Date of Award

2026

Abstract

This dissertation is a narrative microhistory of American diplomacy during Costa Rica’s transformative 1948 civil war. Emerging out of a contested presidential election, the war pitted the Costa Rican government of Teodoro Picado and its communist allies against an anticommunist, nationalist rebel movement led by José Figueres in a monthlong fight for political power. While existing histories of American policymaking have concluded almost unanimously that the United States intervened to support the rebels as part of its Cold War strategy in Latin America—labeling the civil war a precursor to the more infamous coup in Guatemala in 1954—this dissertation seeks to revise the synthesis. I argue, based on a detailed analysis of primary sources in the U.S. National Archives and the Harry S. Truman Library, that a sincere commitment to the Good Neighbor principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of a fellow hemispheric republic guided the State Department’s response. At the same time, I show how exactly Cold War considerations intruded on an essentially local and regional conflict. By zooming in on the immediate period of crisis from January to April 1948 and dividing the story into eight chronological chapters according to major turning points, this dissertation both expands the cast of characters and opens space for historical complexity. It asks crucial questions, including how the foreign policy bureaucracy functions and how much public pressure impacts policymaking. Broadly, it advances conversations in the fields of inter-American diplomatic history and Cold War studies that are highlighting the limitations of American power and the ways in which Latin Americans constructed their own ideological battles after the Second World War.

Document Type

Dissertation

First Advisor

Kurk Dorsey

Second Advisor

Jessica Lepler

Third Advisor

Julia Rodriguez

Department or Program

History

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Download

Share

COinS