Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

Taking on the conventional Anglo-centrism of American history, this superb survey offers a different way of looking at the nation’s past. A leading scholar of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame, Fernández-Armesto (Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration) brilliantly reveals the U.S.’s deep roots in Spanish and Hispanic culture and aspirations. With convincing arguments and deftly told stories, he shows how Spain and Hispanics have influenced American history from well before the British arrived. Likely to be controversial, Fernández-Armesto’s study makes a strong case for the 20th-century being America’s “ second Hispanic colonization” and argues that “the United States is—and has to be—a Latin American country.” Along the way, readers will learn who the real Zorro may have been and how literary magical realism may have originated in the U.S. While not an entirely new way to look at the American past, no one has presented it better or with more zest. A first-person, opinionated, learned, wide-ranging, and delightfully written book, this is responsible revisionist history at its very best and deserves the widest possible attention. (Jan.)