The Lyndon B. Johnson Chair in History at Texas Christian University and a leading authority on twentieth-century Mexico and US-Latin American relations, Mark Gilderhus passed away in 2015. His highly regarded survey on inter-American affairs, published in 2000 and titled The Second Century, has been revised and updated by Michael LaRosa and David LaFevor. Gilderhus's initial work synthesized the economic and political relations of the United States and Latin America from the late 1880s through the 1990s, primarily from a revisionist perspective. Five of his seven chapters reappear in the second edition with few changes. The other two chapters were restructured by LaRosa and LaFevor; they also penned two entirely new chapters for their edition of The Third Century. The first of these examines US-Cuban bilateral relations from 1980 to 2016, that is, from Mariel to normalization. The second traces hemispheric relations from 1994 to the present and focuses on commerce, conflict, and culture. Although the first edition lacked illustrations, the new volume includes a number of black-and-white photographs and cartoons, as well as an updated bibliography and revised index.

Gilderhus's original study smartly placed US-Latin American relations within a larger global framework and emphasized the goals and tactics that drove Washington's march toward, and maintenance of, regional hegemony. Gilderhus also rightly focused attention on Latin American leaders and their attempt either to manipulate US policies to further their own domestic agenda or to resist them. US officials frequently put “America First”; therefore, Latin American resistance to its northern neighbor was often characterized by nationalistic economic policies. Like most textbooks, Gilderhus's volume was light on theory and based entirely on secondary sources. Although this lack of new material may not appeal to more seasoned scholars, in the hands of Gilderhus it made for a historiographical tour de force. The great appeal of Gilderhus's original work was his ability to provide an integrative overview of hemispheric relations while articulating the distinct scholarly interpretations that were published in English on the subject.

Whereas some of the new sections and chapters by LaRosa and LaFevor (these make up approximately 20 percent of the second edition) are based on primary research, for the most part they too rely mostly on secondary sources. Unfortunately, these authors do not display a command of the literature that is on par with Gilderhus. Consequently, the two new chapters in The Third Century appear disjointed. This is magnified by the fact that one of the new chapters, on US-Cuban relations, is bilateral in orientation, while the entire rest of the book employs a multilateral methodology. The same chapter also appears disconnected from the rest of the book, since it begins in 1980 and concludes in 2016. Because the two following chapters also review hemispheric relations from 1979 to present, the authors cover the Reagan, G. H. Bush, Clinton, G. W. Bush, and Obama administrations twice. Even when LaRosa and LaFevor do take a multilateral approach in their new final chapter, they move away from Gilderhus's original thematic emphasis on politics and economics. Instead, they devote a paltry seven pages to cultural relations—both too little and seemingly out of place.

Finally, the second edition's photographs, many of which were taken by LaFevor, are presented as a “photo essay” and meant to be “read as a sort of ‘chapter’” to help students visualize the beauty of Latin America's people, culture, landscape, and cityscapes (xiii). Unfortunately, the pictures do not give a good sense of the overall region since 14 of the 17 photos derive from just two countries, namely Cuba and Mexico. Likewise, because many of the photographs are underexposed—too dark—the beauty that the authors rightly wish to show is a bit hard to see.

Although the second edition's disjointedness stands out, for many—including this reviewer—The Third Century remains an important text that any instructor teaching US-Latin American relations should seriously consider for classroom use.