U.S. military bases in World War II Latin America

Berkeley Talks

UC Berkeley history professor Rebecca Herman discusses her new book, Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of U.S. Military Bases in World War II Latin America. She’s joined by Margaret Chowning, professor and Sonne Chair in Latin American History at Berkeley, and Kyle Jackson, a transnational historian of the Americas and a Berkeley Ph.D. candidate in history.

"Typically, when the war comes up, the remarkable thing is that it was this moment where almost every country in the Americas banded together, united around the war effort," says Herman.

"So, when I talk about cooperating with the colossus, I'm thinking in this sort of critical way about how people in the region during the Second World War tried to make the most of the United States' sudden attention to the region and willingness to share resources with the region and willingness to send weapons to the region, while also trying to mitigate U.S. overreach and to grapple with the real significant asymmetries of power that structured that cooperative relationship."

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Berkeley Department of History photo.

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