Encyclopedia of U.S. Military Intervention in Latin America

I just received my copy of the Encyclopedia of U.S. Military Intervention in Latin America, edited by Alan McPherson, who has written a lot on the topic. I wrote entries on the School of the Americas, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, and Immigration. It is pricey, but if you're at a university you should recommend it to the library.

Encyclopedias, of which there are a variety of specialized kinds, play a varied role in academia. At teaching-oriented schools where peer-reviewed articles are not deemed important, they contribute to a record of scholarship for promotion, raises, etc. At schools with more research demands, they are sometimes looked down upon because they are synthetic and not peer-reviewed. I did not do any until a few years out of tenure, and only then because people I knew were editing them (the other I contributed to was the Encyclopedia of U.S.-Latin American Relations. I couldn't really refuse that one even if my colleague Jurgen Buchenau weren't an editor!). They can be, or at least really should be, time consuming.