Late in 1982, elections were held in Brazil for governors, congressional representatives in both houses, state legislators, mayors, and city council members. According to many observers, they were the first truly free elections in twenty years, the first unhampered by the ominous presence of an institutional act that had overridden the Brazilian constitution.

The Fundación John Boulton was established in 1950 as a privately funded institution sponsored by the Casas Boulton of Caracas, Valencia, and Maracaibo. For many years, the Fundación functioned in the Villa Espalmador in El Paraíso, but it has recently moved to new quarters in Torre El Chorro, Avenida Universidad, in the center of Caracas. Founded to facilitate research on the history and culture of Venezuela, the Fundación has assembled a strong collection covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, the collection is constantly being augmented by purchases, exchanges, and donations of additional material. The material available in the Fundación is found in the library, in the various archives, and in two museums.

The majority of the working classes are divided into various factions that display a host of views and attitudes. As E. P. Thompson has portrayed the concept of class, it is at best not a permanent structure or category but something that emerges from time to time when workers band together for one reason or another. The complexity of this phenomenon has been compounded by the growth of various sectors of the working class, adding to its heterogeneity and amorphousness. Marx himself perceived that capitalism had “converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage labourers.”

The outpouring of colonial Mexican social history that marked the 1970s had its origins in the previous decade. As Marcello Carmagnani's article points out, historians had come to appreciate the limits of institutional approaches to this field of inquiry. Contributions in demographic history, economic history, and ethnohistory strongly indicated that the dynamics of colonial life were other than had been identified to date and that even periodization and the eras of transition in the colonial period—let alone the reasons behind the transitions—might be different if measured by other standards.

Although the 1970s witnessed a convergence of neoliberal economic policies and authoritarianism in the Southern Cone countries of Latin America, the 1980s gave way to a new combination of economic orthodoxy and democracy in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Neoliberal economic projects emerged in these central Andean countries as they confronted broadly similar economic problems. Plummeting prices in the international market for key exports, decreased investment, and growing financial burdens imposed by the international debt created the parameters of la crisis—the topic that became a central focus of political discourse in these new democracies. At different points in time, each of the three countries responded to the crisis with neoliberal economic experiments. In Peru a turn toward neoliberalism occurred under the administration of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980-1985), only to be completely reversed by the heterodox policies of Alan García (1985–). In Ecuador basic stabilization measures had already been undertaken by the government of Osvaldo Hurtado (1981-1984). León Febres Cordero (1984-1988) then committed the country to a monetarist and antistatist model. In Bolivia following the enormous instability and hyperinflation during the government of Hernán Siles Zuazo (1982-1985), the country adopted a neoliberal approach under the presidency of Víctor Paz Estenssoro (1985-1988).