Book Presentation: "Puerto Rico: A National History"

Description

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will be in conversation about his book Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press, 2024) with Jessica Marie Johnson, associate professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins, hosted by the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and the Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the U.S. with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago's people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today.

In this masterful work of scholarship, Meléndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus and captures the full sweep of Puerto Rico's turbulent history in the centuries that followed, from the first Indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511—led by the powerful chieftain Agüeybaná II—to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952. He deftly portrays the contemporary period and the intertwined though unequal histories of the archipelago and the continental U.S.

Puerto Rico: A National History is an engaging, sometimes personal, and consistently surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a national identity, offering new perspectives not only on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean but on the U.S. and the Atlantic world more broadly.

Jorell Melendez Badillo is a historian of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. His work focuses on the global circulation of radical ideas from the standpoint of working-class intellectual communities.

Jessica Marie Johnson is a former fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020).