Translation of : El pueblo dominicano, 1850-1900.

This work provides an annotated collection of documents related to the history of the Dominican Republic and its people. It features annotated documents on some of the transcendental events that have taken place on the island since pre-Columbian times.

Combining intellectual and social history, Teresita Martinez-Vergne explores the processes by which people in the Dominican Republic began to hammer out a common sense of purpose and a modern national identity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Hoping to build a nation of hardworking, peaceful, voting citizens, the Dominican intelligentsia impressed on the rest of society a discourse of modernity based on secular education, private property, modern agricultural techniques, and an open political process. Black immigrants, bourgeois women, and working-class men and women in the capital city of Santo Domingo and in the booming sugar town of San Pedro de Macoris, however, formed their own surprisingly modern notions of citizenship in daily interactions with city officials. Martinez-Vergne shows just how difficult it was to reconcile the lived realities of people of color, women, and the working poor with elite notions of citizenship, entitlement, and identity. She concludes that the urban setting, rather than defusing the impact of race, class, and gender within a collective sense of belonging, as intellectuals had envisioned, instead contributed to keeping these distinctions intact, thus limiting what could be considered Dominican.

In this book, _lvarez-L-pez details the history of revolution in the Dominican Republic, which was an infant independent nation struggling to preserve its political independence from Haiti and from the expansionist policies of northern European countries and the United States. In 1861, the Dominican Republic was annexed to Spain. The Spanish empire expansionist policy sought to preserve Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the acquisition of the Dominican Republic strengthened Spain's hold on the Antilles Empire. Spain's policies strengthened the political objectives of the Dominican ruling class, which were political stability and control of the political power under a Caucasian empire. While both these objectives were achieved, the new colonial experiment was a total failure. The exclusion of the native ruling class, over taxation, economic exploitation, coercive imposition of the Catholic Church customs, prejudice against blacks and mulattos led to war, ending with the defeat of the Spanish Empire. This defeat opened a revolutionary cycle in the Spanish Caribbean.

This work examines the distinct political periods in the country's history, such as the Spanish, French, Haitian, and US occupations and the several periods of self-rule. It also covers a socioeconomic history by establishing links between socioeconomic conditions and political developments.

The colony called Santo Domingo, which became the Dominican Republic, was the violent crucible in which the ingredients of the New World, drawn from America, Europe and Africa, were fused together for the first time: humans, religions, technologies, animals, plants and learned behaviors. The history of the Dominican Republic diverged from the patterns established by the rest of Latin America, as it ultimately gained independence not from Spain, but from Haiti, and Spain later recolonized the country during a watershed period in the 1860s. In the 20th century, the United States occupied the Dominican Republic on two formative occasions, from 1916 to 1924 and again in 1965-1966, interventions detailed in this volume. At every turn, the backdrop to this pattern of shaky sovereignty has been the extreme instability of Dominican politics, which has been punctuated by incessant civil wars, coups, and periods of dictatorship, until the last few decades. The Historical Dictionary of the Dominican Republic contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Dominican Republic.

What is 'authoritarian rule' and is it best studied? Using the Dominican Republic, this book investigates new methods of analysis, arguing that it should be imperative to approach authoritarian histories – like other histories – on the basis of detailed investigations of power relationships, everyday practices and meanings.