On June 18, 1539, at Tlaxcala, New Spain, Indians recently converted to Christianity performed a pageant written and directed by the Franciscan missionaries. The play titled “The Conquest of Jerusalem” featured the final siege of the Holy City led by combined armies from Spain and New Spain aided by forces from France and Hungary. The drama unfolds with the army from New Spain, protected by angels and St. Hippolytus, showing the most valor. Huddled to one side of the battlefield are the Pope and his court offering prayers for a Christian victory. After several attacks, each of which ends in a miracle saving the Christian armies, the Moslems capitulate and convert to the true faith. In the final scene, the Pope causes all the new converts to be baptized after which the Sultan and his soldiers bow before Charles V and proclaim him to be “God's Captain” for all the earth. The pageant commemorated the Truce of Nice concluded on June 17, 1538, between Charles V and Francis I at the urging and coordination of Pope Paul III who wanted to free Charles V to attack the Turks and capture Jerusalem. Celebrating the Truce of Nice was a natural choice for the friars because it reflected commonly held theories of apocalypticism. The pageant exhibited salient themes of the apocalyptic conversion of non-believers and infidels, the recapture of Jerusalem, and the recognition of a “last world ruler.” Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía), who recorded the pageant, prefaced the drama by praying that this prophesied victory would soon happen and he assigned an unprecedented role to the peoples of the New World in the victory.

Harris Gaylord Warren was, by common consent, the father of Paraguayan studies in the United States. His broad-ranging activities —from diplomatic undertakings in South America to military service in Italy to administrative and scholarly work at various North American universities—marked him as an historian of rare depth and insight. Not commonly known is that Dr. Warren began his career as a historian in the 1930s as a borderlands specialist. The Sword was their Passport: A History of American Filibustering in the Mexican Revolution (Baton Rouge, 1943) is yet recognized as the definitive work on North American adventurers in that turbulent era. As an officer in the United States Army in World War II he was selected for various military history projects. After the war Dr. Warren returned to teaching and then administration. At that time his publications ranged from texts to Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, (New York, 1959).

On April 19, 1914—two days before the seizure of Vera Cruz by United States marines—North American radicals gathered at Carnegie Hall in New York City to protest the expected use of force against Mexico by the administration of Woodrow Wilson. One of the speakers, William (“Big Bill”) Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World, threatened a nationwide general strike should the United States go to war against Mexico, and the crowd approved a resolution condemning any act of armed intervention.

But the Mexican crisis was not the only issue that aroused the crowd at Carnegie hall. A second resolution was approved which denounced the imprisonment of a young immigrant called Frank Tannenbaum, who had recently been sentenced to a year in the penitentiary for participating in an illegal assembly. On March 4 — his twenty-first birthday — Tannenbaum had led an “army of the unemployed” into the Roman Catholic Church of St. Alphonsus on West Broadway and had demanded shelter. His arrest that night and subsequent trial had become a cause célèbre among liberals and radicals who believed that he had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

On Christmas Day, 1829, in a room in the National Palace in Mexico City, Joel Roberts Poinsett received official Mexican acknowledgement of his resignation as the United States minister to Mexico. Two days earlier, Poinsett had requested his passport, and this meeting was merely a diplomatic formality. Across the table from Poinsett were Lucas Alamán, Pedro Vélez, and Luis Quintanar, representing General Anastasio Bustamante, who on December 23 had forcefully ousted Vincente Guerrero from the Mexican presidency. Alamán, Vélez, and Quintanar were serving as an interim executive body until Bustamante's impending entry into the capital. The gathering was a cordial one, at which time Poinsett and Alamán in particular expressed admiration for one another. Such had not been the case in their previous dealings.

