No city of south america has been more frequently or more carefully depicted in views of all kinds than Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, a port on the northern coast of Brazil, which this year is celebrating the 300th anniversary of one of the great events in its history. The iconography of Recife begins with the Dutch, who are responsible for its growth as a town. Before their conquest of Pernambuco in 1630, Recife had been only a village of fishermen dependent upon the old Portuguese town of Olinda, located a short distance to the north. Olinda, however, lacked port facilities, for it was built on hills dominating an open beach. Recife, on the other hand, is located at the confluence of the rivers Beberibe and Capibaribe, where there is a deep harbor protected from the sea by reefs of sandstone, which gives the place its name. The situation was, therefore, ideal for the needs of the Dutch West Indies Company, which for commercial purposes had brought about the conquest of the rich sugar and dye-wood-producing Portuguese colony of Pernambuco.

On march 22, 1833, the regency of Brazil in the name of the emperor, by virtue of the privileges of ecclesiastical patronage which the crown enjoyed, appointed Dr. Antônio Maria de Moura to the See of Rio de Janeiro, vacant since the death of the eighth bishop, Dom José Caetano da Silva Coutinho, on January 27, 1833. In accordance with the usual practice, the regency petitioned Pope Gregory XVI on April 30 of the same year to confirm the appointment by sending the appropriate bulls of institution without which (since collation is effected solely by institution of the Roman Pontiff) the bishop-elect could not be consecrated and enthroned and, in the case of Brazil, could not exercise jurisdiction over the diocese or administer it. When Gregory refused to confirm Dr. Moura, for reasons which will later be made clear, the Imperial Government and the Holy See became involved in a dispute more bitter and prolonged than any of the many disputes between the two powers that characterize the history of the church-state relationship in Brazil from the proclamation of the independence of the country in 1822 to the abrogation of the union and the renunciation of patronage by the government in 1890.

Leaders of the american independence movements thought in concepts of natural law and natural rights. They assumed that a society not only should but could be based upon reason and liberty rather than authority or tradition. Even those who took the more dismal Hobbsian view believed that there was a large measure of rational consent to the laws which necessity forced upon men who were dominated by passion rather than by reason. In any case, Nature was believed to have a universal character, and differences in geographical background were thought to have relatively little importance in shaping society and civilization. Nor did they think in terms of the historical determinism, whether idealistic or materialistic, which dominated nineteenth-century thought. The New World was held to be the seat of liberty and equality, not because American soil necessarily produced freedom, but because in America man had freedom to reach his fullest development. The New World thus differed from the Old chiefly in the institutions and civilization which man had created here. Incidentally, this rationalist view had much in common with the older Utopian concept of America, from which, in no small measure, it was derived. Moreover, the very idea of Utopia was partly American in origin. Thomas More, for example, based his Utopia upon what he knew of Inca civilization. For a long time, therefore, Europeans had thought of America as a Utopia in which liberty, equality and opportunity for the immigrant were natural products of man’s freedom to live a life more in accord with Nature than Europe permitted.

IF ANY SINGLE MOTIVE could be selected as the driving force behind that remarkable series of maritime explorations which were conducted in America during the first decades of the sixteenth century, it might very well be the desire to find a passage through the “American Nuisance.” As soon as it became apparent to navigators and cosmographers that the lands discovered by Columbus on his first three voyages were not the outposts of the East, the crown of Spain and its subjects bent every effort to find a way through or around these new and inconvenient discoveries to the Spice Islands and the markets of India and China. At about the same time that Columbus discovered the mainland of South America, Vasco de Gama reached Calicut by way of the Cape of Good Hope. His glowing accounts of the wealth awaiting exploitation in India extended the hopes of both Spain and Portugal that an interoceanic passage might be found.

In the october, 1949, issue of THE AMERICAS the present writer published an article on the wood-beach at Recife in Brazil as it existed in late colonial days. To this the editor very kindly added the subtitle “A Contribution to the Economic History of Brazil.” Since the article appeared I have received a number of communications from historians in Brazil and in Portugal who commented with such interest upon the subject that I feel justified in soliciting more space in THE AMERICAS in order to present a discovery I have recently made. Since it concerns the authorship of the extraordinary watercolor around which the article was written, it is of vital importance to the subject.

