This essay reviews and analyzes recent north american writing on united States-Latin American relations, particularly on the Alliance for Progress. It does not attempt to summarize or evaluate the Alliance's history as such, nor does it deal with Latin American perspectives on the Alliance (or more generally on inter-American relations), though I hope to treat these subjects in future works. What this article does instead is to analyze the dwindling North American literature on the Alliance for Progress, as a means of illuminating the state of scholarship in this country on United States-Latin American relations. I shall draw on available writings to illustrate my major theme, which is that United States analysts of inter-American relations tend to adopt either of two alternative perspectives. These perspectives, which I will call “liberal” and “radical” (using both words without quote marks hereafter), differ sharply in their sets of assumptions about the nature of United States-Latin American relations and, more generally, about politics in America, North and South. Each perspective provides insights for interpreting the Alliance and for explaining other aspects of inter-American relations; neither, by itself, seems to me satisfactory. In the final section of this essay, I shall attempt to sketch out a complementary “bureaucratic politics” perspective, one that is usually missing from both liberal and radical accounts, and suggest that this third perspective may be useful for analyzing United States policy toward Latin America.

The International Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis, or International Institute of Social History, located in Amsterdam, is well known as one of the world's leading centers for research on the history of labor movements and leftist political parties. It is also a major depository of archival material. However, scholars have largely neglected the Institute's extraordinary collection of Latin American materials. The purpose of this article is to describe the two largest bodies of Latin American holdings, those pertaining to Argentina and Brazil. For reasons of space, we have kept annotations to a minimum and have included only materials published before 1940, since they constitute by far the most significant portion of the Institute's Latin American collection.