During slavery in the Americas, whether plantation, mining or urban, captives, Creoles, freedpersons and Africans invented various forms of socialization, in part through family arrangements. The slave family is one of the most prominent themes in recent studies of Brazilian slavery. Until the 1970s, several authors claimed that such families did not exist; however, contemporary studies have revised many of the arguments about slaves' experiences and daily lives. Based on statistical sources (post-mortem inventories, lists of names, population censuses, and parish records) historians have demonstrated that, despite their living conditions, workdays, specific demographics, illness, mortality, etc., a considerable part of die slave population was able to establish families and compadrio relations by employing various strategies.

In February 1724 two municipal councils (câmaras) in Brazil wrote to the Portuguese crown. Although presiding over the faraway cities of Belém do Pará and São Luís do Maranhão, they claimed the right to advise the king in matters of state. “[T]he first obligation of aldermen (vereadores),” they explained, “is to act as defenders of the cities and peoples that they represent, or in other words, to be councilors to the sovereign prince, … instructing him in what is necessary for the increase and conservation of the people.” In their capacity as councilors, the aldermen proposed a forty-point plan that would turn colonial administration in Amazonia on end. Among other changes, they recommended that missionaries should no longer have temporal jurisdiction over indigenous villages, that the power of overseas governors and justice ministers should be diminished, and that their own children and grandchildren should be given preferential treatment to serve in local positions. Concluding with a flourish, they promised that their recommendations would generate a “superabundance of wealth” and be inexpensive to boot, not costing a penny more than the price of paper (to print a royal decree).

A significant segment of the Argentine intelligentsia experienced the Revolution of September 1955, which overthrew General Juan Domingo Perón, as a moment of liberation. With some exceptions, such as Arturo Jauretche and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz among others, the cultural politics of Peronism had not managed to gain many followers in the course of its ten-year experiment. During the two consecutive Perón governments (1946-1955) the often implicit, and occasionally explicit, opposition between intellectuals and Peronism only intensified. I contend that an analysis of this opposition is indispensable for understanding the redrawing of crucial definitions within the intellectual field at that time. Due to its profound social and cultural impact, the experience of Peronism compelled Argentine intellectuals, whether or not it was their original intention, to enter the political arena, not so much because their interests shifted from culture to politics, but rather because they came to conceive the cultural world as political.

Professor Josefina Zoraida Vázquez has made an indelible imprint on the discipline of the history of Mexico. Her publications have provided an analysis of the Mexican experience through such diverse themes as the U.S. invasion (1846-1848), the evolution of national education programs, and the struggles to establish federalism and republicanism in the first decades of independence. She has written official textbooks used by all Mexican school children, appeared on numerous television programs, taught dozens of doctoral students, and assisted many scholars in both Mexico and the United States. She has been an active member of the historical profession; she organized the Congress of Mexican Historians from Mexico, the United States, and Canada in Patzcuaro in 1977 and served as the President of the same organization in Monterrey in 2003.