Greg Grandin
Grandin in a 2020 interview
Born1962 (age 61–62)
Alma materBrooklyn College (BA)
Yale University (PhD)
Occupation(s)Historian, Author, Academic
EmployerYale University

Greg Grandin (born 1962) is an American historian and author. He is a professor of history at Yale University.[1] He previously taught at New York University.[2]

He is author of a number of books, including Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, as well as for the National Book Award[3] and a National Book Critics Circle Award.[4]

A more recent book, Who Is Rigoberta Menchú?, focuses on the treatment of the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner. His 2014 book, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, is a study of the factual basis for the novella Benito Cereno by Herman Melville.

Life

Grandin received a B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1992 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999.[5]

He won the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Award for the best book published in any discipline on Latin America for Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation. Eric Hobsbawm called The Last Colonial Massacre a "remarkable and extremely well-written work" that

is about more than the dark history of Guatemala and the Cold War in Latin America. It is about how common people discover politics. It is about the roots of democracy and those of genocide. It is about the hopes and defeats of the twentieth-century left. I could not put this book down.[6]

Grandin has published widely on US foreign policy, the Cold War, and Latin American politics in The Nation,[7] The New York Times,[8] Harpers,[9] and the London Review of Books.[10] He has appeared on the Charlie Rose Show and has interviewed Naomi Klein[11] and Hugo Chávez.[12]

After the death of Chávez, Grandin published a lengthy obituary in The Nation, opining that "the biggest problem Venezuela faced during his rule was not that Chávez was authoritarian but that he wasn't authoritarian enough."[13]

In the summer of 2009, he reported from Honduras on that country's coup, appearing a number of times on Democracy Now![14] and Grit TV[15] and writing a series of reports in The Nation and elsewhere on the consequences of the overthrow of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya.

Grandin worked as a consultant with the Historical Clarification Commission (Spanish: Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, or CEH), the Guatemalan truth commission, and has written a number of articles on its methodology, including its genocide ruling[16][17] and its use of historical analysis.[18]

Grandin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2010.[19]

Selected works

External audio
audio icon On This Spanish Slave Ship, Nothing Was As It Seemed, Review of The Empire of Necessity, 5:57, Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR, January 27, 2014[20]

Author

  • The blood of Guatemala: a history of race and nation. Duke University Press. 2000. ISBN 978-0-8223-2495-9.
  • The last colonial massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. University of Chicago Press. 2004. ISBN 978-0-226-30571-4.
  • Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. Macmillan. 2007. ISBN 978-0-8050-8323-1.
  • Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. Macmillan. 2010. ISBN 978-0-312-42962-1.
  • Who Is Rigoberta Menchu?, Verso, 2011, ISBN 978-1-84467-458-9
  • The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, Metropolitan Books, 2014, ISBN 9780805094534
  • Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman, Metropolitan Books, 2015, ISBN 9781627794497
  • "The Strange Career of American Exceptionalism", The Nation, January 2/9, 2017, pp. 22–27.
  • The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Metropolitan Books, 2019, ISBN 9781250179821
  • "Kissinger Still at Large at 100", The Nation, vol. 316, no. 11 (May 29/June 5, 2023), pp. 16–19. "We now know much more about Kissinger's crimes, the immense suffering he caused during his years in public office." (p. 19.)

Editor

  • Greg Grandin; Thomas Miller Klubock, eds. (2007). Truth Commissions: State Terror, History, and Memory. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-6674-4.
  • Greg Grandin; Gilbert M. Joseph; Emily S. Rosenberg, eds. (2010). A Century of Revolution. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-4737-8.

Reception

Fordlandia was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times,[21] The New Yorker;[22] NPR;[23] The Boston Globe;[24] San Francisco Chronicle;[25] and the Chicago Tribune.[26]

In 2020, Grandin was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.[27]

References

  1. ↑ "Greg Grandin | Department of History".
  2. ↑ "NYU > History > Greg Grandin". History.fas.nyu.edu. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  3. ↑ "The National Book Foundation". Nationalbook.org. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  4. ↑ "National Book Critics Circle: 30 Books in 30 Days: Fordlandia, by Greg Grandin – Critical Mass Blog". Bookcritics.org. March 9, 2010. Archived from the original on August 12, 2010. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  5. ↑ Vitiello, Domenic (September 25, 2018). "Department of History". History.fas.nyu.edu. Retrieved January 29, 2019.
  6. ↑ "Interview with Greg Grandin author of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War". Press.uchicago.edu. May 29, 1978. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  7. ↑ "Greg Grandin". The Nation. Retrieved August 25, 2015.
  8. ↑ Grandin, Greg (February 14, 2010). "Empire of Savagery in the Amazon". The New York Times.
  9. ↑ "The right quagmire: Searching history for an imperial alibi—By Greg Grandin (Harper's Magazine)". Harpers.org. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  10. ↑ Grandin, Greg (November 29, 2007). "Greg Grandin reviews 'Nixon and Kissinger' by Robert Dallek and 'Henry Kissinger and the American Century' by Jeremi Suri". London Review of Books. LRB. pp. 11–13. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  11. ↑ "Body Shock: A 40th Anniversary Conversation with". Naomi Klein. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  12. ↑ "October 12, 2009". The Nation. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  13. ↑ Greg Grandin (March 6, 2013). "On the Legacy of Hugo Chávez". The Nation. Retrieved August 15, 2023.
  14. ↑ "Defying Coup Regime, Zelaya Attempts Return to Honduras". Democracynow.org. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  15. ↑ "GRITtv: Greg Grandin: Echoes of the 80s In Honduras". Free Speech TV. Archived from the original on September 27, 2011. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  16. ↑ "The Specter of Genocide - Cambridge University Press". www.cambridge.org.
  17. ↑ "Project MUSE - Nepantla: Views from South - Chronicles of a Guatemalan Genocide Foretold: Violence, Trauma, and the Limits of Historical Inquiry". Archived from the original on June 8, 2011.
  18. ↑ Greg Grandin (February 2005). "The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala". The American Historical Review, 110.1. The History Cooperative. Archived from the original on September 3, 2006. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  19. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on June 2, 2010. Retrieved April 23, 2010.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  20. ↑ "On This Spanish Slave Ship, Nothing Was As It Seemed". Review of The Empire of Necessity. Fresh Air on NPR. January 27, 2014. Retrieved March 6, 2018.
  21. ↑ "100 Notable Books of 2009". The New York Times.
  22. ↑ "Briefly Noted: "A Year's Reading"". The New Yorker. August 1, 2011. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  23. ↑ Heller, Zoe (December 23, 2009). "Maureen Corrigan's Best Books Of 2009". NPR. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  24. ↑ Kenney, Michael (December 6, 2009). "Simply the best nonfiction". The Boston Globe.
  25. ↑ "Best Science Books 2009: San Francisco Chronicle : Confessions of a Science Librarian". Scienceblogs.com. January 6, 2010. Archived from the original on June 5, 2011. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
  26. ↑ "Our favorite nonfiction of 2009". Chicago Tribune. April 12, 2009. Archived from the original on December 13, 2009.
  27. ↑ "The Pulitzer Prizes".
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