Excerpt from Macy's Latin American Fair: Jan. 17-Feb. 7, 1942 American. In the Western Hemisphere we have come to the realization that if we would solve those problems successfully, we must face them not as North Americans or South Americans, but as Americans All. Through the years there has been sporadic talk, always well meant, of good will and good neighbors, of inter-american friendship and Hemisphere unity. Our Latin American friends have felt, perhaps rightly, that talk was cheap. Talk is cheap and good will makes fine diplo matic conversation, but friendship does not live on promises and there can be unity only when there is knowledge, understanding, and a free and profitable exchange of the products of the hands and hearts of men. We in the United States have become acutely aware of our geographic identity with Latin America, of our interdependence and of our unity of purpose. We are awake to the obligation to let our deeds speak louder than words. Concrete evidence of our good will can best be shown by a strenuous effort to improve our economic relations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

What is Pan-Americanism? People have been struggling with that problem for over a century. Pan-Americanism is (and has been) an amalgam of diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural projects under the umbrella of hemispheric cooperation and housed institutionally in the Pan-American Union, and later the Organization of American States. But what made Pan-Americanism exceptional? The chapters in this volume suggest that Pan-Americanism played a central and lasting role in structuring inter-American relations, because of the ways in which the movement was reinvented over time, and because the actors who shaped it often redefined and redeployed the term. Through the twentieth century, new appropriations of Pan-Americanism structured, restructured, and redefined inter-American relations. Taken together, these chapters underscore two exciting new shifts in how scholars and others have come to understand Pan-Americanism and inter-American relations. First, Pan-Americanism is increasingly understood not simply as a diplomatic, commercial, and economic forum, but a movement that has included cultural exchange. Second, researchers, political leaders, and the media in several countries have traditionally conceived of Pan-Americanism as a mechanism of US expansionism. This volume reimagines Pan-Americanism as a movement built by actors from all corners of the Americas.

In Improvised Continent, Richard Cándida Smith synthesizes over seventy years of Pan-American cultural activity in the United States and shows how Latin American artists and writers challenged U.S. citizens about their place in the world and about the kind of global relations the country's interests could allow.