From 1978 to 1980 the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), using funds granted to the committee by the Tinker Foundation, sponsored a Working Group on Latin American Urbanization and Urban Research. During that period the group held two three-day seminars, the first in London in February 1978, and the second in Carmel, California, 31 March-2 April 1980. Both meetings, as well as the interim activities of the group, were planned and coordinated by Jorge Hardoy (Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales, Buenos Aires) and Alejandro Portes (The Johns Hopkins University), in conjunction with SSRC staff. The intention was to unite established scholars from a variety of countries in a context that would encourage collaborative research projects, sharing both substantive focus and conceptual perspectives. The original group included Henry Coing, Wayne Cornelius, Jorge Hardoy, Larissa Lomnitz, Alejandro Portes, Bryan Roberts, Paul Singer, John Walton, and Oscar Yujnovsky.

The Centro Paraguayo de Estudios Sociológicos (CPES), founded 17 March 1964 in Asunción, is a private institution dedicated to research and teaching. Initiative for the creation of the center came from a group of university professors who felt it was necessary to incorporate new theories and methods into Paraguayan scientific work. On 11 February 1971, Executive Decree No. 24.354 gave the center legal existence, with administration by a committee of directors and an assembly of founding members, and executive responsibility resting with a general director.

The 1970s were particularly fruitful for the field of Puerto Rican historiography. A number of works were published, not only on the Island but abroad, which showed the trend of current and future research. New topics were being dealt with from a variety of updated viewpoints and methodologies, and previously studied problems were revised in the light of newly available sources, as was the case, for example, with slavery. Various factors have contributed notably to this situation: the assiduous exchange of ideas among Puerto Rican, Latin American, North American, and European researchers, a process which, although slow, has served to involve Puerto Rico in recent historiographical trends; the involvement of the Island in international affairs; the opening of new collections of valuable historical materials; the institutionalization at the university level of graduate study in the field of history; and, in general, a greater emphasis on Puerto Rican cultural identity.

O Congresso Nacional, em Brasília, dispõe de um dos maiores acervos documentais para o estudo da história brasileira. Entretanto, poucos têm uma idéia precisa do volume e da natureza daquela documentação, bem como de sua possível contribuição para o conhecimento histórico. É meu intento, pois, descrevê-la aos interessados por esse campo de estudo e fornecer indicações, a título de exemplo, sobre uma das modalidades de exploração, modalidade essa que corresponde a meu projeto pessoal de pesquisa: o papel do Parlamento diante das relações exteriores.

The Instituto de Estudios Peruanos is an independent, nonprofit organization devoted to social science research. It was founded in 1964 by a group of Peruvian scholars interested in the interdisciplinary study of Peru and its developmental problems. The Institute was officially recognized by the government, through the Ministry of Education, in Ministerial Resolution 2041 of May 1964. The staff consists of five senior researchers and nine associate researchers who share similar institutional goals and a common ideological perspective aimed at reformulating traditional ideas and interpretations of Peruvian reality in order to depict and analyze more accurately the country's economic, political, social, and cultural processes.

Some men become symbols of an intellectual epoch, partly because they helped to create it and partly because they integrated and expressed so powerfully the themes that others of their time were emphasizing. Gino Germani was the outstanding symbol of the emergence of empirical sociology in Latin America in the two decades following World War II.

The lively exchange in the Latin American Research Review between D. C. M. Platt and Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein over dependency and autonomy in nineteenth-century Latin America raises a number of significant questions in the field of historical interpretation. It illustrates once more how difficult it is to support sweeping generalizations about so large and complex a region as Latin America, especially in a time period so filled with changes (in at least parts of the region) as the nineteenth century. The controversy over sources of action and their motivation, which characterizes dependency analysis, is unresolved. The argument is flavored with attributions of moral blame for events that may turn out, in a broader historical view, to have been highly fortuitous. The present comment is an attempt to insert and assess the force and direction of a vector usually passed by in the controversy. The case will be confined to Argentina, the country most often cited by Platt, and certainly the Latin American country most affected in its emerging pattern of economic development by marked shifts from Spanish to criollo to British influence over the century.