Virginia Textbooks and the Cold War in Latin America

Visualizations of Textbook Titles

The presentation of information in these textbooks has been proven to be selective, and it is also unorganized and haphazard in its structure. The Cold War in Latin America transpired over many decades and affected a large portion of its geography, meaning that it might be difficult to encapsulate the whens and hows of these different events. While the Cuban Revolution, Bay of Pigs, and Cuban Missile Crisis all happened in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Cuba, events such as the El Salvadorian conflict or internal armed conflict in Guatemala spanned for a majority of the Cold War and incorporated national and international actors. Certain events cannot be situated in a neat and tidy history. However, these textbooks elect to cover many of these events through the lens of United States presidents, directly linking events in Latin America to the decisions or administrations of one president. Complexities of multi-president events often fail to be considered in these textbooks, teaching a disorganized and misrepresentative - and thus selective - depiction of the past.

How should I engage with the following visualizations?

This page includes multiple network analyses that demonstrate how textbooks frame events in Latin America during the Cold War within a United States-centric lens. As with all of the prior tools in this project, these visualizations are interactive, so feel free to hover your mouse over different nodes and periphery data to see how the information is connected. These different examples walk you through first how presidents and government agencies are the primary mode of analysis for these events, transitioning to then painting a more argumentative picture about how these textbooks obfuscate the times, locations, and contexts surrounding United States intervention in Latin American countries.
 
Presidents and Chapter Titles
 
This first data visualization network presents a very traditional engagement with United States history, making the presidents and CIA the nexus of historical happenings and examining how chapter titles are used to define the roles of these presidents during the Cold War. As can be seen, there are certain presidents who are tied to more Cold War in Latin America events than others, including President John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) and President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981). President Kennedy arguably faced the most United States-specific threats to capitalism during his administration, cut short by his assassination. This abundance includes the persistent tension between the United States and Cuba for a few years. President Carter is commonly associated with introducing human rights as a valid and legitimate concern of United States foreign policy, and these textbooks explain various policies that he enacted to prioritize human rights. While President Carter at times went back on his stance on human rights to prioritize the fight against communism, he is presented as someone who never deterred from his human rights focus despiser the challenges he faced related to the Cold War in Latin America.

Chapter Titles and Cold War in Latin America Events
 
This next visualization demonstrates a more disorganized version of how information is presented in various textbooks. The nexus this time pertains to the Cold War events being covered in these textbooks, linked to the different chapter titles that explain them. This allows us to see how the same events are covered in different temporal and thematic sections of these textbooks, demonstrating the lack of structure and consistency within and between these tertiary sources.

For example, the Cuban Missile Crisis, covered within all eight textbooks examined, appears in seven different chapter titles. These span from Postwar America and Cold War: 1945-1963, associating this event with the early parts of the Cold War, to The Vietnam War Years and the Cold War, considering the Cuban Missile Crisis to be linked with the late 1960s and the longer span of the Cold War. The inability for these textbooks to have a common understanding of where the Cuban Missile Crisis, along with other events pertaining to the Cold War in Latin America, fits in this historical narrative makes it extremely difficult for students to understand when exactly these events happened and how they all relate to the larger picture of the Cold War. This visualization challenges us to think about the chronology of the Cold War as a continual timeline as opposed to one broken up by arbitrary chapter titles.

Subsection Titles and Cold War in Latin America Events
 
While chapter titles demonstrate the broad breadth of the Cold War in Latin America in these textbooks, the most telling observation related to events and titles pertains to how the coverage of the same events in the visualization above changes when examined through their subsection title. These are the titles that most closely consider these events, and the broad array of options to discuss the same events showcases the disorganization and lack of congruency within different textbooks. While the Bay of Pigs is accurately defined and given a place in the textbook under its various descriptive subsection titles, such as “The Bay of Pigs,” “A Failed Invasion,” and “Crises in Cuba and Berlin,” not all events receive this explanatory and accessible labeling system.

For example, the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, orchestrated in part by the United States, falls under three different subsection titles: “The New Policy of Détente,” “Latin America,” and “Latin America and Africa.” These broad labels fail to engage the students with what events will be covered in these subsections because of the vague nature in referring to Latin America and Africa as undergoing similar struggles and contestations during the Cold War. While these regions might have been transformed due to the global nature of the Cold War, a short section on Latin America, Latin America and Africa, and Latin America within the context of China fail to give individual countries and their unique challenges an appropriate or accurate amount of space. Chile is never introduced as an important part of these sections, being mentioned as a case study for Latin America as a region that experienced many different interventions and coups over the course of the Cold War. Despite the destructive nature of the dispossession of President Salvador Allende for the installment of General Augusto Pinochet as dictator, these textbooks do not introduce Chile in any common way, contributing to the lack of organization in the presentations of this narrative.

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