Author: Peter Lambert
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822395398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
Hemmed in by the vast, arid Chaco to the west and, for most of its history, impenetrable jungles to the east, Paraguay has been defined largely by its isolation. Partly as a result, there has been a dearth of serious scholarship or journalism about the country. Going a long way toward redressing this lack of information and analysis, The Paraguay Reader is a lively compilation of testimonies, journalism, scholarship, political tracts, literature, and illustrations, including maps, photographs, paintings, drawings, and advertisements. Taken together, the anthology's many selections convey the country's extraordinarily rich history and cultural heritage, as well as the realities of its struggles against underdevelopment, foreign intervention, poverty, inequality, and authoritarianism. Most of the Reader is arranged chronologically. Weighted toward the twentieth century and early twenty-first, it nevertheless gives due attention to major events in Paraguay's history, such as the Triple Alliance War (1864–70) and the Chaco War (1932–35). The Reader's final section, focused on national identity and culture, addresses matters including ethnicity, language, and gender. Most of the selections are by Paraguayans, and many of the pieces appear in English for the first time. Helpful introductions by the editors precede each of the book's sections and all of the selected texts.
Author: Girolamo Imbruglia
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004350608
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
The Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and a Cultural History of Utopia (1568–1789) explores the religious foundations of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, and the discussion of the missionary experience in the public opinion of early modern Europe, from Montaigne to Diderot. This book presents a wealth of documentation to highlight three key aspects of this debate: the relationship between civilisation and religion, between religion and political imagination, and between utopia and history. Girolamo Imbruglia's analysis of the Jesuits' own narrative reveals that the idea and the practice of mission have been one of the essential features of the European identity, and of the shaping modern political thought.
Author: Paul H. Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Author: Shawn Michael Austin
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826361978
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
In Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay, historian Shawn Michael Austin traces the history of conquest and colonization in Paraguay during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emphasizing the social and cultural agency of Guaraní—one of the primary indigenous peoples of Paraguay—not only in Jesuit missions but also in colonial settlements and Indian pueblos scattered in and around the Spanish city of Asunción, Austin argues that interethnic relations and cultural change in Paraguay can only be properly understood through the Guaraní logic of kinship. In the colonial backwater of Paraguay, conquistadors were forced to marry into Guaraní families in order to acquire indigenous tributaries, thereby becoming “brothers-in-law” (tovajá) to Guaraní chieftains. This pattern of interethnic exchange infused colonial relations and institutions with Guaraní social meanings and expectations of reciprocity that forever changed Spaniards, African slaves, and their descendants. Austin demonstrates that Guaraní of diverse social and political positions actively shaped colonial society along indigenous lines.
Author: James Schofield Saeger
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742580563
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
The first serious biography of Francisco Solano López in English for decades, this richly researched book tells the dramatic story of Paraguay's most notorious ruler. Despite the heroic stature he gained after his death, López was a monumentally flawed leader who made the disastrous decisions in 1864 and 1865 to invade Paraguay's powerful neighbors, Brazil and Argentina, initiating the most devastating interstate conflict in South American history. Drawing on a trove of primary sources, James Schofield Saeger offers a critical analysis of López's personality and often-irrational persecution of enemies, adherents, and siblings. He traces López's preparation for high public office, work habits, control of his nation and army, propaganda, and execution. Concluding with an examination of López's posthumous rehabilitation, Saeger shows how the tyrant who ruined his nation became its most highly honored hero, crowning a campaign by revisionist publicists from 1870–1936, and a useful symbol for later authoritarians. Still largely unchallenged in Paraguay today, this glorification of a martial president is definitively put to rest in Saeger's meticulous study.
Author: Clement J. McNaspy
Publisher: Chicago : Loyola University Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
For one brief shining hour there existed in the jungles of what is now Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, a marvelous civilization that stands today only in near-forgotten though still eloquent ruins. These were the Thirty Cities of the so-called "Jesuit Reductions", safe havens into which Jesuit missioners gathered primitive Indians to protect them from Portuguese slave traders and the depredations of the Spanish colonists. In a fantastically short time, the talents of these previously untrained people flowered into the building of a remarkable "world" of beauty and grace almost beyond belief, a world Voltaire called "in some way the triumph of humanity" and Chesterton called "a Paradise in Paraguay". Were it not for the mute testimony of the delicately carved statues and the ruins of noble churches, the whole story might seem beyond belief.
Author: Frank O. Mora
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820329321
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Ranging from the 1840s through the early twenty-first century, this study of shared political, economic, and cultural histories fills significant gaps in our understanding of Paraguayan-U.S. relations. Frank O. Mora and Jerry W. Cooney tell how an initially rocky beginning between the two countries, marked by diplomatic posturing, shows of military force, and failed business schemes, gave way to a calmer period during which the United States backed Paraguay's territorial claims against its neighbors, prospects grew brighter for American entrepreneurs, and Paraguay embraced Pan-Americanism. It was not until the 1930s that the two countries engaged in earnest as the United States attempted to mediate the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia. Then, as the authors write, "hemispheric solidarity in World War II, the cold war in Latin America, the 'balance of power' among states in the Río de la Plata, and the question of U.S. support for, or aid to, Latin American dictators" became matters of mutual interest. The dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89) spanned much of this era, and a shared attitude of realpolitik typified U.S.-Paraguayan relations during his rule. Post-Stroessner, the United States has stood by Paraguay during its transition to democracy, despite lingering concerns about such issues as drug trafficking and intellectual piracy. The countries should grow closer with time, the authors conclude, if Paraguay resists the continent's leftward political shift and remains a solid partner in U.S. antiterror initiatives in South America.
Author: Tomás Mandl
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476642893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Paraguay has been called the least-known country in Latin America, an island surrounded by land, and the "South American Tibet." For many years, foreign writers and journalists described it as an enigmatic land where a peculiar people endured calamities and Nazis sought refuge. Tomas Mandl spent 2016 to 2020 traveling through the country, meeting leading minds and sifting through data. Drawing on more than 40 interviews with historians, political scientists, economists, journalists and diplomats, this book provides a timely assessment of Paraguay's strengths, challenges and developmental outlook, and their implications for the world.
Author: Augusto Roa Bastos
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525564691
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
I the Supreme imagines a dialogue between the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator known as Dr. Francia and Policarpo Patiño, his secretary and only companion. The opening pages present a sign that they had found nailed to the wall of a cathedral, purportedly written by Dr. Francia himself and ordering the execution of all of his servants upon his death. This sign is quickly revealed to be a forgery, which takes leader and secretary into a larger discussion about the nature of truth: “In the light of what Your Eminence says, even the truth appears to be a lie.” Their conversation broadens into an epic journey of the mind, stretching across the colonial history of their nation, filled with surrealist imagery, labyrinthine turns, and footnotes supplied by a mysterious “compiler.” A towering achievement from a foundational author of modern Latin American literature, I the Supreme is a darkly comic, deeply moving meditation on power and its abuse—and on the role of language in making and unmaking whole worlds.
Author: Jacob Blanc
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816537143
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
"A transnational approach to the history of a key Latin American border region"--Provided by publisher.
