Introduction to the Site

     This Website is envisioned as a comprehensive, interpretive, open-access digital archive on the nationalist rebellion against US military intervention in Nicaragua led by Augusto C. Sandino in the 1920s and '30s.  Rigorous accuracy, judicious interpretation, and the democratization of knowledge rank among its most important guiding principles.   (Right: Statue in Managua commemorating the 1979 Triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, July 19, 2009; photo by the author.)

     Right now this Website houses and integrates more than 4,855 archival documents on the rebellion, comprising around 12,000 pages of hard-copy text & images, with a good portion of the text transcribed and fully searchable (see UPDATE BOX, below).  It also lists & identifies the archival locations of another 5,000 or so documents, together comprising over 15,000 pages of text.  Eventually (by the year 2025, I hope) this website will house and integrate over 30,000 documents — and thousands more pages of published texts — materials collected over two decades in archives & libraries in the United States and Nicaragua.  All but a handful are public domain, though I do suggest some SIMPLE PROTOCOLS for using & citing this material.

     This tsunami of evidence on this oft-mentioned but little understood guerrilla war and nationalist campesino rebellion offers an unprecedented look at events "on the ground" in a major episode of foreign invasion & occupation during the golden age of US imperialism in the circum-Caribbean (c. 1898-1934).  The portrait of Sandino's revolt that emerges from this documentary deluge is vastly more nuanced and complex than any scholar or poet has yet conveyed.

    Yet however nuanced this portrait, however intricate and messy and confusing, it is also true that most everything you read about in these pages was rooted in a simple reality:  the executive branch of the US federal government, as part of a larger imperial project, invaded & occupied this small Central American country, and a small group of Nicaraguans, led by a charismatic patriot, resisted that invasion & occupation by force of arms.  (Left: 1984 Bulgarian postage stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sandino's death)  

     The Website's Focus.    As a social & cultural historian, I am mainly interested in the Sandino revolt as a social and cultural process, as a local response to foreign invasion and occupation.  The documents presented here reflect this focus.  They were selected because they speak, in some fashion, to the agency of Nicaraguans and Segovianos in shaping their own history.   

     By Way of Background & Context.    The US Marines first intervened militarily in Nicaragua in the civil war of 1912, and were stationed in the country more or less continuously for the next 20 years.  Nicaragua effectively became a U.S. protectorate, surrendering much of its sovereignty to the United States, as was true of much of the circum-Caribbean during this period.  READ MORE

     Las Segovias.    In the late 1920s this rugged region bordering Honduras was home to about 120,000 people spread over some 6,000 square miles of mountains, valleys, forests, and jungles, in several dozen towns and hundreds of villages, hamlets, and homesteads.  Even before the Marines arrived, extreme inequality, oppression, exploitation, poverty, and violence dominated the social landscape.  After May 1927 Segovianos flocked to Sandino's banner.  The Marine invasion intensified; the US-created National Guard grew in power; and by 1932 the Sandinista rebels, based in Las Segovias and organized into a government of their own, threatened to topple the national government.   READ MORE

     The Imperial Spotlight.   Before mid-1927 there is very little documentation on Las Segovias, a frontier region bordering Honduras mostly ignored by the national state.  Then in June 1927 came the Marine invasion & occupation, and our documentary base explodes.  For 5½ years the US imperial spotlight — expressed in a dazzling variety & quantity of texts — illluminated the hidden corners & crevices of a culture & society & history hitherto almost totally obscured.  The interpretive challenge for scholars is to read these texts against the grain, in the words of Ranajit Guha in his classic The Prose of Counter-Insurgency (1988) — and with a fertile & reasoned historical imagination.  Alongside this explosion of imperial texts was the proliferation of texts & artifacts created by the Sandinista rebels that the Marines & Guardia were trying to eradicate.  In January 1933 the spotlight vanished, and a month later Sandino's armed rebellion basically ended in a provisional peace treaty with the newly elected Sacasa government.  The Marines went home, carting hundreds of boxes of records with them.  What the US imperial gaze spotlighted for those 6 or so years constitutes the bulk of what I wish to share here — alongside a wide variety of sources from Honduras, Mexico, Great Britain, Germany & beyond.  Smaller in scale but often punchier in impact are the textual fragments & social memories produced in Las Segovias that survived the brutal repression that followed Sandino's assassination in 1934.

