Certain characters and their roles in the European conquest of America are well known: Christopher Columbus, Hernando Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, and a few others. Likewise, scholarly interest in the conquest has focused on the centers of great political, economic, and cultural entities such as the Aztec Empire in Mesoamerica and the Inca Empire in the Central Andes.

Thousands of soldiers swept onto the campus of the University of El Salvador with tanks and planes, ransacking buildings and arresting more than eight hundred students, professors, and staff. It was July 19, 1972, and the university had “fallen into the hands of the Communist Party of El Salvador and a minuscule group of opportunists of the most disgraceful immorality,” said the recently inaugurated president Army Colonel Arturo Armando Molina.1 Troops handcuffed the rector, Fabio Castillo, and the dean of the medical school and sent them into exile in Nicaragua.2 Early in the invasion, the troops sealed off and occupied the university's printing press, where workers produced a magazine of arts and politics called La Pájara Pinta that essayist Italo López Vallecillos and novelist Manlio Argueta had founded in 1966, and of which Argueta was still the editor.3 The campus occupation lasted two years and proved a milestone in El Salvador's long march to civil war. The closing of La Pájara Pinta that day silenced the most important forum for Salvadoran dissident writers and marked, for many of them, the end of their literary careers and the start of their lives as fugitives and, eventually, guerrillas.

It is a feature of modern nationhood that a declaration of independence is reified as a key inflection point, a specific moment in time during which a region and its people cease to be beholden to something else and begin to chart their own collective course. Independence thus represents both an end and a beginning. It is both a process and a goal. Independence is usually understood as a political act, a metaphorical coming of age, a goal achieved, and an event that brings hope. This collection of six recent books on independence in Age of Revolutions across the Atlantic world fit together to show how wartime worlds and worldviews may not fit as neatly into the textbook national story. They share an intellectual project of moving beyond the usual actors and narrative trajectories to introduce us to new perspectives on the events by looking at different regions and demographics: Austrian diplomats, British Foreign Office bureaucrats, Irish radicals, New England whalers, African traders, Chilean popular classes, Mexico City's night watchmen, and many others. These six authors tug at the standard chronology of Atlantic independence as well, pulling it back to the 1770s and extending its living impact into the 1850s. Taken together, they remind us that independence is a tricky concept, one that can look quite different depending on one's place in a broader matrix. Wars eventually end, but combative words and unreconciled worldviews collide and continue the struggle.