Cooperating with the Colossus: 
US Military Basing in World War II Latin America

Rebecca HERMAN (Associate professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley)

Rebecca Herman is associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Cooperating with the Colossus and a number of articles and essays that have appeared in The American Historical Review, Diplomatic History, and Gender & History. Her broader research agenda is concerned with the complicated relationship between international cooperation and global inequality, and is marked by an interest in grounding big questions of international politics in local histories and the lives of "ordinary" people. Her newer work explores these tensions and methodological inclinations in the realm of environmental politics. She is currently working on a book about Antarctica in the 1970s and 80s that reconstructs a fraught period in Antarctic governance through the stories of the soldiers and scientists, military wives and children, artists, writers, and activists who traveled to the frozen continent in growing numbers during these years. Her most recent article, "Greenpeace Goes South: The Promise and Pitfalls of Global Environmentalism in Argentina," tells the story of Greenpeace International's first office in the global South, which opened in Buenos Aires in the 1980s. It is due out in Environmental History in January 2024.

In her talk, Rebecca Herman will discuss her last book, Cooperating with the Colossus, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2022 and won the 2023 Tonous & Warda Johns Family Book Award given annually to an outstanding book on the history of US foreign relations, military history, or immigration history by the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. The book brings together the diplomatic history of US military basing in Latin America during World War II with the social and political histories of the communities where the bases were built to better understand the tensions between sovereignty and cooperation that have profoundly shaped the modern history of the Americas.

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