The Song Behind Today’s Review Title
Fred McFeely Rogers was born in 1928 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. His father, James Rogers, was president of the McFeely Brick company, a prominent local business. His mother volunteered at the local hospital.
Rogers received a bachelors in music in 1951, and a bachelors in theology in 1963. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who worked in children’s programming for many years. In 1963 he developed the program Misterogers for the Canadian broadcaster CBC. In 1968 Rogers returned to Pennsylvania and developed the television show Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for the educational television network NET (later PBS). Rogers was creator, showrunner and host of this show which focused on preschool age children.
Any child who grew up in the US from 1968 through the show’s final episode in 2001 (and even later through the miracle of reruns) is familiar with its theme song, sung by Rogers as he came in the front door of the living room that served as each episode’s initial set. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was delivered in Rogers kid-friendly and instantly recognizable voice. The song ends with the title lyric - “won’t you be my neighbor?”.
Today’s book details the long history of relations between the United States and its southern neighbors — the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies south of the US border. Neighbors even if not always the best of friends.
Fred Rogers became a beloved figure to millions of American preschoolers. He was a kind of “television uncle” who educated by entertaining. Learn more about Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood at www.misterrogers.org, and watch Fred Rogers sing the theme song here.
You can also watch as Rogers brings a theater filled with television stars to tears as he receives a lifetime achievement award at the 1997 Emmys in this YouTube video. Fred Rogers passed away in 2023 at the age of 74, a victim of stomach cancer. Sometimes the good do die old.
In America, América Greg Grandin dives into the history of South and Central American countries and the relations between these nations and the United States. It’s a history fraught with mistrust, lack of understanding, and clashes that is occasionally punctuated with periods of cooperation. It is an ambitious, sweeping historical undertaking that stretches from Europe’s first encounter with the New World up to the present day.
The overarching thesis of Grandin’s book is that the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies that make up Latin America share a common understanding of social justice and social democracy that has been at odds with the individualistic, materialistic and expansionist impulses of the United States.
Grandin’s book starts with the initial Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the New World. The enslavement of the native population and the disregard for the lives and the humanity of the “Indians” that the Spanish encountered led to early pushback from some of the Catholic priests who first came to the Americas.
Grandin spends a lot of time documenting that pushback from Bartolomé de las Casas, one of the first Catholic priests to call on the Spanish Crown to intercede and forbid the rape, murder and plunder of the native populations of the Spanish New World. Despite decrees from the Crown though, the slaughter and theft of the Spanish Conquest continued.
This early recognition by at least some among the conquerors that the Conquest was unjust, and that the native peoples were deserving of treatment as equals, sparked an ongoing debate within Latin America. Over the ensuing centuries the push and pull of this debate eventually settled into a consensus on social justice and the equality of all peoples that extended to the equal sovereign rights of nations.
Greg Grandin is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. (Photo source: https://greggrandin.com/about/)
Contrast that story with the settlement of the colonies that eventually became the United States. Early English settlers were people of multiple Protestant denominations coming to a land that had already experienced a rapid population decline due to the spread of disease. Any recognition of the equal humanity of American Indians by these settlers was limited and periodic. There is an interesting discussion in the book of the English conquest and occupation of Ireland in the 1500s and the interplay of English thought between that and the settlement of America. In both cases the native population was treated as inferior and deserving of subjugation, and if possible eradication.
As the new nation the United States separated itself from the mother country this notion of mastery of the land and its native people helped feed the rise of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny. These ideas that the United States is “exceptional” and has a duty conquer the continent and to protect other sovereign nations in the hemisphere foreshadowed the Cold War years where the US assumed the mantle of “policeman to the world”.
Grandin follows the story of the unfolding dialogue between these two cultures and their differences across 500 years. He masterfully brings together the political, economic and cultural threads into a cohesive historical perspective, even if there are times in this history when the threads are not as closely woven (the dictators and fascists of the South American post WWII years are the biggest example).
I do have to warn potential readers that this is a heavy tome. It unfolds over more than 700 pages, without the voluminous Notes. It is a commitment. Nevertheless, this is an eye-opening history that reveals new insights in every chapter. You’ll leave this book with a better understanding and appreciation for the Americas, especially South and Central America.
One other caveat, for me at least, is this — as a reader with Canadian roots on my father’s side I was disappointed that Canada appears mostly as an artifact of the English in the New World, and in this book is mostly found not even in the background, but offstage. I realize that as a writer Grandin’s focus here is in relations between the US and it’s southern neighbors. But it would be interesting to hear the author describe how Canada’s notions of social justice and equality of peoples, which it seems to share in large part with the Latin American nations, came to be. That is likely a whole other book, perhaps by another author.
RATING: Four and a Half Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌠
OVERALL COMMENTS: An epic history of Latin America and the United States, and the relations between them. This is an ambitious, sweeping historical undertaking that stretches from Europe’s first encounter with the New World up to the present day.
I GOT MY COPY: I purchased my ebook copy from the Kobo online store.
Title: America, América
Author: Greg Grandin
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Publish Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN-13: 9780593831267
Publisher’s List Price: $35 hardcover, $24 paperback. ebook and audiobook available through retailers
Other Books and Stuff
CURRENT BOOKS & STUFF
I’ve been so busy with this week’s book that I haven’t dared to crack the cover of another one. But I did find time to add another book to my To Be Read pile. This one is a brand new biography of the American President and Supreme Court Justice William Taft. He is the only American to have held both positions. I hope to review the book by November, when it’s released to the public.
We did finish season 3 of the Netflix series The Diplomat. I’m honestly amazed that the writers have been able to carry the same storyline through three seasons while delivering great dialog and clever plot twists. As the seasons have progressed that storyline has gotten less plausible — not because of its own outrageousness but from the fact that the world itself has changes so much in the last few years. Nevertheless I can’t wait for Season 4 to start next month. We’re up to date on HBO’s Lanterns, and we’re really enjoying it.
WHAT’S NEXT
Next week I’ll be reviewing Andrew Wittkop’s Literary Voyagers, a book the author describes as a “nonfiction novella”. It comes from one of my favorite indie publishers, Belt Publishing. Here’s the publisher’s description:
A complicated friendship blooms during a fated meeting between two nineteenth-century women writers.
In the mid-1830s, the author Anna Brownell Jameson was called from Britain to Canada to help her husband secure a position in local government. Duty fulfilled, she secured a separation agreement but decided to make the most of the rest of her time in North America: she embarked on a trip around the Great Lakes to gather material for a book on the “plight of the Indian woman.”
In a remarkable interaction on Mackinac Island, where the current-day lower peninsula of Michigan meets the upper peninsula, she met Jane Johnston Schoolcraft—an Ojibwe American poet and translator, who was married to the geologist Henry Schoolcraft who was working as an Indian agent for the United States government. The two women talked extensively, bonding over their interests and plights, and sharing private demons.
After their meeting, Anna continued to gain recognition for her writing and became a larger part of the literary scene in Britain and the Continent, entangling herself in the affairs of the likes Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Ottilie von Goethe, Lady Byron, and Ada Lovelace. Jane became sicker and less able to work.
In Andrew Wittkop’s sensitive, subtle retelling, complete with Anna's sketches and other historical images, the nuances of the relationship between the two women reveal much about the complicated nature of connection and disconnection and Anna’s blindnesses and missed opportunities. While Jane’s work and life have been slowly gaining attention in the twenty-first century, this text opens a window on two under-remembered writers.
