Pioneering Latin Americanist Robert Jackson Alexander (1918–) was a central player in U.S.–Latin American labor, political, and scholarly affairs after World War II. For some five decades starting in 1946, Professor Alexander traveled extensively as an engaged witness to, and active participant in, many major political events in Latin America and the Caribbean. The unique documentation Alexander created and assembled (the largest and most important private archive of its sort) is deposited with the Special Collections and University Archives of Rutgers University.1 The crown jewel of this remarkable collection are his contemporaneous notes on over ten thousand interviews he conducted with presidents, politicians, trade unionists, businessmen, government officials, military men, diplomats, and scholars. Although specialists knew of these interviews, few historians have realized the scope of this comprehensive multinational resource, which documents modern Latin America’s tumultuous political and diplomatic history.
Born in 1918 in Canton, Ohio, and raised in...
