper). In his book, Seth Garfield asks how tensions between groups in the Brazilian Amazon in the World War 11 era to shape landscapes and lifeways in the (p. 1). Among these groups were the governments of Brazil and the United States, migrants, labourers, scientists, journal…
William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh. Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana
Journal Article William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh. Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. Get access William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh. Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 524. $35.00. Alan McPherson Alan McPherson University of Oklahoma [email protected] Search for other w…
Haiti, 1916–1920
This chapter relates another era of “occupation resistance,” this time in Haiti. Here, far more than in other Latin American occupations, marines committed vicious racist abuses, including the corvée, a system of forced labor. The corvée prompted the greatest resistance movement of the Haitian occupation, led by Charlemagne Péralte, who led thousands against the marines in a few years of heavy guerrilla action in 1918–1919. After Péralte’s assass…
Haiti, 1915
The Invaded: How Latin Americans and Their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations
In 1912 the United States sent troops into a Nicaraguan civil war, solidifying a decades-long era of military occupations in Latin America driven by the desire to rewrite the political rules of the hemisphere. For the first time, Alan McPherson takes us inside the resistance to the three longest occupations—in Nicaragua (1912–1933), Haiti (1915–1934), and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924). He asks why the invaded resisted and why the troops even…
The First World War and the Decline of US Empire in the Caribbean
The First World War and the Decline of US Empire in the Caribbean. Un article de la revue Bulletin de la Société d'Histoire de la Guadeloupe (Numéro 168, mai–août 2014, p. 1-245) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Herbert Hoover, Occupation Withdrawal, and the Good Neighbor Policy
Historians still associate the Good Neighbor Policy in L atin A merica almost exclusively with F ranklin R oosevelt while admitting that Republican administrations before his set some precedents. This article argues more forcefully for recognizing the work of H erbert H oover in establishing the major pillar of the policy—the withdrawal of U.S. troops from L atin A merica. More attuned than previous presidents to dissenting voices throughout the …
Caribbean Taliban: Cuban American Terrorism in the 1970s
Most scholars have not taken Cuban-American terrorism in the 1970s seriously, despite the unprecedented campaign of terror it unleashed. Borrowing a framework of self-identity usually applied to other terrorist groups and using case studies of the Cuban Nationalism Movement in New Jersey and of Alpha 66 in Florida, this article argues that Cuban-American political ideology was the key to its impact and its support from communities in Florida and …
Rioting for Dignity: Masculinity, National Identity and Anti-US Resistance in Panama
Modern Panama: From Occupation to Crossroads of the Americas
Michael L. Conniff and Gene E. Bigler (a scholar and a diplomat, respectively), examine Panamanian history from the early 1980s to the administration of President Juan Carlos Varela up to 2018. They ask how the country has fared during and since the transition from client of the United States to independent republic managing the Panama Canal by itself. Theirs is a largely positive assessment. Politically, Panama ended the tumultuous Manuel Norieg…
Herbert Hoover, Occupation Withdrawal, and the Good Neighbor Policy
Historians still associate the Good Neighbor Policy in L atin A merica almost exclusively with F ranklin R oosevelt while admitting that Republican administrations before his set some precedents. This article argues more forcefully for recognizing the work of H erbert H oover in establishing the major pillar of the policy—the withdrawal of U.S. troops from L atin A merica. More attuned than previous presidents to dissenting voices throughout the …
Foreigners under U.S. Occupation in the Caribbean
This article investigates the experiences of third-country diplomats, private citizens, and subjects during U.S. occupations in the Caribbean, specifically in Haiti (1915–34) and the Dominican Republic (1916–24). It asks how their treatment by occupation forces and others might have affected the occupations and finds that they did so negatively. Although important differences marked the experiences of white Europeans - Germans, Spaniards, French,…
The Irony of Legal Pluralism in U.S. Occupations
The Limits of Populist Diplomacy: Fidel Castro's April 1959 Trip to North America
This article asks what lessons about diplomacy can be drawn from Fidel Castro's April 1959 trip to the United States and Canada, a trip long neglected by historians as an aberration in US–Cuban relations because of its apparent public relations success. The trip's meaning, rather, lies in the populist style Castro practiced to circumvent normal protocol, and more importantly in the failure of that populism to sway not only US foreign policy maker…
Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations
The Scottish Sixth
From “Punks” to Geopoliticians: U.S. and Panamanian Teenagers and the 1964 Canal Zone Riots
In 1964, U.S. civilian teenagers managed a rare feat by sparking a major foreign policy crisis. Even more remarkable, they were abroad when they did it, and they caused the crisis out of what many considered too much patriotism. The riots that rocked Panama beginning on 9 January of that year started as a scuffle between Panamanian and U.S. high school students in front of Balboa High School (BHS), a “Zonian” institution mostly for U.S. citizens.…
Yankee No
Examining the roots of anti-Americanism in Latin America, McPherson focuses on three major crises: the Cuban Revolution, the 1964 Panama riots, and U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. He demonstrates the shifting and complex nature of anti-Americanism in each country and the love-hate ambivalence of most Latin Americans toward the U.S
Misled by Himself: What the Johnson Tapes Reveal About the Dominican Intervention of 1965
The recent release of over four hundred telephone conversations recorded in the Lyndon Baines Johnson White House from April to December 1965 provide historians with exciting new evidence on the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. The role of the president in that civil conflict has been up to now mysterious since Johnson rarely committed himself to paper. Critics and scholars since have somewhat exonerated him as simply another decision…
Forthcoming in Volume 38 Number 2