Heir to Greek and Roman culture, the revelations of Holy Scripture and the great commentaries upon it written by Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and lesser theologians and philosophers of the Middle Ages, the cultured European of the fifteenth century was content that the corpus of his knowledge was complete, and that within it was all that was necessary for a full understanding of the universe. Nevertheless, this satisfaction was greatly upset by the explorations of Christopher Columbus and his followers during the final decade of the century. The European discovery of extensive lands populated with theretofore unknown peoples, with a flora and fauna totally distinct from that of Europe, was, in all senses, a New World. In that this New World had not been incorporated into the extensive and well-defined knowledge of Western civilization, it was, therefore, open to any and all concepts conceivable to the imagination; everything was possible, even the very improbable.

For almost two decades prior to 1927 Nicaragua had been governed by Washington “more completely than the American Federal Government rules any state in the Union.” Such governance was justified by the State Department which raised the specter of the Monroe Doctrine not only to bolster America's economic ambitions in the region but also to protect the nation's national security — a fact which took on added importance due to the recent construction of the Panama Canal. From 1912 to 1925, a Legation Guard of United States Marines reminded the country of the overwhelming American dominance. For only a brief period did America's military presence abate. In 1926, however, a civil war broke out that threatened to destroy the political and economic stability the United States had come to rely on. American military assistance was requested and quickly rendered. What events led to U.S. military action in this Central American country?

The Evueví (commonly known as the “Payaguá”), a Guaycuruan tribe in southern South America, dominated the Paraguay and Paraná rivers for more than three centuries. Non-sedentary, similar in nature to the Chichimecas of northern Mexico and the Araucanians of southern Chile, the Evueví were riverine Indians whose life was seriously disrupted by the westward expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese in the Gran Chaco and Mato Grosso regions. This study will identify Evueví strategies for survival and analyze the nature of intercultural contact between the Indian and Spanish cultures. A study of the ethnohistory of the Evueví contributes to an understanding of the cultural adaptation of a non-sedentary indigenous tribe on the Spanish frontier whose salient features were prolonged Indian wars, Indian slavery, and missions. Such an analysis also provides an opportunity to analyze European attitudes and perceptions of a South American indigenous culture. Unlike other Amerindians, the unique characteristic of the Evueví was that Europeans perceived them as river pirates during the colonial era.

In the summer of 1835 Mexico chose to abandon the federal form of government instituted a decade earlier in 1824 and to replace it with a centralized republic. The dismantling of federal laws and institutions and the enactment of those designed to replace them occupied the next eighteen months until on December 30, 1836 the process of change to the new system culminated in the publication of a new constitution, the so-called Constitutión de las Siete Leyes. This fundamental change in the political structure of the nation was not achieved without considerable dissent and the protracted transitional period permitted many groups who opposed the new order of things to air their views and in some cases, notably in Zacatecas and Texas, to attempt military resistance. The supporters of centralism found themselves, therefore, obliged to make and justify their case for change and to convince themselves as well as their opponents that their proposals represented the popular will. It is with this centralist case for change, or manifesto, that this article is primarily concerned.

Much has been published about the Church in colonial Peru, but very little has appeared regarding the regular orders' internal financial workings or their members' economic activities. The little written about Peruvian nuns tends to describe them as comfortably housed, colorfully dressed and bejeweled, and surrounded by slaves and servants. There is nothing on Peruvian convents comparable to Asunción Lavrin's detailed research on Mexican nunneries. A bibliography about the finances of friars and their monasteries would be similarly weak, except for material on the Jesuits.

The great economic and political changes in the Río de la Plata of the late 1700s penetrated not only Buenos Aires and the interior of present-day Argentina, but upriver the hitherto neglected province of Paraguay shared the reforms of the Intendant system and economic liberalization. Those changes, along with the expulsion of the Jesuits, produced a shift in the economy of this region from the Paraná-Tebicuary area to the northern frontier of that province. The impelling economic motive for that shift was the north's greater ability to meet the demand for Paraguay's primary export, yerba mate. By the 1780s, northern Paraguay experienced a greater exploitation of yerbales, both to the benefit of independent entrepreneurs and government revenues.

