"In this book, the historian Lester D. Langley offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the modern Western hemisphere since the mid-nineteenth century. He evaluates the dynamics of hemispheric history, commencing with the articulation of the "two Americas" (Theodore Roosevelt's America and the contrasting America described by the Cuban revolutionary, essayist, and poet Jose Marti) and culminating with recent controversial efforts to forge a united hemisphere." "Tracing the interactions and influences among the nations of South, Central, and North America, including Canada, Langley departs from other accounts of the past 150 years. He argues that the seedtime for the Americas of the early twenty-first century was not the Cold War but the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also contends that it is not what the countries and peoples of the Americas have in common that binds them; instead, their cultural, political, and economic conflicts tie them together."--Jacket.