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Stigma, shame, and blame experienced by patients with lung cancer: Qualitative study
OBJECTIVES: To draw on narrative interviews with patients with lung cancer and to explore their perceptions and experience of stigma. DESIGN: Qualitative study. SETTING: United Kingdom. PARTICIPANTS: 45 patients with lung cancer recruited through several sources. RESULTS: Participants experienced stigma commonly felt by patients with other types of cancer, but, whether they smoked or not, they felt particularly stigmatised because the disease is …
Courts of World Opinion: Trying the Panama Flag Riots of 1964
In January 1964, riots broke out along the so-called border between Panamanian cities and the U.S.-run Canal Zone, resulting in loss of life among Panamanians and U.S. citizens and serious economic and political damage on both sides. While historians have mainly focused on the causes of the riots and the U.S.-Panama diplomacy that followed, a close look at the lesser-known international investigations of the violence adds texture and detail to th…
Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations
Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States
From 1848 to the U.S. Civil War, Cubans exiled mostly in New York City — from Miguel T. Tolón to Cirilo Villaverde — produced a dozen newspapers and a few novels, the most prominent being Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés. Together they expressed a positive vision of filibustering as a way to better Cuba through independence, annexation, or social justice. The author asks how publishing on Cuba from the vantage point of exile in the United States influ…
The Limits of Populist Diplomacy: Fidel Castro's April 1959 Trip to North America
This article asks what lessons about diplomacy can be drawn from Fidel Castro's April 1959 trip to the United States and Canada, a trip long neglected by historians as an aberration in US–Cuban relations because of its apparent public relations success. The trip's meaning, rather, lies in the populist style Castro practiced to circumvent normal protocol, and more importantly in the failure of that populism to sway not only US foreign policy maker…
Rioting for Dignity: Masculinity, National Identity and Anti-US Resistance in Panama
Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua by Elizabeth Dore
Yankee No!: Anti-Americanism in U.S.–Latin American Relations
Personal Occupations: Women's Responses to U.S. Military Occupations in Latin America
Alan McPherson is ConocoPhillips Chair in Latin American Studies and Associate Professor of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Yankee No! Anti‐Americanism in U.S.‐Latin American Relations and Intimate Ties, Bitter Struggles: The United States and Latin America since 1945. He would like to thank Roxanna Dunbar‐Ortiz and Marysa Navarro for reading versions of this article.NotesAlan McPherson is ConocoP…
U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War
Arguments don’t come much clearer than in this book. Casting his net over U.S. efforts to overthrow governments in Latin America from 1954 to 1989, Michael Grow asks why and rejects the two “standard scholarly explanations . . . : U.S. national-security concerns and U.S. economic interests” (p. x). Rather, playing a key role were “three entirely different factors — U.S. international credibility, U.S. domestic politics, and lobbying by Latin Amer…
Forget the Maine! The Legacy of “The United States and the Americas”: Forget the Maine
“Imagine that—a history of U.S.-Cuban relations, and no mention of the Maine!” So exclaimed the eminent political scientist and superb historian Lars Schoultz to me when I was in graduate school at the University of North Carolina. Schoultz was not shocked but rather delighted at the achievement of his historian colleague Louis Pérez, a volume in the series “The United States in the Americas.” I never spoke to Pérez about it, but having now read …
Artful Resistances: Song, Literature, and Representations of U.S. Occupations in Nicaragua and Hispaniola1
Foreigners under U.S. Occupation in the Caribbean
This article investigates the experiences of third-country diplomats, private citizens, and subjects during U.S. occupations in the Caribbean, specifically in Haiti (1915–34) and the Dominican Republic (1916–24). It asks how their treatment by occupation forces and others might have affected the occupations and finds that they did so negatively. Although important differences marked the experiences of white Europeans - Germans, Spaniards, French,…
The Irony of Legal Pluralism in U.S. Occupations
Haiti, 1916–1920
This chapter relates another era of “occupation resistance,” this time in Haiti. Here, far more than in other Latin American occupations, marines committed vicious racist abuses, including the corvée, a system of forced labor. The corvée prompted the greatest resistance movement of the Haitian occupation, led by Charlemagne Péralte, who led thousands against the marines in a few years of heavy guerrilla action in 1918–1919. After Péralte’s assass…
Haiti, 1915
The Invaded: How Latin Americans and Their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations
In 1912 the United States sent troops into a Nicaraguan civil war, solidifying a decades-long era of military occupations in Latin America driven by the desire to rewrite the political rules of the hemisphere. For the first time, Alan McPherson takes us inside the resistance to the three longest occupations—in Nicaragua (1912–1933), Haiti (1915–1934), and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924). He asks why the invaded resisted and why the troops even…
The First World War and the Decline of US Empire in the Caribbean
The First World War and the Decline of US Empire in the Caribbean. Un article de la revue Bulletin de la Société d'Histoire de la Guadeloupe (Numéro 168, mai–août 2014, p. 1-245) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Herbert Hoover, Occupation Withdrawal, and the Good Neighbor Policy
Historians still associate the Good Neighbor Policy in L atin A merica almost exclusively with F ranklin R oosevelt while admitting that Republican administrations before his set some precedents. This article argues more forcefully for recognizing the work of H erbert H oover in establishing the major pillar of the policy—the withdrawal of U.S. troops from L atin A merica. More attuned than previous presidents to dissenting voices throughout the …
Political Culture in Panama: Democracy after Invasion - by Pérez, Orlando J
Political science (39 works) · Law (36 works) · History (27 works) · Politics (27 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Law (18 works) · Economic history (14 works) · Cuban History and Society (13 works) · Political economy (13 works) · History (12 works)