Two books by historian Jordana Dym

Within the past year, Associate Professor of History Jordana Dym saw the publication of two books: Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759-1821 (2007, University Press of Colorado), which she co-edited (with Christophe Belaubre of the University of Toulouse-le Mirail and the Universidad Industrial de Santander, Colombia); and From Sovereign Villages to National States:  city, State, and Federation I Central America, 1759-1839 (2006, University of New Mexico Press), which she wrote.

Both volumes demonstrate Dym’s passion for connecting Latin America to the growing field of “Atlantic history,” which she described in a recent Scope profile as “the many interactions (economic, political, philosophical, military) among North America, Latin America, Europe, and West Africa since the sixteenth century or so.”

Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759-1821 examines how the Spanish policies known broadly as the Bourbon Reforms affected Central American social, economic, and political institutions. This is the first edited volume in English to focus on the impact of these policies on this region and brings together texts by Central American, European, and North American scholars to study changes in education, marriage, trade, and other areas.  Historians look to this period to help explain why, just a few generations later, one colony split into five countries.

University of Arizona historian Kevin Gosner notes that the volume “offers new contexts and new empirical material for key debates in our field.”

Read more at the publisher’s web site:
http://www.upcolorado.com/bookdetail.asp?isbn=978-0-87081-844-8

The reasons for Central America’s post-independence instability were a focus of Dym’s earlier book, From Sovereign Villages to National States:  City, State, and Federation in Central America, 1759-1839, an analysis of Central America’s early 19th-century political revolution.  Dym suggests that Central America, like the U.S., France, and many states of South America, had idealistic leaders when it became independent in 1821, but that because of many factors, in particular the power of local institutions like city governments, they could not make a Central American federation work.  Her book argues that even the creation of the small countries including Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, represented success as well as failure, since battling cities within had to agree to a common future.

Karen Racine of the University of Guelph, in her online review http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/itinerario/bookreviews-23.html? wrote, “Jordana Dym has written a welcome and important book that not only will contribute to the growing field of Atlantic world history in the age of great revolutions, but also will raise scholarly interest in Central American history in general.”

More information is available at the publisher’s web site:
http://www.unmpress.com/Book.php?id=11012375539822
To read more about Dym’s research on From Sovereign Villages, click here:
https://www.skidmore.edu/scope/spring2006/campus_scene/index.htm

With two books to her credit, it’s logical to assume that Dym might be taking things a bit easier these days, but such an assumption would be erroneous.  This summer, she working on two new co-edited books:  one on Napoleon Bonaparte’s impact in the Americas in the 19th century, and a reader for undergraduates that asks students to consider how maps help shape the space of Latin America from the colonial period to the current times.  

She’s also researching papers to be given during the upcoming academic year at several professional meetings.