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The Vanguard Of The Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, And Democracy In Nineteenth-Century Latin America, James E. Sanders

History Faculty Publications

When Mexican Conservatives offered Maximilian the throne, he assumed that their desire for a monarch meant that the republican experiment in Latin America had failed. Even though he fell in defeat, Latin America’s importance for the development of republicanism and democracy and the shaping of the modern Atlantic world is similarly dismissed today. This refusal to grant the republican experiments in Latin America legitimacy has occluded a powerful alternative possibility for organizing society and understanding the future that emerged in nineteenth- century Latin America. As noted in the prologue, I denominate this alternative “American republican modernity.” In this counter mentalité, …