University of North Carolina Press
U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story
Key Metrics
- Stephen G Rabe
- University of North Carolina Press
- Paperback
- 9780807856390
- 9.28 X 6.26 X 0.61 inches
- 0.84 pounds
- History > Latin America - South America
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
When the South American colony now known as Guyana was due to gain independence from Britain in the 1960s, U.S. officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations feared it would become a communist nation under the leadership of Cheddi Jagan, a Marxist who was very popular among the South Asian (mostly Indian) majority. Although to this day the CIA refuses to confirm or deny involvement, Rabe presents evidence that CIA funding, through a program run by the AFL-CIO, helped foment the labor unrest, race riots, and general chaos that led to Jagan's replacement in 1964. The political leader preferred by the United States, Forbes Burnham, went on to lead a twenty-year dictatorship in which he persecuted the majority Indian population.
Considering race, gender, religion, and ethnicity along with traditional approaches to diplomatic history, Rabe's analysis of this Cold War tragedy serves as a needed corrective to interpretations that depict the Cold War as an unsullied U.S. triumph.
Author Bio
Professor of history Stephen Rabe held the Ashbel Smith Chair in History at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he taught for forty years. He won three awards for distinguished teaching. He has written or edited eleven books, including John F. Kennedy: World Leader (2010) and The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America, 2nd ed. ( 2016). His Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (1988) won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His new project, Kissinger and Latin America, will be published by Cornell University Press.
Rabe has taught or lectured in twenty countries, conducting seminars on modern U.S. history in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. He has also served as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College, Dublin in Ireland and the Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
Education
PhD: History, University of Connecticut, 1977
MA: History, University of Connecticut, 1972
BA: History, Hamilton College, 1970
Source: University of Oregon
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