Making the Americas

Synthesizing a broad range of international relations scholarship, including perspectives from gender, race, and cultural studies, O'Brien offers a sweeping history of the Americas that ranges from the adventures of eighteenth-century whaling men to the contemporary struggle over globalization. As a part of this study, the author explains how the responses of Latin Americans to Americanization have varied from the vehement rejection of U.S. economic dominance to embracing as well as reconfiguring the icons of American consumer culture.

O'Brien's goal is to provide readers with a nuanced understanding of how the people of the Americas have shaped their own history, and influenced the development of U.S. economic, strategic, and cultural power in the world today.

The author, an expert on business interests in Latin America, examines U.S. efforts, spanning two centuries, to impose economic dominance on the peoples of the Americas and the Latin American responses to these policies.