Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
I. European Encounters 9
II. Pirates, Governors, and Slaves 61
III. Revolutions 91
IV. Caudillos and Empires 141
V. The Idea of the Nation: Order and Progress 191
VI. Dollars, Gunboats, and Bullets 233
VII. The Era of Trujillo 279
VIII. The Long Transition to Democracy 325
IX. Religious Practices 387
X. Popular Culture 417
XI. The Dominican Diaspora 467
Suggestions for Further Reading 507
Acknowledgment of Copyrights and Sources 515
Index 527

About the Author

Eric Paul Roorda is Professor of History at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945, published by Duke University Press.

Lauren Derby is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Dictator's Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo, also published by Duke University Press.

Raymundo González is a researcher at the Dominican National Archives and Social Science Coordinator for the Dominican Ministry of Education. He teaches at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the Instituto Filosófico Pedro Francisco Bonó, both in Santo Domingo.

Reviews

"A splendid introduction to an often-misrepresented nation, tracing its history from the pre-Columbian era through the Trujillo dictatorship to the ever-increasing influence of contemporary Dominicans - demographic, musical, literary, and sporting - in US life. An excellent choice of brief texts makes this an attractive reader for undergraduate courses on the Caribbean." - Richard Price, author of The Convict and the Colonel, Travels with Tooy, and Rainforest Warrior