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AS FEATURED ON NICARAGUAN TV - CDNN CHANNEL 23
'DANILO LACAYO EN VIVO ' FRI 16 JULY 2010
CLICK ON THE LOGO TO VIEW A RECORDING OF THE SHOW (©
DANILO LACAYO)
"Los centroamericanos y en
particular los nicaragüenses tenemos que agradecer y
aprovechar la existencia de este portal Sandino Rebellion
que contiene numerosos documentos y fotografías que ilustran
sobre la intervención y ocupación militar norteamericana en
Nicaragua y la heroica resistencia de Augusto C. Sandino.
Este importante y destacado esfuerzo del historiador Michael
Schroeder y de quienes han colaborado con él, nos permite
asomarnos, desde nuestros lugares, a documentación que de
otra forma, solamente sería accesible a unos pocos."
- Dora María Téllez, former Sandinista commander &
public servant, founding member of the Sandinista Renovation
Movement (MRS), and now historian and Nicaraguan
representative of Enlace Académico, at
www.enlaceacademico.org
"Amor, Paz y Justicia, sea para todos nuestros Hermanos y Hermanas que
visitan este Web Site.
Y de manera muy especial en nombre de
toda nuestra familia,
sea también este deseo para nuestro querido Hermano el
Profesor Michael Schroeder, por haber dedicado una parte
importante de su vida a la recopilación de información sobre
la Vida y Obra del General Augusto C. Sandino y de sus
compañeros de lucha, pues reconocemos la dedicación y el
esfuerzo en su trabajo, logrando avanzar en beneficio de los
nicaragüenses y de la humanidad. No creo que exista en la
Web un historiador capaz de haber recopilado tanta
información sobre estos acontecimientos historicos.
Siempre más
allá . . . "
- Walter
C. Sandino, grandson of Augusto C. Sandino, Executive
President of the Fundación Augusto Nicolás Calderón Sandino (FANCS),
and author of the book
El libro de Sandino: El Bandolerismo
de Sandino en Nicaragua (Managua: INPASA, 2009) and his
wife Señora Marbely Castillo.

Visit the FANCS website at
www.acsandino.org.ni
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"A stunning enterprise — a virtual Sandino online
encyclopedia and data base — and an obligatory starting
point for anyone researching twentieth century Nicaraguan
history."
-
Barry Carr, Senior Fellow, Institute of Latin American
Studies, La Trobe University
"Discovering your site was like finding a
buried treasure ..."
read more from
William Alvarez, US Marine Corps,
of Atlanta GA
"A Nicaraguan
artist friend just forwarded me your website. I've
read enough to know that it is like finding gold on the
moon! ..."
read
more from
Linda John of San
Francisco CA
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SEEKING VOLUNTEER TRANSLATORS & TRANSCRIBERS
As readers of this website will note, there are thousands of
documents on this topic that still need to be transcribed
and translated into Spanish. If you or someone you
know is interested in helping to develop this website by
transcribing or translating documents, please be in touch!
Much of the work can be done electronically. Thank
You!
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SE
BUSCA TRANSCRIPTORES Y TRADUCTORES VOLUNTARIOS
Como los lectores de este Website se nota, hay miles de
documentos sobre este tema
que deben ser transcrito y traducido al español.
Si usted o alguien que usted conoce está interesado en
ayudar a desarrollar este Website con la transcripción o
traducción de documentos, por favor estar en contacto!
Un gran parte del trabajo se puede realizar por vía
electrónica. Muchas gracias!
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PLEET INITIATIVE GRANT RECIPIENT AT LEBANON VALLEY COLLEGE
In Spring 2009 this website was awarded $5,000 from Lebanon
Valley College's Pleet Initiative for Student-Faculty
Research Across the Curriculum.
Funded by a generous
gift from David & Lynn Pleet of Lebanon, PA, the Pleet
Initiative seeks to foster student collaboration in
faculty-driven research initiatives.
For two years (2009-2011), participating students will be
involved in all aspects of this website's redesign and
construction.
We
will also take several trips to the U.S. National Archives
in Washington D.C. and the Marine Corps Historical Center in
Quantico, VA.
Copious thanks to David & Lynn Pleet and the Pleet Initiative Committee for their generous
funding of this website. More information on the Pleet
Initiative can be found
here.
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ECO-TOURISM IN NICARAGUA
A great way to see Nicaragua's countryside and support local
businesses is the award-winning Finca Esperanza Verde in the
verdant mountains of San Ramón near Matagalpa.
To quote from FEV's promotional materials,
"Come
relax at our organic coffee farm complete with 5 hiking
trails, gorgeous views, a butterfly garden, yoga pavilion,
hammock hut and waterfall swimming hole ...
"All of Finca Esperanza Verde's ecotourism income stays
in the community supporting local jobs and businesses."
