Like metropolitan France, the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue experienced a media revolution during the first four years of the French Revolution. In 1789, there was only one newspaper on the island, the officially licensed Affiches américaines, with two editions, one in the colony's capital, Port-au-Prince, and the other in its commercial center, Cap Français. By the time of the destruction of Cap Français, the colony's major city in June 1793, more than a dozen different newspapers had been founded in the colony, making it the second site in the New World, after Britain's North American colonies, to experience the phenomenon of a revolutionary press. Not only were there more newspapers, but their content and language were radically different from those of the Affiches. Like the newspapers created in France in 1789, those in Saint-Domingue denounced the vestiges of royal power and called on the colony's white citizens to demand the right to govern themselves. By helping to break down traditional authority, the press played an essential if unintentional role in making the revolts against white rule by Saint-Domingue's free people of color and its slave population possible.

“The pueblo of San Estevan de Tlaxcala is inhabited by pure blood Tlaxcaltecan Indians who founded it during the conquest of this country. . . . These Indians speak Spanish and are civilized.” So observed don Nicolás de Lafora, a military engineer accompanying the Marqués de Rubí’s inspection tour of New Spain's northern presidios, as he approached San Esteban and the adjoining Spanish town of Saltillo, in present-day Coahuila, in June 1767. A decade later, fray Agustín de Morfi, chaplain to newly appointed commander general of the Provincias Internas don Teodoro de Croix, echoed Lafora's assessment, linking San Esteban's ability to preserve its privileges for the better part of two centuries to the community's pureza de sangre, preserved through the great care its residents took to avoid “mixing” with the castas (mixed races) that “infected” Saltillo.

“I carried a package for Osvaldo Pugliese,” Teresa de Gílenberg proudly recalled during our interview in 1997. One day in the late 1940s, this Communist militant of Polish origins asked Juan, a vendor in her barrio, if he would contribute potatoes and gather foods from other tradesmen in solidarity with Pugliese, a renowned tango composer, orchestra director, and Communist who was incarcerated in the infamous Villa Devoto jail. Juan brought her a large parcel containing his donations and those offered by his fellow vendors, and she personally handed it to the musician.

In November 1960, the New York Times reported on the looming revolution in Northeastern Brazil, describing how Marxist social movement leaders were organizing peasants. Reporter Tad Szulc claimed that “singers and violeiros—the traveling troubadors of the Northeast who act as human newspapers”—were spreading leader Francisco Julião's manifestos to the largely illiterate rural population and its “miserable, drought-plagued hamlets.” The human newspapers allegedly sung about agrarian reform as a form of liberation, comparing the process of revolution in Brazil with that of Cuba. Szulc wrote:

The greatest thrill that any researcher can experience is coming across, quite unforeseen, priceless documents long given up as lost. In the case of myself and two close colleagues, Wendy Kramer and Christopher H. Lutz, the documents that have come to light and that have so delighted us include Libros de Cabildo numbers two and three of the city of Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of Spanish Central America. Libro Segundo is a register of events that took place between 1530 and 1541; Libro Tercero is a log spanning the years 1541 to 1553. Our incredulity at learning the whereabouts of these two volumes was matched, if not surpassed, by the anticipation of verifying their existence and thereafter consulting them, something that has not occurred (as best we can determine) in over a century. Far more than the minutes of mundane municipal affairs, these two Libros de Cabildo contain valuable information about Spanish conquest and colonization, and indigenous resistance to it, that will enhance considerably our understanding of the early colonial period, not only in Guatemala but throughout Central America. Furthermore, the Libros de Cabildo have proven to be the proverbial tip of the iceberg, for the cache of which they form part contains other treasures perhaps not quite so unique but nonetheless of significant historical worth.

The editorial office receives a number of edited volumes and other texts that will be of interest to our readership. When these works tend to be less suitable for unified reviews than monographs, we list them here. To introduce these volumes, we include the publication information and tables of contents. The volume selected for this issue is a recently received anthology.