The study of slave mortality and morbidity in Brazil has been very difficult because of the extreme paucity of sources. Techniques which have been useful in studying the lives of free men and women seldom are useful for analyzing their slaves. The use of parish records such as baptism and death registers is not possible because of the custom of listing only the slave's first name and the unimaginative choice of names which resulted in large numbers of Joãos, Josés, Manuels, Antônios, Antonias, Joanas, and, of course, Marias. Equally important, the types of plantation records available to students of U.S. slavery have seldom been found for Brazil.

This essay is an examination of an isolated slave register, which, for a series of idiosyncratic reasons, provides information permitting a glimpse at mortality and morbidity in a distinct and carefully controlled slave population. Because the slaves involved were used in diamond mining under horrendous conditions it is probable that the conclusions reached in this essay represent a worst case scenario. Rather than typical, this is a special case where work and living conditions were probably worse than in plantation zones and certainly worse than in urban areas. It is this situation which makes the conclusions of this essay quite startling.

More than two decades of scholarship on colonial Mexico has established both the role and character of merchant class communities, especially in Mexico City and Guadalajara. Beginning with David A. Brading's seminal Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810, several additional studies now constitute a significant body of literature on the subject. Collectively, Brading, John E. Kicza, Doris M. Ladd and others have demonstrated how Mexico City merchants consolidated their fortunes by acquiring haciendas (landed estates). Moreover, their studies describe how Mexico City entrepreneurs maintained commercial hegemony by purchasing large quantities of European merchandise and then reselling it at grossly inflated prices. These businessmen monopolized colonial trade through extensive familial ties and trading networks extending back to Spain. Although these and other revelations are important with respect to Mexico City merchants, they neither explain the position nor the significance of entrepreneurs in the principal Spanish colonial port

To the dismay of today's social progressives, the Argentine Catholic church addresses the moral situation of its people but also shies away from specific political positions or other hint of secular involvement. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the church set out to secure its place in national leadership by strengthening religious institutions and withdrawing clergy from politics. The church struggled to overcome a heritage of organizational weakness in order to promote evangelization, that is, to extend its spiritual influence within Argentina. The bishop of the central city of Córdoba, Franciscan Friar Zenón Bustos y Ferreyra (1905-1925), reinforced pastoral care, catechesis, and education. After 1912, as politics became more heated, Bustos insisted that priests abstain from partisan activities and dedicate themselves to ministry. The church casts itself in the role of national guardian, not of the government, but of the faith and morals of the people.

When you look at these picture postcards, you sense how they felt — these invading U.S. sailors and marines at war with Mexican soldiers and civilians defending their territory. These photos are not the work of professionals, although a number of salaried photojournalists in 1914 recorded the American landing at Veracruz for their respective publications. Instead, these are, by and large, simple snapshots, unplanned, some unfocused, taken at a moment's opportunity by the participants themselves. They picture the way in which common combatants hoped to remember the event, and how they wanted others to view it. All the more so, because these are not simply photographs, but also postcards, the images reinforced with handwritten messages and mailed elsewhere to share the experience of Veracruz and to indicate how they felt about it. Americans full of bombast and arrogance in their display of Old Glory, disdain the enemy. Mexicans, returning the fight (some of it in posed pictures), eager to display the destruction caused by the foreign intervention and to mourn their dead. Picture postcards such as these beg analysis, yield insights, raise questions; they are a new and fascinating piece to be fitted into the puzzle of history.

The creation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776 by Charles III of Spain and his Edict of Free Commerce two years later brought unprecedented commercial prosperity to the port cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Unlimited trade was now allowed between this region of South America and Spain. Exports—mainly silver from Alto Perú and pastoral products from the pampas—flowed in ever greater volume to the Iberian Peninsula. In return, merchants of the estuary received from Spanish commercial houses European manufactures and luxury items. This trade which spanned the South Atlantic depended upon a complex web of credit and merchant associations between the Old World and the New, and also upon the unobstructed traffic of Spain's merchant marine. In the 1780s and early 1790s with the Empire at peace Platine commerce contributed to both government revenues and the growth of a dynamic immigrant merchant community recently arrived from northern Spain. By 1794 the booming trade of the new viceroyalty justified the creation of the Real Consulado de Buenos Aires, essentially an official merchants guild to regulate the business affairs of this region.