The old wood-beach in the harbor of Recife, the capital of the rich colonial captaincy of Pernambuco, was the storage place for the valuable shipments of tropical woods to Portugal and other parts of the Portuguese Empire, which constituted a major element in Brazilian eighteenth-century trading. In the Arquivo Militar of Rio de Janeiro there is a view of the area showing in great detail the warehouse, the government and other buildings that surrounded it, as well as men working on the shore and loading ships that lie at anchor in the harbor. This watercolor, which was published in THE AMERICAS, is signed by José de Oliveira Barbosa and dated 1788. The author gave as his only identification the phrase “of the Regiment of Olinda.” Since an examination of the records of this regiment in the year 1788, which are now at the Arquivo Histórico Colonial in Lisbon, failed to show Barbosa’s name among the officers, I reached the conclusion that at that time the man did not have the rank of officer and so stated in my article.

REATION AND CRITICISM, in literature, are two complementary activities. Once I asked a poet what was the meaning of one of his poems, and his answer was this: “I don’t know. Such a task belongs to you, the critics, not to us, the poets.”

Modern aesthetics is dominated by the conception that art is nothing but a question of expression and does not have any reference to communication. This is a consequence of the sway that Hegel’s philosophy continues to exert over the modern world.

Amid the mixed emotions with which Cortés prepared A% to enter the Mexican capital in early November, 1519, was the gnawing fear that his military position therein would be an untenable one. Even the most courageous and least professional military man among the invaders must have realized that a Spanish force of fewer than five hundred men, far within the interior of a hostile and strange land, literally had entered a lion’s den as it marched into the populous island-city of Tenochtitlán via the narrow and ever so vulnerable causeway that stretched some seven miles between it and the mainland. So it was that even as his courage and curiosity took him into Tenochtitlán, his military mind and his sense of responsibility for the welfare of his men led Cortés to seek a means whereby the Spaniards could dominate the waters of Lake Texcoco and the lacustrine communities, including Tenochtitlán itself. Only after the Spaniards had become masters of the adjacent countryside—in this instance the waters and shores of a lake—could they know that inner satisfaction and quiet confidence that comes from a sincere sense of physical security. Only when the Spaniards had established their mastery over the lake area could it be said that the initiative so important to continuance of the conquest rested in their hands. With his infantry, his cavalry and his artillery momentarily stalled in the insular setting in which they found themselves, Cortés needed to create a new military force which, when thrown into the balance, would tip the scales once again in favor of the Spaniards.

Before the argentine revolution of 1810, land was the principal source of wealth and the sanction of social position in the otherwise resourceless Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. The revolution of May did not significantly alter the fundamental social, political and economic relationships between the masses of the people, the landowners and the soil. And although the administration of Rivadavia in the 1820’s and the dictatorship of Rosas in the next two decades were poles apart in their philosophies of society and government, each bore the same fruit in the further concentration of land in the hands of a relatively few men. After the fall of Rosas and the return of the exiled unitarios in 1852, the position of the landed gentry was not changed, despite the work of men like Urquiza, Mitre and Sarmiento, who applied themselves to the task of awaking Argentina from its long sleep of reaction. These victorious leaders were liberal and pragmatic, but there was no Argentine Homestead Act during their administrations. They accepted the land system as it was and tried to build upon it by spinning out the means of communication and transportation and technical development that would make it workable and by bringing in immigrants to make it fruitful. Aside from the establishment of a few colonies, the methods of land distribution and the laws of landownership remained essentially unchanged. Indeed, the governments that came after the Rosas regime, needful of revenue and concerned with the white elephant that was the government domain, embarked on much the same types of real estate deals as had the tyrant. In one case, in 1857, the government leased 3,000,000 hectares of land to 373 people; in 1867 Mitre’s government sold this land on easy terms to its renters.

THE SPANISH AMERICAN WARS for independence abounded in events of which novels are born. Among them is the heroic and herculean crossing of the southern Andes by the Argentine general, José de San Martín, and his army to crush Spanish rule in Chile. San Martín’s preparations in Mendoza on the eastern side of the Andes in present Argentina, in which almost insurmountable obstacles had to be overcome, merit in themselves much more attention than they have received from historians.

There have been numerous well-deserved tributes written recently about the late Professor Herbert Eugene Bolton. There can be no doubt that his work raised the standards and scope of western American historical scholarship to new heights. The development of a broadly viewed concept of the historical unity of the Americas was largely his own contribution. His long life (eighty-two years) and his persistent devotion to studies, both detailed and wide in scope, earned Bolton great prestige. At the University of California he nurtured a veritable “school” of California historians. A former student speaks of his remarkable achievements as those of “the most prolific of western historians both in his own writings and in the students whose work he guided….” Another of his one hundred doctoral fellows calls Bolton’s a career of “matchless enthusiasm and perseverance.”

