In 1814, Alexander von Humboldt, the great traveller and explorer of the Americas, drew attention to an unusual feature of the movement for independence in the Viceroyalty of New Granada: the establishment of printing presses and newspapers followed rather than preceded the outbreak of war. Humboldt was struck by the contrast New Granada's war of independence offered with the two more famous political revolutions of the age. A great proliferation of printed pamphlets and periodicals had preceded the outbreak of revolution in both the Thirteen Colonies and France. How curious, Humboldt commented, to find the process reversed in Spanish America. Humboldt is not alone in viewing the newspaper as the expected harbinger of change in the age of Atlantic revolution. While the precise role played by the printed word in the French and American revolutions remains a subject of debate, many historians acknowledge the importance of print in creating a climate conducive to revolutionary challenge. Were newspapers and the press really latecomers to the revolution in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, as Humboldt suggests? What does this tell us about late colonial New Granada? How, in the absence of a developed press, did information, revolutionary or otherwise, circulate within the viceroyalty? Moreover, what means were available to either the Spanish crown or the American insurgents to create and manipulate news and opinion? What, indeed, does it mean to speak of the spread of news in a society such as late colonial New Granada? This article seeks to address these questions.

Turn-of-the century Argentine political leaders were deeply influenced by new ideas about the origin and treatment of criminality developed by the Italian positivist school of criminology. According to this school, crime was not the fruit of the criminal's wickedness, as classic penology had claimed, but was rather the result of a complex web of social and psycho-biological determinations of which the criminal had been a victim. This pathology called “crime” could be corrected if its origin was scientifically determined and if the new methods of rehabilitation prescribed for criminals and potential criminals were enforced. Although not all of the premises of the criminological school led by Lombroso, Ferri, and Garofalo were accepted uncritically in Argentina, the basic principles of the new science were widely adopted by jurists, doctors, hygienists and psychiatrists. These ideas were received in the context of massive European immigration, accelerated urbanization, and the emergence of a large working class.

The events of Alberto Masferrer's life and the parallel evolution of his social thought reveal much about the broader forces which shaped El Salvador and Central America during his generation. His lifetime brackets the consolidation of the Salvadoran state and the formation of modern social groups. Alberto Masferrer was born in 1868, the age of the Liberal presidents' ascendence throughout Central America; he died in 1932 as Depression-era dictators assumed power throughout that same region. In fact, 1932 is a watershed year in Central American history. With Agustín Farabundo Martí's failed Communist uprising in El Salvador and the murder of Augusto Cesar Sandino in Nicaragua, the early 1930s brought a decisive end to the possibility for Masferrer's idealized type of elite-led reform and instead turned opponents toward ideologically-motivated popular revolt. Alberto Masferrer, like most intellectuals, struggled with ideas and power. He realized that the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century Presidents not only had failed to improve the material and moral condition of the majority of his countrymen, but actually had degraded them. Though Masferrer's admiring biographer Matilde Elena López observed that “[t]he reality of man exploited by an unjust society is the central idea of his life,” it remains no easy task to categorize the cranky journalist's thought for, indeed, he does not fit neatly into any single ideology. Masferrer the humanist gave primary importance to the betterment of social and economic conditions for those living on the material plane, while Masferrer as a Christian stressed the otherworldly values of humility, hard work, patience and charity. Masferrer the communist called for a return to the ejidal landholding system of the traditional Indian communities and a guaranteed standard of living for all Salvadorans, but Masferrer the corporatist recognized the existence of a natural state of hierarchy and felt that harmony would prevail if each remained true to his pre-ordained vocation. Masferrer the aesthetic arielista venerated language and culture, but Masferrer the criollista could not be restrained to the world of pure art and consistently returned to earth to criticize uneven social conditions. Masferrer the hispano-falangist idealized a strong and vigorous nation, yet Masferrer the pacifist abhorred violence and aggressiveness.

Shortly after the Spanish conquests in Mesoamerica (or, as the colonizers termed it, New Spain), friars chiefly of the Franciscan and Dominican orders taught the art of alphabetic writing to the indigenous elite. As a result the colonial period saw the production of an extensive body of documentation—overwhelmingly notarial and largely legal in nature—by Mesoamerica's indigenous peoples, written in their own languages but using the Roman alphabet. The language best represented in the surviving material (and thus in the ethnohistorical literature) is Nahuatl, often misleadingly called Aztec but in fact widely spoken throughout central Mexico. Yucatec Maya places a distant second in terms of known records, probably followed in order of magnitude by Mixtec. While this article will focus primarily upon these three tongues, it should also be noted that scholars have investigated a small but significant body of Cakchiquel and Quiché materials from highland Guatemala, and that there are also known to exist unstudied sources in Chocho, Cuicatec, Mixe, Otomí, Tarascan, Totonac, and Zapotec; other Mesoamerican languages may also have been written alphabetically in the colonial period.