Guatemala, the largest and potentially richest country of Central America, has recently attracted attention from first-rate historians, such as David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), and Greg Grandlin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). The controversial political role of Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú is exhaustively discussed in David S. Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999). The U.S. involvement in the overthrow of President Arbenz in 1954 has been superbly documented and described in Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

For a concise historical overview of Honduras, see Thomas M. Leonard, The History of Honduras (Santa Barbara, CA; Greenwood, 2011). A pioneering work on Honduras is Dario Euraque, Reinterpreting the Banana Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Glenn A. Chambers has examined foreign workers’ participation in the country in Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009).

The roots of the Salvadoran civil war have been examined in Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Erik Ching, and Rafael A.Lara-Martínez, Remembering a Massacre in  El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Memory (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); Jeffey L. Gould and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Paul D. Almeida, Waves of Protest: Popular Struggle in El Salvador, 1925-2005 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The aftermath of the civil war in El Salvador is the topic of several works: Robin Maria De Lugan Re-imagining National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in a Global Context (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012) and Irina Carlota Silber, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011)

Nicaragua’s recent history has been dominated by the legacy of the Somoza dynasty, whose origins are depicted in Knut Walter, The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 1936–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Among the many books describing contemporary Nicaragua are Rose J. Spalding, Capitalists and Revolution in Nicaragua: Opposition and Accommodation, 1979–1993 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), and Thomas W. Walker, ed., Nicaragua without Illusions: Regime Transition and Structural Adjustment in the 1990s (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1997).

Immigration to Costa Rica has been analyzed in Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and in Ronald Harpelle, The West Indians of Costa Rica: Race, Class, and the Integration of an Ethnic Minority (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). Frabrice Edouard Lehoucq has analyzed the political process in the country in Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

The building of the Panama Canal has received magisterial treatment from David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), while political legacies and complications are explored in Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Another recent work on the canal is Julie Green, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penquin, 2009). Also revealing is Orlando J. Pérez (ed.), Post-Invasion Panama: The Challenges of Democratization in the New World Order (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2000). Peter Szok examines African influences in Panamanian culture in Wolf Tracks: Popular Art and Re-Africanization in Twentieth-century Panama (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).

The U.S. presence hovers constantly over Central America, as demonstrated by John H. Coatsworth, Central American and the United States: The Colossus and the Clients (New York: Twayne, 1994) and Mark Rosenberg, The United States and Central America: Geopolitical Realities and Regional Fragility (New York: Routledge, 2007). For the attempt by a distinguished authority on U.S. foreign policy to explain the context, see Walter La Feber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States and Central America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983). The subsequent story is told in William M. Leo Grande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); a less well-known chapter of this complex tale is revealed in Ariel Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1997).