South America

In the event Spain and Portugal divided almost all of South America between, them but in the sixteenth century the French also had commercial and colonial ambitions in Brazil. Robert Knecht tells the stories of two French expeditions that ended in disaster.

Anthony Aveni explains how the people planning great monuments and cities, many millennia and thousands of miles apart, so often sought the same inspiration – alignments with the heavens.

Leslie Ray argues that politics and football have always been inseparable in the land of the ‘hand of God’.

Richard Cavendish marks the birth of the American continent's namesake, on March 9th, 1454.

Federico Guillermo Lorenz shows that those who control the present are sometimes able to control interpretations of the past.

John Geipel on how the enforced diaspora of the slave trade shaped South America’s largest nation.

John Geipel chronicles the tenacity of the tongue in Brazil's Indian heritage

Peter Beck looks back on the importance of Argentina's history.

Christopher Abel and Colin M. Lewis analyse the state of history writing on Latin America, from a 1980s standpoint.

The European images of Argentina are complex, and mirror profound debates about nationalism and universalism, popular and elite culture.

John Lynch argues that the history of Spanish American independence is incomprehensible without Simon Bolivar.

The tango was to Argentina what jazz was to New Orleans. As Simon Collier explains, it swept the world in the pre-First World War era and Carlos Gardel was its star.

Lawrence A. Clayton on the Chinese labourers who came to work in Peru, often in appalling conditions.