As the centennial of Colombia’s Thousand Days War (1899–1902) approached, historians began producing retrospectives of the conflict. This 17-essay collection is part of that body of work. Interest in the last and most destructive of Colombia’s nineteenth-century civil wars has been heightened by similarities between those wars and Colombia’s present armed conflict. Students of Colombia hope that the peace, which ended the earlier war, might offer insights into ways of concluding the country’s current civil war.
The essays contained here are grouped in six categories. The first, consisting of essays by Thomas Fischer and Eduardo Posada Carbó, place the Thousand Days War in regional context, that of Latin America at large. The second group, dealing with the war’s participants, are written by Fernán González, Malcolm Deas, Hermes Tovar, José David Cortés, Aída Martínez, and Rubén Sierra. This group also contains a piece by turn-of-the-century writer Adolfo León Gómez, who described...
