A sweeping, five-hundred-year-history of Latin America that highlights the contributions of ordinary people in the struggle for free, democratic societies.

Latin America threw off European colonialism in a continent-spanning series of revolutions and was a global pioneer of constitutional government. And yet today the region’s history is almost exclusively associated with the legacies of colonialism rather than those of liberation, and with its periods of dictatorship, not its groundbreaking experiments with liberalism and democracy.

In Latin America, historian Timo H. Schaefer challenges such one-sided interpretations. Without downplaying the role violence and authoritarianism played in Latin American history, Schaefer shows that oppression in the region was at every point resisted: by revolutionaries like Simón Bolívar and Túpac Amaru II, and equally by everyday people—from urban slaves to indigenous workers to activist lawyers—who went to court to claim new rights for themselves. In the process, they fundamentally transformed Latin America, and its place in the world.

Latin America tells a far richer story of the continent’s past than the one we think we know, a story of struggle between democracy and dictatorship that powerfully resonates today. At a time of looming authoritarian menace, Schaefer vividly demonstrates, we ignore the history of Latin America at our peril.