The growth of the Spanish Empire and its governmental machinery in the sixteenth century created a demand for letrados, a uniquely Spanish form of civil servant. They were men who came mostly from the impoverished lower nobility and who were trained in law as preparation for serving in the burgeoning bureaucracy. Law, whether canon or civil, offered a young man in sixteenth century Spain entry into well-paying, secure and prestigious jobs in church and state. Doctores and licenciados (the holders of the highest professional degrees) from Salamanca, Valladolid, Alcalá de Henares and other universities could be found all over the New World where they held positions as magistrates, judges, bishops, canons, university professors and town councilmen. They constituted both an administrative elite and a class unto themselves. In the latter half of the sixteenth century the demand for letrados was increased by the growing insularity of the Spaniards themselves — away from the more cosmopolitan Flemish and European orientation of the days of Charles V and toward an hispanization of the civil service.

Criminal justice records provide the historian with a wealth of data on social deviance, and on the role of the judiciary in defining and controlling it. They can as well comment on the most invisible group for the social historian: the “innocent bystanders,” the respectable folk who distinguish themselves neither by their power and influence nor by their deviance. This essay illustrates the value of one kind of judicial data, local criminal investigations in Brazil, to provide information on the working citizens of a community. Changes in the characteristics of that population may be indicative of wider social stress in the Brazilian Independence period.

Late in the spring of 1783, a Franciscan friar, Antonio de los Reyes, arrived in the Province of Sonora and Sinaloa, the first prelate for the newly created bishopric of Northwest New Spain. The bishop was accompanied by his young nephews, Padre José Almada y Reyes and his brother Antonio. A third brother had decided to remain behind in Spain with his parents. The brothers were hidalgos, from the town of Aspe in the province of León.

New Spain was expanding northwestward and the Almada brothers were part of the large influx of peninsulares immigrating from the mother country in the latter third of the 18th century. Their uncle, the bishop, represented royal recognition and promotion of that movement. Like the Almadas, most of the immigrants coming to the Northwest were from the small towns and cities of northern Spain. They brought with them a tradition of urban life in the peninsula dating back into at least the eleventh century. For them, the town was the focal point of civilized society — the center of learning, of business, and of whatever level of culture society had achieved. Not surprisingly, they settled in the embryonic urban centers then emerging in the Province of Sonora and Sinaloa. Urban life was what they knew and what they wanted. They aimed to re-create in the Northwest what they had grown up in back home.

During its first half-century of independence, Peru fought in five international conflicts, had thirty-one different governments, and operated under thirteen various constitutions or provisional charters. The international wars, uncertain terms of office, and a frequency of change in constitutions were all symptoms of an unsettled political environment. Additional symptoms included forceful overthrows of government, political exile, conspiracies, and foreign intervention. By mid-century, Peruvian writers complained of political corruption, graft, lack of public spirit, disrespect for the law, militarism, elitism, mobocracy, a mania for public office (empleomanía), and in general of the social and political disintegration.

Once the two largest sugar colonies in the slave-owning Caribbean, Jamaica and Haiti trace their separate paths of development back to the revolutionary struggles of the 1790's. While the French colony of Saint Domingue was transformed in a way few societies have ever been, Jamaica remained seemingly untouched by the conflagration that consumed its neighbour. When the slaves and free coloureds of Saint Domingue rebelled in the autumn of 1791, Jamaican society faced the greatest challenge of its history. The dramatic spectacle of violent self-liberation was acted out almost before the eyes of its blacks and mulattoes, while the ruling white elite experienced a dilemma that seemed to oppose its prosperity to its survival. This paper looks at the reaction of different social groups in the island in an attempt to explain its continuing stability.

At seven o'clock on the morning of December 31,1958, President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes of Guatemala ordered his Air Force to bombard and sink vessels manned by Mexican nationals fishing clandestinely in his country's territorial waters. Simultaneously, his message was transmitted to Mexican and United States authorities in Guatemala. Ninety minutes later, after warning the fishermen through loudspeakers to proceed to the Guatemalan port of Champerico — announcements which brought only grimaces, lewd gestures, and attempted escape — the pilots strafed the flagless fishing boats, forcing one aground and two, the Elizabeth and the San Diego, to Champerico. Although the remainder of the fishing fleet was escorted by the Mexican Coast Guard to the Oaxacan port of Salina Cruz, seventeen casualties — three dead and fourteen wounded — resulted from the incident. While some of the injured Mexicans were hospitalized, ten of the survivors captured by Guatemalan authorities were incarcerated and subjected to military interrogation. Another of the progressively increasing number of inter-American fishing disputes was inexorably under way.