While we will never be able to fully reconstruct or recreate the past, primary sources are sources that allow historians, students, teachers, and other people to arrive at a closer representation of the truth related to the past. Primary sources can take the appearance of many different forms – letters, memos, periodicals, songs, artwork, interviews, to name a few – and represent a record from a first-hand account. For example, from page one of this project, the transcript of a meeting between Guzzetti and Kissinger is a primary source because it is a first-hand transcript of this meeting. All primary sources must be analyzed to understand who created them, why were they created, how were they created, who were they meant to reach, and how can they be contextualized in a larger history. While the textbooks examined here provide their interpretation of the United States’ role in Latin America during the Cold War, they only offer a few primary sources to explain how they arrived at their conclusions.

How can I supplement textbook information with primary source presentation and interpretation? 

This page has assembled a number of websites and resources that have a variety of primary sources to better understand this past. Materials from institutional and university archives, community archives, and memory projects all allow us to make our own interpretations of the past and put these in conversation with the past that the textbooks portray. One important thing to take from these sources is that they are often written in Spanish and Portuguese, illustrating the global reach of the Cold War and humanizing the victims of human rights violations that happened in Latin America during this era. Certain primary sources examined may affirm assertions made by the textbooks while others could complicate, question, oppose, or nuance a simple representation of the past. All of these sources, located in North America, South America, and Europe, create a space to engage with historical research and gain skills as well as the opportunity to evaluate whether these textbooks adequately discuss the Cold War in Latin America or whether key players, locations, and events deserve a space in these tertiary records.