One of Donald Trump’s first acts in office in his second term was signing an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. What does this focus on names obscure, what does it reveal? What is the real meaning of “America,” and how has its meaning varied across both time and space?
For this, the first episode of Think Back, I spoke with Greg Grandin, a professor of history at Yale and the author of several books, including The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America and America, América: A New History of the New World, which comes out next month. We spoke about how the different colonial experiences of North and South America have shaped both regions up to the present day, as well as what he thinks Latin America can teach us in the United States about how to resist authoritarianism. Be sure to listen to the end for Greg’s insightful account of where the US is at today and where we might be going.
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