     Animating Questions.     Lots of questions inspire & animate this website.  Mainly I'm interested in what the US invasion & occupation, the formation of the Guardia Nacional, and Sandino's revolutionary movement meant for ordinary Segovianos — campesinos, Indians, tenants & sharecroppers, smallholders & squatters, miners & migrant workers, seasonal & day laborers (who together comprised some 85-90% of the region's population), as well as townsfolk, artisans & smugglers, peddlers & traders, boat-drivers & mule-drivers, ranchers & coffee growers, merchants & professionals, politicians & military leaders — individuals, families & communities caught up in a whirlwind of foreign invasion and insurgency as complex and multifaceted as any in history.  I also want to know what these events meant in the broader sweep of history — in Nicaragua, Central America, the Western Hemisphere, and the Atlantic World — and how they intersected with broader changes within these overlapping spheres.  What manner of revolutionary movement was this?  What were its origins, characteristics, and legacies?  All the documents here speak in some fashion to these broader questions & themes.   (Right:  young woman soldier with Conservative forces in 1926-27 Civil War; detail of one of a series of 30 photos taken by US Military Attaché Major A. W. Blooor in March 1927, published here for the first time, from US National Archives II, College Park MD, in the Photo-Doc pages, here)

     Why a Documentary History?    Historians come and historians go, but the documents endure.  These documents, if read with enough care and attention and alongside extant published literature, will bring us as close as we can get to understanding what this tumultuous period meant for ordinary Segovianos, and to its complexities as a social process locally, nationally, and transnationally.  Documents, of course, do not speak for themselves.  They must be analyzed and interpreted, which is the job of historians and of rational human beings generally.  Publishing these documents online creates not only a valuable tool for students and researchers.  It also means that others might interpret these documents differently than I do.  That is as it should be.  I introduce or conclude many documents with some interpretive comments.  Others might disagree with my interpretations or emphases.  If you do, let me know!  Let a thousand interpretations bloom!  (Left: detail of letter from Sandino to Faustino González, 2 April 1931, one of around 1,000 Sandinista documents to be published here for the first time)

          This way anybody — you, for example — can tap into this densely integrated web of information and ask just about any kind of historical question you want to ask.  You can ask about war-making or coffee making.  Vocabularies of political violence or social geographies of production and trade.  Gender, class & race relations.  Popular nationalism.  Poverty, malnutrition & disease.  Military tactics & strategy.  Insurgency & counterinsurgency.  Borderlands & identities.  Local political economies.  Historical geography.  State formation & guerrilla war.  Leadership, weapons & tactics.  Production & settlement patterns.  Social memory & identity formation.  Just about anything.  There is a whole universe in this little grain of sand.    (Right:  campesino in field, Western Segovias, 1928, George F. Stockes Collection, MCRC, one of 71 photos from the Stockes Collection published here)

          I create this site in the classic tradition of scholarship:  as an original contribution to existing knowledge on a specific set of questions about the world.  In part it is envisioned as a documentary annex to my book in progress.  In part it is meant to give back to the Nicaraguan people a part of their own history.  In whole it is rooted in the hope that we — humanity, and especially US citizens and policymakers — might learn from our mistakes.  The story told by these documents is not only edifying & important but endlessly interesting and should become part of humanity's common stock of knowledge.

     What's Here?     Right now only a fraction of the collection is published here, perhaps 10 percent.  The other 90 percent awaits publication of my book-in-progress, The Sandino Rebellion.  The goal is to make the end product — the printed book & this website — a genuinely hybrid print-web text.  Meantime all documents currently available can be found via this Document Update Box:

