James Dunkerley's Americana: The Americas and the World, around 1850 (Verso, 2000) offers a vision of an Atlantic world developing into its recognizably modern form. With its panoramic scope, the book surveys a fluid, dynamic world-region, marked by the most unexpected personal, literary, legal, political, and economic intraconnections. The point of entry for this vision is a temporal one - a synchronic look at the Americas at midcentury, in the 1840s and 1850s.

The scholarship on display is meticulous, erudite, and drawn from a dazzling array of historiographic sources. In the book's extended primary source quotations, one gets the sense of a historian sharing his own irrepressible enthusiasms for the treasures he has uncovered. The book is filled with multitudes of voices that emerge with great immediacy. Often it's as if Dunkerley had finally given these nineteenth-centuries voices a platform on which to hold forth. There are familiar friends, such as Walt Whitman. There are notable and notorious figures, from Karl Marx to William Walker, the US mercenary who declared himself emperor of Nicaragua. There are also more obscure yet no less fascinating characters whom Dunkerley has encountered in his archival forays, such as Francisco Burdett O'Connor the Irish soldier who became an independence fighter under Bolivar in South America and who eventually settled down as a prefect in the Bolivian region of Tarija.

Americana confirms Dunkerley's scholarly depth, analytical originality, and creative gifts. While his intellectual energy has always been evident in his prolific work on Latin American history and politics, in Americana it has finally found full expression. The book weighs in at over 600 pages, and yet it displays the essayist's freedom and delight in his subject, even in language itself. The tone is often playful, and glancing assertion takes the place of belabored argument. The subjects treated in this grand study of a vast region are profuse, and the insights are myriad. What is most striking, however, is its aesthetic quality. If Eric Hobsbawm deemed this the "most unusual" book of 2000, it is surely because Americana boldly breaks the molds of academic history writing in this day and age. Splendid and idiosyncratic, it expresses a historian's enchantment with the materials of history and the pleasures of narration. Dunkerley makes a case for history as seductive, poetic, and emancipatory, qualities too often seen as antithetical to history today.