What is our obligation, as biographers or historians, to the people we write about? I ask this question in the context of my own writing of a biography, a project in which I have been engaged for nearly 20 years, that is now, I thank God, drawing to a close. The subject of the book is Lucas Alamán, the nineteenth-century Mexican conservative statesman, historian, and entrepreneur. Born in 1792, he died in 1853, a few months into the last government of perennial president Antonio López de Santa Anna, of whose regime he had been the chief architect and whom he served in its early weeks as chief minister.

In contemporary studies, three texts dating from the second half of the sixteenth century continue to be treated as essential primary literature concerning pre-Hispanic and early colonial medicine. These are the herbal Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (1552), composed by the Nahuas Martín de la Cruz and Juan Badiano in the Imperial College of Santa Cruz of Tlatelolco; the Historia natural de Nueva España, written by Philip II's protomédico (royal physician) Francisco Hernández, a “scientific envoy” in New Spain in the 1570s; and the Florentine Codex, the only extant manuscript of the 12-book encyclopedia on the world of the Nahuas, Historia universal de las cosas de Nueva España (ca. 1577), which was directed by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún.

Around the year 1550, an indigenous tlacuilo (painter-scribe-historian) in Tepechpan, a small altepetl north of Mexico City, narrated the tumultuous events through which he had lived. In Figure 1, we see an excerpt of this tlacuilo's contribution to the town's annals, the Tira de Tepechpan, which depicts a sequence of events from 1545 to 1549. On the left, beneath the glyph for the year 1545, the tlacuilo paints a dangling corpse, its arms crossed and eyes shut, with blood spurting from the nose and mouth. Here the tlacuilo is telling us of the 1545 hueycocolixtli, the “great sickness” that killed at least a third of the population, according to conservative estimates. Among the victims was Tepechpan's ruler, the crowned figure wrapped in funeral cloth above the year glyph.

On March 8, 1679, Polonia de Ribas entered her last will and testament into record at the offices of Alonso de Neira Claver, the royal notary public of Xalapa. The will included information about Polonia's family, possessions, debts to be collected, and how she wanted her estate distributed after her passing. She was well acquainted with the appropriate processes and venues to ensure that such matters were officially acknowledged. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Polonia demonstrated her legal acumen by documenting half a dozen transactions with the notary public in Xalapa.

After enduring heart surgery in 2015 and a stroke in 2016, Fernando Picó, Puerto Rico's leading historian and a figure renowned all over the Caribbean, passed away on June 27, 2017, at the age of 75. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Picó attended high school at the Colegio San Ignacio, where he received “the call” and decided to become a priest. In 1959, he joined the seminary of Saint Andrew-on-Hudson, Hyde Park, New York, and later went on to Loyola Seminary in Shrub Oak, New York, where he studied philosophy and theology. In addition, he earned a BA in History at Fordham University in 1965 and then an MA in 1966. In 1970, he received a PhD in Medieval History from Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation devolved around on what he jokingly called “the contentious bishops” of Laon, France, during the thirteenth century. He was ordained as a priest a year later.