D O C U M E N T     U P D A T E     B O X Primary Documents NOW Available:    4,878 •  air War 80 AIRCRAFT SQUADRONS reports on the air war •  air-toons 23 POLITICAL cartoons & graphics on the air war, with interpretive captions •  BIB & LIT 32 COLUMNS OF SALOMÓN DE LA SELVA PUBLISHED IN LA TRIBUNA (MANAGUA) IN 1929, PLUS 2 ANCILLARY STORIEs  •  & other rare published workS •  EAST COAST 1,076 DOCUMENTS IN 2,311 JPEG FILES on the atlantic coast region IN THE TIME OF SANDINO, ORGANIZED CHRONOLOGICALLY IN 53 WEBPAGES, WITH 14 ANCILLARY THEMATIC & TOPICAL PAGES •  Edsn 9 DOCUMENTS FROM 1931-1932 LISTING "KNOWN BANDITS" AROUND PALACAGÜINA, ESTELÍ, oCOTAL, CONDEGA, JINOTEGA, EL SAUCE & MATAGALPA •  EDSN-DOCS 339 hitherto unpublished Sandinista documents through march 1928   •  a smattering in 1930 and 1931  •  & most of january 1932   •  26 NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS FROM La colecciÓn de daniel ortega cerda, FATHER OF CURRENT NICARAGUAN PRESIDENT DANIEL ORTEGA SAAVEDRA •  GANGS 26 DOCUMENTS ON CHAMORRISTA GANG LEADER & POLITICAL MASS MURDERER ANASTACIO HERNÁNDEZ & 26 JPEG IMAGES OF NICARAGUAN NEWSPAPERS FOCUSING ON CHAMORRISMO, 1927-1928 •  guardia 109 "guardia news letters" from NOV. 1927 to dec. 1932, IN 1,939 pages of text  •  the "official list of contacts," ON 510 military engagements from july 1927 to dec. 1932, IN 111 pages of text  •  15 guardia troop distribution lists, dec. 1931 to APRIL 1935  •  17 PARTIAL issues of the boletines (bulletins) of the guardia nacional, 1933-1935  •  never before published photos of the guardia  •  63 DOCUMENTS OF THE US MILITARY INTELLIGENCE DIVISION (precursor to the CIA) on the guardia, 1920-1941  •  152 documents on the voluntarios, jan-juLY 1929  •  & MORE •  Honduras 120 reports on events in the honduras-segovian borderlands, 1919-1926 •  IR-DOCS 13 SERIAL INTELLIGENCE REPORTs, JAN-MARCH 1928 •  MAPS THE 1934 US ARMY G-2 MILITARY INTELLIGENCE DIVISION MAP OF NICARAGUA (NORTH OF A LINE FROM MANAGUA TO BLUEFIELDS)  •  22 MAPS OF CITIES & TOWNS, 1910-1932  •  THE COMPLETE TEXT OF THE CLASSIC GRADE SCHOOL PRIMER, HERMANOS CRISTIANOS, GEOGRAFÍA DE NICARAGUA (1928)  •  & MORE •  M-DocS 30 hojas VOLANTES (propaganda fliers) of the mARINES-Guardia, THE EDSN & OTHERS  &  24 propaganda leaflets of liberal, conservative & nationalist parties in the runup to the november 1928 electionS, AMONG OTHER GEMs • 193 DOCS THRU 1927 •  NEWS-DOCS 481 RELEVANT NEWSPAPER ARTICLES FROM THE NICARAGUAN NEWSPAPERS DIARIO MODERNO (MANAGUA; 281 ARTICLES FROM JUNE to DECember 1927, IN 287 JPEG FILES) AND LA TRIBUNA (MANAGUA; 200 ARTICLES FROM JANuary & February 1929, IN 190 JPEG FILES). •  PC-DOCS 126 PATROL & COMBAT REPORTS, WITH BRIEF SUMMARIES & ANALYSES & ancillary docs, TO JUNE 1928 & Some after •  PHOTO-DOCS 560+ PHOTOS OF MARINES, GUARDIA, SANDINISTAS, LIBERALS, CONSERVATIVES, LAS SEGOVIAS & MORE IN COLLECTIONS ORGANIZED BY REPOSITORY & THEMe • including 171 state dept photos of the november 1928 electionS • 13 PHOTOS OF THE VOLUNTARIOS OF 1929 • photos donated by readeRS, including 103 hitherto unpublished & unknown photos (& ONE CARTOON) from the Wm. E. Plocharski Collection •  TOP 100 100 of the most illuminating reports on the sandinistas from the outside looking in, with critical introductions & accompanied by 711 ancillary documents  •  incl. 486 documents in 593 jpeg files on the international aspects of the "Sandino Situation" as tracked by u.s. intelligence agencies, 1928-1933 (doc 95)  •  7 reports in 58 jpeg files by u.s. military attachÉ major a. w. bloor on the nicaraguan civil war, march-may 1927 (doc 99)  •  93 DOCUMENTS IN 217 JPEG FILES ON NICARAGUANS' RESPONSES TO THE MISSION OF U.S. SPECIAL ENVOY HENRY STIMSON, APRIL-MAY 1927 (doc 100) •  usmc-docs 331 personal letters of p.f.c. emil thomas of ohio (in nicaragua 1928-1929) to his sweetheart beatrice  •  7 oral histories of retired marines who fought in nicaragua  •  the official list of marine Corps Casualties in Nicaragua, 1927-1933  •  papers of wilburt s. brown, robert H. dunlap, Merritt "Red Mike" edson, GRAVES B. ERSKINE, robert l. denig (including his "diary of a guardia officer") & other marines A BLOW-BY-BLOW ACCOUNT OF THE WEBSITE'S UPDATES & REVISIONS, COMMENCING NOV-DEC 2014

           The bulk of these primary documents were culled from the Records of the United States Marine Corps & Nicaraguan National Guard, housed mainly in the US National Archives (Record Group 127, or RG127), comprising about 150 linear feet of files.  Other major repositories housing materials that are housed here include the Marine Corps Research Center; the Library of Congress; the US State Department; la Hemeroteca Nacional Manolo Cuadra (Managua); el Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamerica (IHNCA-UCA, also in Managua); and others.  Most everything filtered out of these collections and presented here speaks in some way to how Central Americans, Nicaraguans, and Segovianos acted to shape their own history. 

      How is the Website Organized?    Densely.  And so it's easy to use.  For a full explanation, see the user's guide.  Briefly:  At the top of every page are links to ten document collections, ten thematic collections, eight other links, and a Google search engine.  At the heart of the site are 20 homepages serving as portals into 20 collections of documents, sorted by type & theme.  With so many documents & branches & sub-branches, the site is designed to be simple & easy to navigate, find & cross-reference information, and find your way back to where you started from & ended up.  Again, please see the USER'S GUIDE.

           Suggestions, corrections & comments invited.  This website launched March 2007 & revamped in March 2010.

Painting by Thelma Gómez F., Masaya, Nicaragua, 1989

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