Latin America & the Global Cold War

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Between the late 1950s and the end the 1970s, Latin American countries developed increasingly powerful interactions with the rest of the Global South. Scholars of contemporary Latin American history, however, have largely neglected this story, generating a collective amnesia on a crucial part of the region’s recent past. During his talk, Professor Vanni Pettinà will show how Latin America and The Global Cold War, the volume he co-edited with Professors Stella Krepp and Thomas Field fills this gap, proving that Latin America and Third World contemporary histories became deeply entangled during the 1960s and the 1970s, making their study as separate subjects almost impossible.

Vanni Pettinà holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary History from the University Complutense of Madrid. He is Associate Professor of International and Latin American Contemporary History at the Center for Historical Studies of El Colegio de México and was John W. Kluge Postdoctoral Fellow at the Library of Congress. He has published articles in the Journal of Latin American Studies, International History Review, Cold War History and Historia Mexicana. He is author of Historia Minima de la Guerra Fría, which will be published in English with UNC Press in 2022 with support from Duke-UNC Latin America In Translation Series Grant. He is coeditor, with Stella Krepp and Thomas Field, of Latin America and the Global Cold War (UNC Press 2021). He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled: From Bilateralism to globalism. Development and Foreign Policy during Mexico’s Cold War.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.