Rebecca Herman

I am a historian of the Americas concerned with the social, political, and environmental history of the twentieth century. 

My first book, Cooperating with the Colossus, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. The book reconstructs the history of US military bases built across Latin America during World War II. Despite widespread acclaim for Pan-American unity with the Allied cause, US basing incited local conflicts over labor rights, discrimination, sex, and criminal jurisdiction. Anchored in the wartime experiences of Brazil, Cuba, and Panama, the book moves between the American foreign ministries and the cantinas, courtrooms, plazas, and brothels where the wartime alliance took shape to examine the fraught relationship between cooperation and sovereignty in the Americas. Cooperating with the Colossus was named a Best Book of 2023 by Foreign Affairs and has won book prizes and honorable mentions from the Latin American Studies Association and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. Reseach for this project was supported by fellowships and awards from the Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the George C. Marshall Foundation, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, among others.

I am currently working on a book about Antarctica in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. During those years, the Argentine and Chilean military governments colonized the Antarctic peninsula with civilian settlements, leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement insisted that Antarctica belonged to the global commons like the deep seabeds and outer space, Antarctic Treaty parties negotiated the future of mining on the continent, and a rising environmental movement fought to declare the Antarctic a protected World Park. The book explores this period of uncertainty about Antarctica's future - and the broader question of who decides what happens in places that are naturally uninhabited by humans - through the stories of the soldiers and scientists, military wives and children, artists, writers, and activists who traveled South in growing numbers during these years. By bringing the high politics of Antarctic governance together with the intimate stories of the people who executed it, I aim to write a book that renders complicated matters of environmental governance and global inequality intelligible and compelling to a broad readership. Research for this project is supported by the Hellman Faculty Fellowship and the Samuel P Hays Fellowship of the American Society for Environmental History.

Most recently, I published an article in Environmental History about Greenpeace International's first office in the so-called developing world, which the organization opened in Buenos Aires in the mid-1980s. 

Before entering academia, I spent several years in Argentina, with shorter stints in Bolivia, Brazil, and Boston, working on assorted documentary and translation projects with support from the Benenson Award in the Arts and the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellowship. I am also a life-long fiction writer. What connects all these dots is that in fiction and non-fiction, writing and film, I'm interested in the meaning we make when we craft stories about ourselves and the world around us.

PUBLICATIONS:

Books:

Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, September 2022)

Articles and Essays:

"Greenpeace Goes South: The Promise and Pitfalls of Global Environmentalism in Argentina," Environmental History Volume 29:1 (January 2024)

"Antarctica & Colonialism: A Historian's Reflections," Antarctica & Colonialism, eds. Peder Roberts and Alejandra Mancilla (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2024)

"Latin America and the Guts of Global History" The American Historical Review Volume 128, Issue 1 (March 2023) in the "Forum On Transnational and International History."

"Social Peace in a Time of War: Labor Justice and Foreign Policy in World War II Brazil" in The Entangled Labor Histories of Brazil and the United States, ed. Fernando Teixeira da Silva, Alexandre Fortes, Thomas D. Rogers, and Gillian McGillivray (Lexington Books, 2023)

“Latin America and US Global Governance” in Cambridge History of America in the World, Volume 3, ed. Mark Bradley, Brooke Blower, Andrew Preston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

“Covid-19: A Crash Course in Contingency” Diplomatic History Vol 45, Issue 3 (June 2021): 510-516.

"The Global Politics of Anti-Racism: A View from the Canal Zone" American Historical Review Volume 125, Issue 2 (April 2020): 460-486.

"A Paz Social em tempo de guerra: Justiça do Trabalho e política externa no Brasil na Segunda Guerra Mundial" in Trabalho & Labor: Histórias Compartilhadas Brasil e Estados Unidos Século XX, ed. Fernando Teixiera da Silva e Alexandre Fortes (Editora Sagga, 2020).

"An Army of Educators: Gender, Revolution and the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961" Gender & History Volume 24, Issue 1 (April 2012): 93-111.