FEV is a project of Sister Communities of San Ramón,
Nicaragua.
Visit
the Finca Esperanza Verde website
here
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Introduction
to the Site
This
Website is envisioned as a comprehensive digital interpretive archive on the
nationalist rebellion against US military intervention in Nicaragua led
by Augusto C. Sandino in the 1920s and '30s. (Right: Statue in
Managua commemorating the 1979 Triumph of the Sandinista Revolution,
July 19, 2009; photo by the author)
Right now this Website
houses and integrates over 1,000 archival documents
on the rebellion, most transcribed and fully searchable. It also
lists & identifies the specific archival locations of over 5,000
individual documents, which together comprise some 15,000 pages of text. Eventually (by the year
2015, I hope) this Website will house and
integrate over
25,000 pages of documents
— and thousands more pages of published texts
— materials collected over two decades in archives & libraries in the United
States and Nicaragua.
This tsunami of evidence
on this
oft-mentioned but little understood guerrilla war and nationalist
campesino rebellion offers an unprecedented look at events "on the
ground" in a major episode of foreign invasion & occupation during the
golden age of US imperialism in the circum-Caribbean (c. 1898-1934).
The portrait of Sandino's revolt that emerges from this documentary
deluge is vastly more nuanced and complex than any scholar or poet has
yet conveyed.
Yet
however nuanced this portrait, however intricate and messy and confusing, it is also true that
everything you read about in these pages — all the killing and
suffering, all the heroism and sacrifice, all the planning & scheming & marching
& spying & fighting & dying — all were rooted in a
simple reality: the government of the United States of America decided to invade and
occupy this small Central American country, and a small group of
Nicaraguans, led by a charismatic patriot, decided to resist.
(Left: 1984 Bulgarian
postage stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sandino's death)
The
Website's Focus. As a social & cultural historian, I am mainly interested in the Sandino
revolt as a social and cultural process, as a local response to foreign
invasion and occupation. The documents presented here reflect this
focus. They were selected because they speak, in some fashion, to
the agency of Nicaraguans and Segovianos in shaping their own history.
By Way of Background & Context.
The US Marines first intervened militarily in
Nicaragua in the civil war of 1912, and were stationed in the country more or less
continuously for the next 20 years. Nicaragua effectively became a
U.S. protectorate, surrendering much of its sovereignty to the United
States, as was true of much of the circum-Caribbean during this period.
Read more ...
Las
Segovias.
In
the late 1920s this rugged region bordering Honduras was home to about 120,000
people spread over some 6,000 square miles of mountains, valleys,
forests, and jungles, in several dozen towns and hundreds of villages,
hamlets, and homesteads. Even before the Marines arrived,
extreme inequality, oppression, exploitation, poverty, and violence dominated the
social landscape. After May 1927 Segovianos flocked to Sandino's banner. The Marine invasion
intensified; the US-created National Guard grew in power; and by 1932
the Sandinista rebels, based in Las Segovias and organized into a
government of their own, threatened to topple the national government.
Read more ...
The Imperial
Spotlight. Before
mid-1927 there is very little documentation on Las Segovias, a frontier region
bordering Honduras mostly ignored by the national state. Then in
June 1927 came the Marine invasion & occupation, and our documentary
base explodes. For 5½ years the US
imperial spotlight -- expressed in a dazzling variety & quantity of
texts --
illluminated the hidden corners & crevices of a culture & society &
history hitherto almost totally obscured. The interpretive
challenge for scholars is to read these texts against the grain,
in the words of Ranajit Guha in his classic
The
Prose of Counter-Insurgency (1988) -- and with a fertile & reasoned
historical imagination. Alongside this explosion of
imperial texts was the proliferation of texts & artifacts created by the
Sandinista rebels that the Marines & Guardia were trying to eradicate.
In January 1933 the spotlight vanished, and a month later Sandino's
armed rebellion effectively ended in a provisional peace treaty with the
newly elected Sacasa government. The Marines went home, carting
hundreds of boxes of records with them. What the US imperial gaze
spotlighted for those 5½ years constitutes
the bulk of what I wish to share here. Smaller in scale but often
still punchier in impact are the
textual fragments & social memories that survived the brutal repression
that followed Sandino's assassination in 1934.
Animating
Questions. Lots
of questions inspire & animate this website.
Mainly I'm interested in what the US invasion &
occupation, the formation of the Guardia Nacional, and
Sandino's revolutionary movement meant for ordinary
Segovianos — campesinos, Indians, tenants &
sharecroppers, smallholders & squatters, miners &
migrant workers, seasonal & day laborers (who together comprised some
85-90% of the region's population), as well as townsfolk, artisans & smugglers, peddlers &
traders, boat-drivers & mule-drivers, ranchers &
coffee growers, merchants & professionals, politicians &
military leaders — individuals, families & communities
caught up in a whirlwind of foreign invasion and
insurgency as complex and multifaceted as any in
history. I also want to know what these events meant in the broader sweep of
history — in Nicaragua, Central America, the Western
Hemisphere, and the Atlantic World — and how they intersected
with broader changes within these overlapping spheres.
