Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan Books), published to critical acclaim and commercial success, was the first book to draw parallels between the U.S. government’s actions in the "War on Terror" and its long-obscured and dubious history of intervention in our own backyard—Latin America. Grandin reminded us that before Iraq and Afghanistan, a political philosophy that embraced the deployment of military power to advance free-market economics was unleashed much closer to home. In the words of Naomi Klein: "Grandin has always been a brilliant historian; now he uses his detective skills in a book that is absolutely crucial to understanding our present."

The Last Colonial Massacre: The Latin American Cold War and its Consequence (University of Chicago Press), argues that the Cold War in Latin America was a struggle between two visions of democracy. Using Guatemala as a case study, Grandin demonstrates that the main effect of U.S. intervention in Latin America was not the containment of Communism, but the elimination of home-grown concepts of social democracy. Eric Hobsbawm described it as a "remarkable and extremely well-written work… about how common people discover politics, the roots of democracy and those of genocide, and the hopes and defeats of the twentieth-century left."

Grandin’s first book, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Duke University Press, 2000), a two-century history of the development of Mayan nationalism, was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for most outstanding book published in English in the humanities and social sciences on Latin America. In the London Review of Books, Corey Robin proclaimed it "remarkable… Grandin’s book performs a modest act of restorative justice: it allows Guatemalans to tell their own stories in their own words."

Grandin received his BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY in 1992 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1999. His many books and articles explore the connection between the diverse manifestations of everyday life and large-scale societal transformations that took place in Central America related to agricultural commodity production and state formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Grandin has published extensively on issues of revolution, popular memory, US-Latin American relations, photography, genocide, truth commissions, human rights, disease, and the tensions that exist between legal and historical inquiries into political violence. In 1997-1998 Grandin worked with the Guatemalan Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico—the UN-administered truth commission set up to investigate political violence committed during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.

Philip F. Gura is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of American Transcendentalism: A History, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, among many other books on American cultural history.