

Paul Gillingham
Historian of Mexico at Northwestern University whose work focuses on Mexican political, social, and regional history. Author of Mexico: A 500-Year History and a scholar of the Mexican Revolution and state formation.
Top 5 podcasts with Paul Gillingham
Ranked by the Snipd community

181 snips
Mar 25, 2026 • 1h 5min
Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together
Paul Gillingham, Northwestern historian of Mexico and author of Mexico: A 500-Year History, explores why Mexico stayed united after independence. He gets into Yucatán’s surprising safety, Oaxaca’s political magic, Guerrero’s long violence, Mexico’s unusual freedom from military coups, and why new judicial reforms could reshape the country.

35 snips
Jan 5, 2026 • 35min
Tragedy and triumph: a 500-year history of Mexico
Paul Gillingham, a Professor of Latin American history and author of *Mexico: A History*, takes listeners on a captivating journey through Mexico's complex 500-year tale. He discusses the chaotic Spanish conquest and the bittersweet effects of the U.S. defeat, while revealing the country's surprising status as one of the world's earliest democracies. Gillingham highlights Mexico's rich hybridity, the redistributive efforts of Pancho Villa, and challenges the negative narratives about its past, offering a nuanced view of national identity and legacy.

Mar 7, 2026 • 1h 16min
Paul Gillingham, "Mexico: A 500-Year History" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)
Paul Gillingham, Northwestern historian of modern Mexico, guides a sweeping 500-year tour. He traces early contact and conquest, colonial extraction, independence, the 1910 Revolution, Cárdenas’s reforms, PRI-era politics, and the 21st-century drug war. Short, vivid takes explore debt, urban modernity, land dispossession, and what U.S. historians can learn from Mexico.

Mar 7, 2026 • 1h 16min
Paul Gillingham, "Mexico: A 500-Year History" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)
Paul Gillingham, a Northwestern historian of Mexican politics and social change, offers a sweeping 500-year narrative. He traces first contact, conquest as indigenous civil war, and life under Spanish rule. He covers independence, Porfirian urban modernity, the Revolution and 1917 constitution, PRI rule and decline, and the contemporary rupture of the drugs war.

Mar 3, 2026 • 31min
Juana Inés de la Cruz: life of the week
Paul Gillingham, historian of Mexican history and Sor Juana specialist, guides us through the life of a 17th-century nun and prodigious writer. He covers her early education and bold choice to join a convent to pursue learning. He examines her courtly fame, provocative poetry and proto-feminist writings. He also traces the church backlash, her enforced silence and lasting legacy in Mexican letters.