The history of colonial Latin America can be told in terms of the relations between Spaniards, mixed blood frontiersmen, and Indians. In Mexico, Indians figured as significantly as did political and geographical factors in determining the nature and direction of Spanish-Mexican advance and settlement. The Spaniards were ever desirous to learn more about the Indians, especially if they had cultures and economies worth exploiting. But the Indians seldom submitted peacefully to these strange men who spoke of God and king and insisted on a new way of life. Indian chieftains only reluctantly gave up positions of tribal control and they remained prepared to foment sedition and rebellion against the Spanish and Mexican colonizers. This rebellion occurred often on the fringes of Spanish America.

The Dominican Republic, which has once again exhibited the fragility of its political institutions by taking over two weeks to ascertain a winner in its last presidential election, is, in many ways, a land of shared commonalities with other peoples. Its merengue rhythms point to a common musical bond with West Africa; its language and cultural institutions suggest a heavy Spanish stamp and its affiliations with other regional entities such as Puerto Rico and Venezuela are well known. Unfortunately for the Dominicans, however, they share their own island with another society — a decidely unique situation, especially since this schism represents an antipathic clash between different languages, histories and racial philosophies.

History generally records Lord Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in October 1781 as the last battle of the American Revolution. Nevertheless, six months after that epic campaign, warships of the South Carolina Navy commanded by Commodore Alexander Gillon, transported Spanish General Juan Manuel de Cagigal's infantrymen from Havana to Nassau in the Bahamas, where the British capitulated on May 8, 1782. Thus, the Treaty of Versailles signed the following year made this little-known Spanish and American expedition the last battle of the American Revolution.

The Bahamas, or Lucayos, an archipelago off the southeastern coast of the United States, take on increasing historical interest with the approach of the 500th Anniversary of Columbus's first landing in the New World 200 miles southeast of Nassau at Guanahani. The Bahamas, however, played only a minor role in the Spanish colonization of the Americas whereas, Great Britain gave priority to these strategic islands, making an initial settlement on the island of Eleuthera. The British later found a better harbor to the west and named the island New Providence which became their Bahama stronghold. King Charles II granted the Duke of Albemarle the Bahamas in 1670 and appointed John Wentworth as governor. Harrassed by plundering pirates, the British governor constructed a fort on New Providence in 1695 and named it Nassau in honor of King William III. The island's preoccupation changed in 1703 from marauding corsairs to a Spanish and French invasion during the War of the Spanish Succession. Great Britain regained control and maintained it until the outbreak of the American Revolution when John Paul Jones participated in the brief American seizure of Nassau in March 1776 in one of the first offensive operations in the history of the United States Navy.

On the 18th October 1654 the squadron usually referred to as the Armada del Mar del Sur left Callao bound for Panama, carrying Crown and private bullion. It comprised, as capitana, the Jesús María de la Limpia Concepción of about 1150 tons and built at Guayaquil between 1641 and 1644, as almiranta, an ex-merchantman of 400 tons the San Francisco Solano, and a chinchorro whose task was to sail a little ahead seeking news of possible interlopers en route, assessing sailing conditions and watching out for land. As was usual practice, another chinchorro had previously been dispatched to warn the President of Panama of the impending departure of the squadron in order that he could ensure that the galeones would be waiting at Portobelo to take aboard the silver and other goods. The role and actions of these two chinchorros was to become a subject of considerable debate during the next few months.

Although the study of the liberal republic (1870-1936) could shed considerable light on the overall pattern of political development, this period has remained one of the most under-studied and undervalued of the already under-researched history of Paraguay. In an attempt to fill that lacuna—albeit partially—this article reexamines the available data, discusses new evidence, and reinterprets the period with different theoretical categories. In this manner, it seeks to answer the question of why, in spite of a relatively favorable ideological environment, liberal democracy failed to consolidate and how this failure eventually opened the doors to the authoritarian regime of General Alfredo Stroessner.