On July 13, 1571, King Philip II of Spain, via a real cédula, authorized the Audiencia of Santo Domingo to enact plans to “conquer” a community of African cimarrones (maroons, runaway slaves) located about 36 miles from the city of Santo Domingo. The king offered to those who ventured forth compensation in the form of the cimarrones they captured as slaves. At face value, the substance of this order was not particularly unique. Since the 1520s, runaway African slaves had formed maroon communities in remote regions bordering Spanish conquests. By the 1570s, African maroons could be found in practically every part of Spanish America. The uniqueness of Philip's order comes from the choice of language, in particular the decision to label the expedition a conquest. In most cases, the monarch or his officials used words like ‘reduce’ (reducir/reducciones), ‘pacify’ (pacificar/pacificación), ‘castigate’ (castigar), or ‘dislodge’ (desechar) to describe the goal of such campaigns. By describing an anti-maroon campaign as a conquest, this cédula went against the dominant Spanish narrative of the sixteenth century, in which resistance, especially by Africans or native groups, signified a punctuated disturbance of an ostensibly stable and coherent postconquest colonial order. The wording of the cédula, and the maroon movements to which it responded, explicitly link anti-maroon campaigns to the process of Spanish conquest. This article suggests that Spanish-maroon contestation on Hispaniola should be construed as an integral piece of a prolonged and often incomplete Spanish conquest. More importantly, this reevaluation of the conflict reveals maroons to be conquerors in their own right.

Among the new publications tempting Spanish readers in 1785, alongside a comedy about jealous women, a how-to manual on forensic surgery, and a 600-page translation of the rulings of the Council of Trent, was a modest pamphlet about potatoes. Its author was an expatriate Irishman, Henry (or Enrique) Doyle. Doyle had for some decades resided in Spain, pursuing an undistinguished career in textile manufacturing. He had also drafted several essays on religious themes, with no impact whatsoever on the Spanish reading public. His writings on potatoes, however, were a phenomenal success. The 1785 pamphlet was followed in 1797 by a longer treatise issued with royal approbation at the behest of several important ministers, which was into its fourth edition by 1804. Newspapers and journals hailed Doyle as a patriotic and enlightened contributor to public happiness and seconded his ambition of extending potato cultivation across the length and breadth of Spain.

“Mercy,” preached Fray Casimiro Díaz, “is the legitimate daughter of compassion. And the indigent exclaims, the widows, orphans, and destitute women broadcast, even the religious communities acclaim, that mercy is the distinctive virtue of this Holy Board, for your pious gifts reach all of them.” The Augustinian friar was addressing the guardians and members of Manila's Hermandad de la Misericordia (Confraternity of Mercy) in a mass that commemorated the anniversary of its foundation in mid September of 1743. At first glance, the occasion would not deserve much attention, another sermon praising the alms-giving labor of a confraternity. Spanish America swelled with similar institutions devoted to administering alms and endowments to sponsor prayers and charity. Yet, the Manila Misericordia was different. Church corporations in the Americas invested donations in low-interest annuities in perpetuity attached to property. Charity donors in Manila had found a better way to maximize pious gifts: by creating legacies to be invested in maritime trade loans at high interests.

As the globally eventful year of 1968 drew to a close, Brazilian university students living in what was then a four-year-old dictatorship faced two new challenges that would profoundly alter student politics and resistance on campuses in the coming decade. The more infamous was Ato Institucional 5 (Institutional Act No. 5, or AI-5), which Brazil's military regime decreed on December 13, 1968 (a Friday). History and historiography have rightfully acknowledged AI-5 as ushering in the most repressive and authoritarian phase of Brazil's military dictatorship, with the regime closing the national congress and dramatically escalating state-sponsored violence and political silencing in ways that exponentially intensified earlier forms of repression and censorship.

The twenty-first century could well become known as the populist century. No longer confined to Latin America or to the margins of European politics, populism has spread to Africa, Asia, and, with Donald Trump's election, to the cradle of liberal democracy. Even though it is uncertain what impact Trump's populism will have on American democracy, it is worth learning from Latin America, where populists have been in power from the 1930s and 1940s to the present. Even as Latin American populists like Juan Perón and Hugo Chávez included the poor and the nonwhite in the political community, they moved toward authoritarianism by undermining democracy from within. Are the foundations of American democracy and the institutions of civil society strong enough to resist US president Donald Trump's right-wing populism?