What manner of revolutionary movement was this?
What were its origins, characteristics, and legacies? All
the documents here speak in some fashion to these
broader questions & themes.
(Right: street
boy, Telpaneca, ca. 1929, Carl P.
Eldred Papers,
Marine Corps Research Center
[MCRC], Quantico VA)
Why a Documentary History?
Historians
come and historians go, but the documents endure. These
documents, if read with enough care and attention (and along with the
published literature) will bring us as close as we can get to
understanding what this tumultuous period meant for ordinary Segovianos, and to its
complexities as a social process locally, nationally, and transnationally.
Documents, of course, do not speak for themselves. They must be
analyzed and
interpreted,
which is the job of historians and of rational human beings generally.
Publishing these documents online creates not only a valuable tool for
students and researchers. It also means that others might
interpret these documents differently than I do. That is as it
should be. I introduce or conclude many documents with some interpretive
comments. Others might disagree with my interpretations or
emphases. If you do, let me know! Let a thousand interpretations bloom! (Left: detail
of letter from Sandino to Faustino González, 2 April 1931, one of around
1,000 Sandinista documents to be published here for the first time)
This way anybody —
you, e.g. — can tap into this densely
integrated web of information and ask just about any
kind of historical question you want to ask. You can ask about war-making or coffee
making. Vocabularies of political violence or
social geographies of production and trade.
Gender, class & race relations. Popular
nationalism. Poverty, malnutrition & disease. Military tactics & strategy.
Insurgency & counterinsurgency. Borderlands &
identities. Local political economies.
Historical geography. State formation & guerrilla
war. Leadership, weapons & tactics.
Production & settlement patterns. Social memory &
identity formation. Just
about anything.
(Right: campesino in field,
Western Segovias, 1928, George F. Stockes Collection,
MCRC, one of 70 photos from the Stockes Collection
published here)
I create this site in the classic tradition of
scholarship: as a substantial and original contribution to
existing knowledge on a specific topic. In part it is
envisioned as a documentary annex to my forthcoming book. In part it is meant to give back to the
Nicaraguan people a part of their own history. In whole it is
rooted in the hope that we — humanity, and especially US citizens and
policymakers — might learn from our mistakes. The story told by these documents is not only edifying and important
but endlessly interesting,
and should become part of humanity's common stock of knowledge.
What's
Here?
Right now only a fraction of the collection is published here (maybe 5%). All can be found via this UPDATE BOX:
Around two-thirds of the
primary documents come from the Records of the United States Marine
Corps & Nicaraguan
National Guard, housed mainly in the US National Archives (Record Group
127, or RG127), comprising about 150 linear feet of files. The
rest come from a variety of repositories: the Marine Corps
Research Center, the Library of Congress, the US State Department, the Hemeroteca Nacional Rubén
Darío (Managua), the Instituto de Historia
de Nicaragua y Centroamerica (IHNCA-UCA, also in Managua), and others.
Everything filtered out of these
collections and presented here speaks in some way to how Central
Americans, Nicaraguans, and Segovianos acted to shape their own history.
How is the Website Organized?
Densely. And so it's easy to use. For a full explanation, please see the
user's guide. Briefly:
At the top of every page are links to ten document collections,
ten thematic
collections, eight other links, and a Google search engine. At
the heart of the site are 20 homepages serving as portals into 20 collections of
documents, sorted by type & theme. With so many documents
& branches & sub-branches, the site is designed so it's simple & easy to navigate,
find & cross-reference information, and
find your way back to where you started from & ended up.
Again, please see the
USER'S GUIDE.
Suggestions
& comments invited. This website launched March 2007 & revamped in
March 2010.
Painting by Thelma Gómez F., Masaya,
Nicaragua, 1989
Visitors since
March 2010:
¡Que lo disfrute!
Y que aprendamos.
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TOP OF PAGE
AIR WAR • AIR-TOONS •
EAST COAST • EDSN-DOCS • HONDURAS • NEWS-DOCS • PC-DOCS • PHOTO-DOCS • TOP 100 • USMC-DOCS
Thanks to Lebanon Valley College and
the Pleet Initiative for their generous funding of this website.
Thanks to website developers Tim Haak
and Mile 6 LLC of Lebanon, PA for their expert help in
putting it together.
Thanks to everybody who's ever helped
with this project. It is a very long list.
Copyright of all original material Michael J. Schroeder, 2010.
All rights reserved.
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