With an upcoming election, Chávez's involvement with U.S. oil exports, and the country becoming a leader of an increasingly united South America, this volume provides necessary background information to understand how Venezuela became what it is today. The history begins with Columbus's third voyage of discovery from Spain. Spanish explorers named the land "Little Venice" for the native homes built on stilts at the water's edge. Tracing the nation's 300 years as a Spanish colony through a brief unification followed by civil war, Tarver brings Venezuela's dramatic history to life. Highlighting events including the discovery of oil in the 1900s and the establishment of democratic government in 1958, Tarver offers a comprehensive chronicle that contextualizes the current unrest under the leadership of Hugo Chávez.

Discover the fascinating story of Venezuela. Venezuela is a vibrant and incredible country, with rich natural resources and an environment backing the Amazon rainforest. This book takes a look at the country's history, from the Carib and the arrival of the Spanish to their cold war and political struggles. Inside you'll find an insight into the regimes of both democracy and dictatorship, including José Antonio Páez, Hugo Chavez, and Nicolás Maduro. You'll also learn about the current issues the country faces, with skyrocketing inflation, economic crisis, and little end in sight. Buy now to uncover the events which shaped Venezuela's history today!

Since being elected president in 1998, Hugo Chávez has become the face of contemporary Venezuela and, more broadly, anticapitalist revolution. George Ciccariello-Maher contends that this focus on Chávez has obscured the inner dynamics and historical development of the country’s Bolivarian Revolution. In We Created Chávez, by examining social movements and revolutionary groups active before and during the Chávez era, Ciccariello-Maher provides a broader, more nuanced account of Chávez’s rise to power and the years of activism that preceded it. Based on interviews with grassroots organizers, former guerrillas, members of neighborhood militias, and government officials, Ciccariello-Maher presents a new history of Venezuelan political activism, one told from below. Led by leftist guerrillas, women, Afro-Venezuelans, indigenous people, and students, the social movements he discusses have been struggling against corruption and repression since 1958. Ciccariello-Maher pays particular attention to the dynamic interplay between the Chávez government, revolutionary social movements, and the Venezuelan people, recasting the Bolivarian Revolution as a long-term and multifaceted process of political transformation.

" The first six chapters develop the history of Venezuela and her culture from the purely Indian times, through the Spanish Conquest and colonization through the revolution against Spanish rule and the subsequent troubled National period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" -- Book cover.

This classic in the literature of the European exploration and settlement of the New World has never until now been available in the English language. Its author, born in 1671, was descended from a noble Spanish family and was a learned and influential member of Caracas society. His Historia de la conquista y poblacion de la provincia de Venezuela is widely regarded as a literary masterpiece and a major historical work. It has been read and acclaimed throughout the world. Jeannette Varner's sensitive translation will be welcomed by English-speaking Latin Americanists everywhere. The work is an accurate and absorbing narration of the early history of Venezuela, from Christopher Columbus's arrival on August 1, 1498, on his third voyage to the New World, until its sack by the British corsair, Sir Francis Drake, at the end of the sixteenth century. Based firmly on the histories of official chroniclers and early historians of Venezuela, its first four book are a matchless introduction to the subject and provide valuable background for scholarly study. The last three books, dealing with the bloody struggle for the domination of Caracas and its vicinity, constitute Oviedo's original contribution to the history of Venezuela. Widely divergent subject matter ranges from the ghastly crimes of the tyrant Lope de Aguirre, who murdered both his priest and his daughter, to the mystic transfiguration of Martin Tinajero, whose body attracted swarms of wild bees with its odor of honey. In his Letras y hombres de Venezuela, Arturo Uslar Pietri calls the book a "song of pride in race and love of the land, an elegy full of sentiment and melody." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Oil has played a major role in Venezuela’s economy since the first gusher was discovered along Lake Maracaibo in 1922. As Miguel Tinker Salas demonstrates, oil has also transformed the country’s social, cultural, and political landscapes. In The Enduring Legacy, Tinker Salas traces the history of the oil industry’s rise in Venezuela from the beginning of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the experiences and perceptions of industry employees, both foreign and Venezuelan. He reveals how class ambitions and corporate interests combined to reshape many Venezuelans’ ideas of citizenship. Middle-class Venezuelans embraced the oil industry from the start, anticipating that it would transform the country by introducing modern technology, sparking economic development, and breaking the landed elites’ stranglehold. Eventually Venezuelan employees of the industry found that their benefits, including relatively high salaries, fueled loyalty to the oil companies. That loyalty sometimes trumped allegiance to the nation-state. North American and British petroleum companies, seeking to maintain their stakes in Venezuela, promoted the idea that their interests were synonymous with national development. They set up oil camps—residential communities to house their workers—that brought Venezuelan employees together with workers from the United States and Britain, and eventually with Chinese, West Indian, and Mexican migrants as well. Through the camps, the companies offered not just housing but also schooling, leisure activities, and acculturation into a structured, corporate way of life. Tinker Salas contends that these practices shaped the heart and soul of generations of Venezuelans whom the industry provided with access to a middle-class lifestyle. His interest in how oil suffused the consciousness of Venezuela is personal: Tinker Salas was born and raised in one of its oil camps.

Exposes the self-serving logic behind much middle-class opposition to Venezuela's elected leader, and explains the real reason for their alarm. This work argues that the Chavez government has instituted one of the progressive constitutions, but warns that they have yet to overcome the dangerous spectres of the country's past.