Virginia Textbooks and the Cold War in Latin America Main Menu Virginia History Textbooks and the Cold War in Latin America home-page; basic description Textbook Introduction Heat Map This is how frequently each country is mentioned in text in these different textbooks Timeline of the Cold War in Latin America This is where the Timeline JS will be placed. Primary Sources Here is where my bibliography will be with a bunch of different archives/primary sources Secondary Sources Additional Resources About the Author

Visualizations of Textbook Titles

38093 Primary Sources Here is where my bibliography will be with a bunch of different archives/primary sources
As the presentation of information in these textbooks has been proven to be selective, it also remains to be argued that this information is 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 situate 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 uniform and simple - and thus selective - depiction of the past.
This first data visualization network presents a very traditional engagement with United States history, making the presidents the nexus of historical happenings and events that privileges their narratives and names. 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 includes the persistent tension between the United States and Cuba for a few years. President Carter is commonly associated with bringing 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.
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 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, as well as The Vietnam War Years and the Cold War, considering the Cuban Missile Crisis to be linked with the late 1960s and the 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 Latin American Cold War, 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 can make us aware of this fact and challenge us to think about the chronology of the Cold War as a continual timeline as opposed to one broken up by arbitrary chapter titles.
While chapter titles demonstrate the broad breadth of Latin America’s Cold War through 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 with 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, including “The New Policy of Détente,” “Latin America,” and “Latin America and Africa.” These broad labels fail to engage the student with what events will be covered in these subsections, particular 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 a conversation 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.

This page has paths:

  1. Visualizations of Textbook Titles Tyler Goldberger
  2. Visualizations of Textbook Titles Tyler Goldberger
  3. Visualizations of Textbook Titles Tyler Goldberger
  4. Visualizations of Textbook Titles Tyler Goldberger
  5. Visualizations of Textbook Titles Tyler Goldberger
  6. Visualizations of Textbook Titles Tyler Goldberger
  7. Visualizations of Textbook Titles Tyler Goldberger
  8. Visualizations of Textbook Titles Tyler Goldberger
  9. Visualizations of Textbook Titles Tyler Goldberger
  10. Visualizations of Textbook Titles Tyler Goldberger
  11. Virginia History Textbooks and the Cold War in Latin America Tyler Goldberger

Contents of this path:

  1. Visualizations of Textbook Titles