Resources for Further Study

Resources for Further Study

For Basic Information:

Sheppard Software has a briefing page consisting of map games that are easy to play and will bring you up to speed quickly:

www.sheppardsoftware.com/South_America_Geography.htm

Help Teaching provides a good self-quiz at

www.helpteaching.com/questions/South_American_Geography.

Several sources are available for basic demographic and geographic facts about Latin America.

The Socio-Economic Database, http://sedlac.econo.unlp.edu.ar/eng/institutional.php, provides information gathered about the region by the World Bank and Universidad de La Plata.

Reading:

You can do no better than the NACLA Report on the Americas, which comes out four times per year and, though it draws heavily on academic specialists, is written for a general audience.

Latin American Research Review is the most prestigious area-study journal. Among many other good journals, Latin American Perspectives differs in dedicating itself more to Latin American views, particularly radical ones.

Video and Film:

A list of hundreds of Latin American films with English translation can be found at Steve Volk’s resource page: www.oberlin.edu/faculty/svolk/latinam.htm.

A recent look, sympathetic to more radical left ist leaders, is South of the Border, Oliver Stone’s 2009–2010 documentary.

Icarus Films is a repository of hundreds of documentaries; for Latin America, you can find them listed at www.icarusfilms.com/subjects/latin_am.html.

Another source of good documentary material is http://www.journeyman.tv, which seems to add five or six high-quality videos of varying length every week and which can be streamed for free (and sometimes downloaded for free).

On the Internet:

The Latin American Network Information Center (http://lanic.utexas.edu) is the best general portal, with links categorized by theme and by country.

More diverse is the portal Zona Latina (www.zonalatina.com/), which contains innumerable resources, systematically listed by type and then broken into country or region. The site treats a wide range of types and subject matters, with many English-language articles; the site is very eclectic ideologically and especially good on cultural topics.

The Library of Congress offers the Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS) online, provides the titles and annotations of all sorts of articles and books concerning the region. Using the website’s search engine, a student can find citations of documents for further study on any specific topic found in this textbook. The main page is located at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/hlas/hlashome.html.

Following News:

The Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington-based think tank, provides a valuable compilation three to five days per week of English-language news. You can sign up to receive the digest (links to articles divided by region) via e-mail at the organization’s website, www.cepr.net.