In A History of Argentina, originally published in Spanish in 2020, Ezequiel Adamovsky presents over five hundred years of Argentine economic, political, social, and cultural history. Adamovsky highlights the experiences of women, Indigenous communities, and other groups that have traditionally been left out of the historical archive. He focuses on harmful aspects of Spanish colonization such as gender subjugation, the violence enacted in the name of the Catholic Church, the role of the economy as it shifted from the encomienda system into modern industrialization, and the devastating effects of slavery, violence, and disease brought to the region by Spanish colonizers. Adamovsky also discusses Argentina’s independence and territorial consolidation, the first democratic elections in 1916, military coups, Peronism, democratization and the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, and many other facets of Argentine life up to the 2019 presidential election. Concise, accessible, and comprehensive, A History of Argentina is an essential guide to this nation.

First published in 1998. Including a wide range of information and recommended for academic libraries, this encyclopedia covers historiography and historians from around the world and will be a useful reference to students, researchers, scholars, librarians and the general public who are interested in the writing of history. Volume II covers entries from K to Z.

This book provides a new interpretation of Spanish American independence, emphasising political processes.

Staging Buenos Aires centers theater as a source of historical inquiry to understand how nonelites experienced and shaped a city undergoing dramatic transformations. Commercial theater constituted the core of the city’s public sphere, one in which middle-class playwrights and audiences assumed the leading role. Audiences and critics often disagreed about what was “acceptable” entertainment. Playwrights used theater to promote their own ideas of sociopolitical change, creating a space for working- and middle-class audiences to identify and push back against imposed regulations and attitudes. Cultural production on the city’s stages revealed fissures and social anxieties about the expansion of the political system and of the public sphere as women became increasingly visible in urban spaces. At the same time, theater also gave structure and meaning to these rapid changes, providing the space for the city’s playwrights and complex publics to play a key role in identifying, processing, and shaping the transforming nation. Plays helped audience members work through dramatic shifts in societal norms as urbanization and industrialization resulted in the visible decline of patriarchal social structures, made most visible in the urban sphere.

In her study of key radio dramas broadcast from 1930 to 1943, Lauren Rea analyses the work of leading exponents of the genre against the wider backdrop of nation-building, intellectual movements and popular culture in Argentina. During the period that has come to be known as the infamous decade, radio serials drew on the Argentine literary canon, with writers such as Héctor Pedro Blomberg and José Andrés González Pulido contributing to the nation-building project as they reinterpreted nineteenth-century Argentina and repackaged it for a 1930s mass audience. Thus, a historical romance set in the tumultuous dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas reveals the conflict between the message transmitted to a mass audience through popular radio drama and the work of historical revisionist intellectuals writing in the 1930s. Transmitted at the same time, González Pulido’s gauchesque series evokes powerful notions of Argentine national identity as it explores the relationship of the gaucho with Argentina’s immigrant population and advocates for the ideal contribution of women and the immigrant population to Argentine nationhood. Rea grounds her study in archival work undertaken at the library of Argentores in Buenos Aires, which holds the only surviving collection of scripts of radio serials from the period. Rea’s book recovers the contribution that these products of popular culture made to the nation-building project as they helped to shape and promote the understanding of Argentine history and cultural identity that is widely held today.