It is fairly well known that in 1890 Guillermo Prieto was crowned the most popular poet in Mexico. Students of Mexican literature will add that he also wrote articles on manners and customs, criticism, original dramas, satire, travel books and folklore. Those who delve into political science have discovered that he served in the national congress for some forty-eight years, that as postmaster general he reorganized the Mexican postal system, and that he served four terms as minister of finance. Some have even seen the fat tomes in which he published his views on political economy, but practically nobody today knows that Prieto was also a writer of history. The purpose of this paper is to shed more light on Guillermo Prieto as a historian.

Though born into a distinguished family in the Mexican capital, in 1894, Francisco Monterde Garcia Icazbalceta did not find his road to success easy, smooth or direct. At fourteen he had to face the struggles of life alone, having lost his father when he was eight, and his mother only six years later. So precarious was his lot that for a time it seemed as if his education would have to be interrupted. With the encouragement of friends, however, he was able to complete his secondary education at the Escuela Nacional “Fray Francisco Aparicio” (1907), and a regular academic course at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (1909). With limited resources, and lacking parental support and guidance, young Monterde could not decide at once upon his life’s work. His aims and ambitions at that time were not quite clear even to himself, and his prospects and possibilities were also uncertain. His course was destined to be circuitous: he had to pursue his studies as best he could and as opportunities presented themselves. He took up the study of commerce and finance at the Escuela Nacional de Comercio “Doctor Mora,” graduating in 1912, and then embarked upon the study of dentistry, which he completed at the University of Mexico in 1916.

Charles Auguste marie Joseph Count de Forbin-Janson (1785–1844) had one of those rare natures whose essential spirit is that of the Christian apostle. That he was born to be a missionary is the only explanation of the single-minded, lifelong dedication of this greatly gifted nobleman whose apostolate included a dramatic and outstanding contribution to the mission record of the United States and Canada and who, although he did not die in America, was a martyr to his labor for its evangelization.

ON APRIL 11, 1859, during the Mexican War of the Reform, the liberal forces of Santos Degollado were defeated at Tacubaya by the conservative forces under the command of General Márquez. Among the prisoners taken by the conservatives were several young physicians who were ordered shot by the conservative command. One of the physicians was Juan Díaz Covarrubias. The specific source of the command is obscure, but its infamy is clear; it has lived as a shameful chapter in Mexican history, and it has granted Díaz Covarrubias the glory of the man who might have been.

During the early days of 1859, Port-au-Prince was busy with holiday celebrations, dramatic addresses and colorful events. Haitians possess a certain genius for properly observing a great day, and indeed it seemed that halcyon days had at last arrived in the Caribbean. Before the national legislature that April came a new president, a man for all the people. He was a person of medium height, rather slender and very erect and dignified. A mixture of Negro and mulatto elements, the new national hero had a very dark complexion, gray hairs befitting his fifty-three years, and courteous airs. In fact, his decorum was striking, set off as it was with a quiet gentleness, polish and evident idealism that seemed almost out of place in a Haitian warrior who had just dethroned an emperor.

The ownerless imperial crown, symbolic of the recently defunct regime, was brought before the restorer of the old Republic. Fittingly, the chief executive employed allegory to express his adventure into reform. After a long, flowery speech denouncing the exiled Emperor Faustin I, President Nicolas Fabre Geffrard swore fidelity to the popular government, announced some preliminary political changes, and took up a small gavel. With this he struck the crown three times, condemning the magnificent diadem and its regime as he inaugurated the Republic which must not waver. From that day on the crown of Soulouque became a museum piece, but what is symbolized could not be so easily defeated and discarded.

The poorest, the most abandoned, the most isolated of the Spanish possessions in North America was the province of Costa Rica. Despite valiant efforts made by the royal governors to build roads and to stimulate the production of items for export, the colonial history of the nation indicates a vegetating and unstimulated economy. The smallest settlements made by the Spaniards were scattered throughout the country, and the greatest concentration of population was in the fertile Meseta Central, which had no easy access to the sea. All of the early settlers were “miserably poor with no prospect of finding mines to bring them quick wealth, no export crop in demand in world markets, and no means of bringing such a crop to the coast had it existed.”

A NEW AND VIGOROUS INTEREST exists today in United States schools in the study of Portuguese and of Brazil. The accent has shifted both literally and figuratively. Until recent years Portuguese was studied largely by students of philology for the purpose of comparing it with other Romance languages. At present the language is approached by students as a key to the understanding of Brazil and its culture. Peninsular Portuguese has given way in the classroom to the carioca and paulista, or even the nordestino forms, in pronunciation and intonation, as well as vocabulary.

The interest in the Portuguese language in general and Brazil in particular has a long and honored history in the United States. The importance of the study of Portuguese has been emphasized by United States leaders since the early days.