From the late eighteenth century through most of the nineteenth, Buenos Aires and Montevideo were hosts to a joint theatrical circuit characterized by the regular comings and goings of impresarios, artisans, musicians, and actors between the two cities. The military conflicts that shaped this period actually encouraged these connections, as they stimulated both exile and repatriation between one locale and the other. Africans, and particularly their Rioplatense descendants, were an integral part of popular entertainment circuits in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Some of the first Argentinean historians of theater and music, among them Vicente Gesualdo and Teodoro Klein, were aware of this connection and included in their initial scholarship links that connect the history of free and enslaved Afro-descendants to the early theater of Río de la Plata.

In the fall of 1874, in the midst a particularly severe round of Church-state conflict, Mexico's archbishop, Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos, introduced a novel weapon in the Catholic Church's struggle against liberal anticlericalism. He had sought and obtained a special dispensation from Pope Pius IX for all Mexicans to participate in a “spiritual pilgrimage,” a month-long exercise of mental travel, prayer, and contemplation that would figuratively transport the faithful out of Mexico's anticlerical milieu and into the purified air of Jerusalem, Rome, and other Old World holy sites, where they would pray for divine intercession on behalf of the embattled Church. The practice had been inaugurated a year earlier by lay Catholics in Bologna, as a response to the prohibition of mass pilgrimages in the flesh in the former Papal States. Labastida y Dávalos felt that spiritual pilgrimage could be especially effective in Mexico, where the anticlerical government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada had embarked on a radical program of secularization. In fact, the recently codified Laws of Reform had likewise prohibited acts of public religiosity in Mexico, attempting thus to suppress the myriad local processions and mass pilgrimages that helped to define Mexican Catholicism.

Treason during wartime inspires some of the worst features in the human character. Not only does the traitor besmirch his own reputation in the eyes of his countrymen, but those near him are frequently polluted by association. Worst of all, the desire for vengeance that is unleashed through treasonous acts frequently brings excesses that dwarf the original crime. It is for this reason that magistrates and systems of law in Western democracies have traditionally tried to leech the passion out of individual cases of treason as they attempt to render equitable and just decisions.

In 2006, Mexico City's Museo Franz Meyer held an exhibition titled Creating a Modern Mexico, celebrating the furniture designs of Clara Porset y Dumas. This exhibition and a growing literature on her work by design historians during the first decades of the twenty-first century have helped establish Porset as the highest-profile pioneer of industrial and interior design in twentieth-century Mexico.

Judith Ewell has been a major figure in modern Latin American history, both as a research scholar and as a teacher. Just before receiving her PhD at the University of New Mexico in 1972, Ewell began teaching at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, from which she retired in 2004. Ewell's books include The Indictment of a Dictator: The Extradition and Trial of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1981); Venezuela: A Century of Change (1984); and Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe's Hemisphere to Petroleum's Empire (1996, Spanish ed. 1998). Ewell has also published numerous articles and book chapters on modern Latin American history and women's history. She is co-editor of the much-loved biographical essay collection, The Human Tradition in Latin America (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) with William H. Beezley, with whom she served on the editorial board of Scholarly Resources Press (now Rowman & Littlefield). Most importantly, Ewell served as chief editor of this journal, The Americas, from 1998 to 2003.