Teresa A. Meade is Florence B. Sherwood Professor of History and Culture Emerita at Union College, New York. She is the author and editor of many books and articles on Latin American and Caribbean history, especially social movements, issues of gender, and labor history in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is a member of the Editorial Collective of Radical History Review, former president of the Board of Trustees of The Journal of Women's History, and a recipient of grants from Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Hadassah Brandeis Institute.

1. Introduction to the Land and Its People
2. Latin America in 1790
3. Competing Notions of Freedom
4. Fragmented Nationalisms
5. Latin America's Place in the Commodity Chain
6. Immigration, and Urban and Rural Life
7. Revolution from Countryside to City: Mexico
8. The Left and the Socialist Alternative
9. Populism and the Struggle for Change
10. Post-World War II Struggles for Sovereignty
11. Cuba: Guerrillas Take Power
12. Progress and Reaction
13. Revolution and Its Alternatives
14. The Americas in the Twenty-first Century
15. A Future of Sustainable Cooperation?
Further Reading