An American Teacher in Argentina tells the story of Mary E. Gorman who in 1869 was the first North American woman to accept President Domingo F. Sarmiento’s invitation to set up normal schools in Argentina, where she eventually settled. An ordinary historical actor whose life only sometimes enters the historical record, she moved along the fault lines of some of the greatest historical dramas and changes in nineteenth-century US and Argentine history: she was a pioneering child on the US-Indian frontier; she participated in the push for US women’s education; she was a single woman traveler at a time when few women traveled alone; she was a player in an Argentine attempt to expand common school education; and a beneficiary of the great primary products export boom in the second half of nineteenth-century Argentina, and thus well positioned to enjoy the country’s Belle Époque. The book is not a straightforward, biographical narrative of a woman’s life. It charts a life, but, more important, it charts the evolving ideas in a life lived mostly among people pushing boundaries in pursuit of what they considered progress. What emerges is a quintessentially transnational life story that engages with themes of gender, education, religion, contact with indigenous peoples in both the US and Argentina, natural history, and economic and political change in Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because the book tells a good story about one woman’s rich and eventful life, it will also appeal to an audience beyond academe.

After a promising start as a prosperous and liberal democratic nation at the end of the nineteenth century, Argentina descended into instability and crisis. This stark reversal, in a country rich in natural resources and seemingly bursting with progress and energy, has puzzled many historians. In Civilizing Argentina, Julia Rodriguez takes a sharply contrary view, demonstrating that Argentina's turn of fortune is not a mystery but rather the ironic consequence of schemes to "civilize" the nation in the name of progressivism, health, science, and public order. With new medical and scientific information arriving from Europe at the turn of the century, a powerful alliance developed among medical, scientific, and state authorities in Argentina. These elite forces promulgated a political culture based on a medical model that defined social problems such as poverty, vagrancy, crime, and street violence as illnesses to be treated through programs of social hygiene. They instituted programs to fingerprint immigrants, measure the bodies of prisoners, place wives who disobeyed their husbands in "houses of deposit," and exclude or expel people deemed socially undesirable, including groups such as labor organizers and prostitutes. Such policies, Rodriguez argues, led to the destruction of the nation's liberal ideals and opened the way to the antidemocratic, authoritarian governments that came later in the twentieth century.

Argentina lies at the heart of the American hemisphere's history of global migration booms of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century: by 1910, one of every three Argentine residents was an immigrant—twice the demographic impact that the United States experienced in the boom period. In this context, some one hundred and forty thousand Ottoman Syrians came to Argentina prior to World War I, and over the following decades Middle Eastern communities, institutions, and businesses dotted the landscape of Argentina from bustling Buenos Aires to Argentina's most remote frontiers. Argentina in the Global Middle East connects modern Latin American and Middle Eastern history through their shared links to global migration systems. By following the mobile lives of individuals with roots in the Levantine Middle East, Lily Pearl Balloffet sheds light on the intersections of ethnicity, migrant–homeland ties, and international relations. Ranging from the nineteenth century boom in transoceanic migration to twenty-first century dynamics of large-scale migration and displacement in the Arabic-speaking Eastern Mediterranean, this book considers key themes such as cultural production, philanthropy, anti-imperial activism, and financial networks over the course of several generations of this diasporic community. Balloffet's study situates this transregional history of Argentina and the Middle East within a larger story of South-South alliances, solidarities, and exchanges.

Argentinian writer Eduardo Gutiérrez (1851-1889) fashioned his seminal gauchesque novel from the prison records of the real Juan Moreira, a noble outlaw whose life and name became legendary in the Río de la Plata during the late 19th century. John Chasteen's fast-moving, streamlined translation--the first ever into English--captures all of the sweeping romance and knife-wielding excitement of the original. William Acree's introduction and notes situate Juan Moreira in its literary and historical contexts. Numerous illustrations, a map of Moreira’s travels, a glossary of terms, and a select bibliography are all included.