This volume is one of the most important and revealing case studies in U.S.–Latin American relations. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the country’s wealthiest and most Americanized elites were transformed from leading supporters of U.S. imperial rule into some of its greatest opponents.

Gobat focuses primarily on the reactions of the elites to Americanization, because the power and identity of these Nicaraguans were the most significantly affected by U.S. imperial rule. He describes their adoption of aspects of “the American way of life” in the mid–nineteenth century as strategic rather than wholesale.

Contents
Illustrations
Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Manifest Destinies, 1849-1910
1. Americanization through Violence: Nicaragua under Walker
2. Americanization from Within: Forging a Cosmopolitan Nationality
Part II. Restoration, 1910-1912
3. Challenging Imperial Exclusions: Nicaragua under the Dawson Pact
4. Bourgeois Revolution Denied: U.S. Military Intervention in the Civil War of 1912
Part III. Dollar Diplomacy, 1912-1927
5. Economic Nationalism: Resisting Wall Street’s "Feudal" Regime
6. Anxious Landlords, Resilient Peasants: Dollar Diplomacy's Socioeconomic Impact
7. Cultural Anti-Americanism: The Caballeros Catolicos' Crusade against U.S. Missionaries, the "Modern Woman,” and the "Bourgeois Spirit”
Part IV. Revolution, 1927-1933
8. Militarization via Democratization: The U.S. Attack on Caudillismo andthe Rise of Authoritarian Corporatism
9. Revolutionary Nationalism: Elite Conservatives, Sandino, and the Struggle for a De-Americanized Nicaragua
Epilogue. Imperial Legacies: Dictatorship and Revolution
Selected Bibliography

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