No rhetorical flourishes: this work-in-progress is intended to provoke a long-overdue public dialogue on an ugly topic that refuses to stay disappeared. It treats a hidden battleground of Argentina's Dirty War (1976–1983), a ‘petite war,’ a war within the war, directed by a military-appointed doctor against the mentally deficient inmates concentrated at the national psychiatric hospital, the Colonia Nacional Dr. Manuel A. Montes de Oca in Torres, and its sister institution, the Colonia Psiquiátrica Domingo Cabred, in Lujan, both in Buenos Aires province. Buried in the historical, statistical, legal, and archival records, along with the key informant interviews, ethnographic observations, and photos is shattering evidence of medical human rights abuses committed under the necropolitics of the Dirty War against an abandoned population of mental “defectives” who were condemned to gratuitous suffering and early deaths at the psychiatric colony (see Figure 1). In the worst instances, the abuses were crimes against humanity.

On May 1, 1989, María, a high school teacher from Buenos Aires, wrote a letter to President Raúl Alfonsín as he began his final months in office. The country was in the midst of a hyperinflation crisis and elections were set for just two weeks away. Earlier in the day, María had heard the president's last address to the congress, and she felt compelled to write him. “My friend,” she began, as she recounted how she and her husband, an adjunct university instructor, had worked hard over two decades of marriage, weathering continuous financial difficulties and the sensation of “always having to start over.” María emphasized that she had no political affiliations that would cloud her judgment, lest the president think she was writing to ask for political favors.

Upon leaving office in 1716, the Duke of Linares, the viceroy of New Spain, warned his successor of a particularly vexing issue: the question of what to do about Mexico City's Baratillo marketplace. “There is in the Plaza of Mexico,” he wrote, “a traffic prohibited by law or decree that is so problematic that ending it has been a great challenge for me, being that what is stolen [in the city] is sold there, only disguised.” Hipólito Villarroel, writing his treatise about the decadence of Mexico City more than a half-century later, was no more sparing in his description of the market. He referred to it as the “cave or depository for the thieving committed by artisans, maids, and servants, and, in sum, all the plebeians—Indians, mulattos, and the other castas—that are permitted to inhabit this city.” The market was even the subject of a book-length satirical manuscript, written in 1754. Pedro Anselmo Chreslos Jache's unpublished “Ordenanzas del Baratillo” is a legal code for a world turned upside down, where the mixed-race castas reigned and Spaniards were ostracized, and where “four thousand vagabonds” congregated every day to be instructed by “doctors in the faculty of trickery.”

In his epic poem Paradise Regained (1671), John Milton has Satan observe that “The childhood shows the man/As morning shows the day/ Be famous then/ By wisdom. As the empire must extend/ So let extend thy mind o’er all the world.” As parents and as patriots, the leaders of Latin America's revolutions for independence wanted bright futures for both their children and their young nations. In many ways, the goals they set for each were the same: enhanced commercial opportunities, a political arena marked by greater freedom of speech and open debate, the rule of law, government with a strong moral center in which the privileged members of society had a responsibility to set a good example, and, perhaps most cherished of all, access to modern scientific and secular education. As figurative parents of emerging nations, and as biological parents of impressionable youth, these creole founding fathers wished to instill useful patriotic values in their national and personal families alike. Bridging the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, Latin American independence rhetoric blurred the distinction between nation-building and paternity, indicating that its leaders saw themselves as parents in more than one sense.

Alfred W. Crosby is the author of such influential works as The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1973). He lives in retirement on Nantucket Island with his wife Frances Karttunen, noted in her own right for important works in linguistics and history. In September, 2013, I had the opportunity to carry on a long conversation with Crosby about his work, American Studies, and the future for environmental history. Crosby suffers from Parkinson's disease. His mind is sharp and his insights are keen. The Columbian exchange is the phenomenon of the contact period in which European crops and animals were imported into the New World, while New World crops and animals were introduced into Europe.

The editorial office has received a number of textbooks and syntheses of scholarly literature that will be of interest to our readership, especially for teaching purposes. To introduce these works, we occasionally list in this section the publication information and tables of contents entries. The five volumes selected for this issue examine Brazil, economic history, dictatorship, Central America, and modern Latin American history.