The Peruvian educational reform law of 1972, promulgated by the military regime of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, was considered at the time one of the best to date in the history of Latin America. With the dismantling of many of the reform laws of the “First Phase” (1968-75) of the revolution during the “Second Phase” (1975-80), and the nearly total repudiation of the entire military period by the democratically elected government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980-85), there was no change more regretted than the undoing of the educational reform. One of the main reasons for the reform's setback was the intense opposition it aroused among private upper-class schools which resented the social aspects of the law. Half of these schools were church-run. But contrary to what has happened in other Latin American countries, the battle in Peru was not between an authoritarian laicist state and the Roman Catholic Church. The real forces that lined up against each other in Peru were, on the one hand, the government, the official church and progressive groups within the church, which in the wake of Vatican II and the bishop's conference of Medellín not only came out in support of the law but even participated directly in composing it, and on the other hand, the powerful cluster of upper-class religious and lay schools which represented the traditional and rightest groups in the church. The educational reform, therefore, was the occasion for a clash among Catholics themselves. At the same time it forced the church to make a fundamental choice: between continuing its uncritical support for upper-class religious education or openly siding with the many state-supported church schools for the middle and lower classes, especially in cases of conflict between the two systems.

A monarchy based on the slave plantation labor of Africans until the late nineteenth century, vast Brazil offered little appeal to European immigrants except in the far south of the country, where smaller plots of arable land became available as the coffee frontier expanded. Facing shortages in slave supply after mid-century, when the British forced the Brazilians to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade, provincial governments attempted to lure European immigrants by granting subsidies to pay for transport and for initial costs of settlements. In 1881, the Imperial government joined in the effort to recruit immigrants who, in addition to providing a replenished work force, could also be counted on to “whiten” the population. Germans predominated among immigrants until 1886, followed by Italians, Poles, and some Japanese until the 1930's, when rising xenophobia led Brazilian officials to curtail immigration and to install a restrictive quota system.

There is perhaps no area of historical literature where women—other than monarchs and Mata Haris—have been less visible than in the literature of international relations. Yet women of the western world were active at the international level by the last half of the nineteenth century, and in numbers commensurate to those of their male counterparts. The record of their organization, deliberations, tactics, correspondence, public statements and delegations to designated representatives of their governments adds a new dimension to the history of international relations.

No more Cubas!” For a quarter of a century, that slogan has propelled American intervention into Latin America. President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress was designed to head off more Castro-type revolutions in the region. In 1965, President Johnson crushed a revolution in the Dominican Republic, declaring that “another Cuba in this hemisphere would be unacceptable.” And the Nixon plan for subverting the Chilean government in the early 1970s was motivated, in Henry Kissinger's words, by fear of Allende's “patent intention to create another Cuba.”

Amanuscript account by a Scots merchant, Robert Allen, of his life in New Spain from 1698 until 1707 has recently come to light. In 1708 Allen sent the three-page memorial to the British secretary of state for the south, Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, outlining his experiences over the preceding decade with the view towards securing employment under the crown in the Americas. Allen began with the year 1698 when he left the Scottish colony at Darien to work for Jamaican merchants on trading voyages in the Spanish West Indies. In 1701 he returned to the coast of Darien in search of Nicaragua wood and, by chance, began six years of residence on the continent. Surviving one Indian massacre, he lived among friendly natives, joined the Jamaican expedition of 1702 which raided the Isthmus of Panama, escaped a second Indian and Spanish massacre, and was taken as a prisoner to Quito where in 1704 he secured appointment as secretary to the fiscal of the audiencia and surveyor general of the province of Quito. When this official was promoted to the Council of the Indies in 1707, Allen accompanied him on the journey to Spain. However, their ship was one of those attacked and sunk by Admiral Wager, who in turn persuaded Allen to return to England and approach the government.