| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Lester D. Langley. The Americas in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 317. $37.50.
Lester D. Langley's most recent book carries forward his efforts to enhance our understanding of "the evolution of the Americas," an ambitious undertaking ranging across time from the collapse of European colonial empires until the post-NAFTA era. This project, really a work in progress throughout his academic career, took particular form in 1996 with the publication of The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850, an insightful volume in which Langley compared and contrasted the causes and consequences of the American, Haitian, and Spanish-American wars of revolution, which resulted in the establishment of independent but in some cases dysfunctional states. The book reviewed here presents an intricate synthesis of hemispheric history in modern times, as described by the author, a distinctive scholarly domain located somewhere between national and global history.	1
Langley's approach incorporates traditional themes but addresses them in unique ways. As he observes, "Virtually every topic of relevance to the history of the Americas since the nineteenth century—expansionism, continentalism, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, revolution, among others—has prompted a rich, often contentious literature." Yet, in his view, "to impose any one theory—modernization, diffusion, Marxism, dependency, or convergence—on that history often fails to capture its complex and often chaotic nature." In a good turn of phrase, he notes, "the whole is not greater than but different from the sum of its parts" (p. 8).	. . .

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