Historians have long debated the relationship between the Spanish Crown and its colonial subjects. The issue has taken on an additional dimension as our knowledge of the lives of women expands. Recently published works describe the statutes promulgated by royal authorities to regulate the institution of marriage. But what was the actual result of these laws once they crossed the Atlantic Ocean? Were they followed to the letter, partially enforced, or ignored? Did they apply to some groups and not to others? In order to answer these and other questions it seemed appropriate to focus upon the laws governing marriage and the effect of their implementation on a specific group of women—the wives of regular army officers who served in Venezuela during the last half of the eighteenth century.

These brief remarks on the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, Licenciate Alonso de Zorita, and the Franciscan Order in sixteenth-century Mexico should not be interpreted as characteristic of either the century or the colonial period as a whole. Church and state generally complemented each other, but the origins “of the longenduring conflict between clerical and anticlerical forces” in Mexico and the Borderlands “reach into earliest colonial times.” An example is the jurisdictional dispute between Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna and Viceroy Diego Carrillo de Mendoza y Pimental in the 1620s. Another is the long and bitter conflict between Franciscan missionaries and Spanish governors in seventeenth-century New Mexico. Nevertheless, cooperation between representatives of Church and State in New Spain is apparent even before the arrival of the saintly “Twelve Apostles” headed by Fray Martín de Valencia in 1524.

Any historian who sets out to write a book faces two dangers. The one might be called the “one more document syndrome,” the obsession with research that is so exhaustive that nothing further can be found. The other is the prospect of publishing a work, only to have further documentation come to light that was lacking in his original research or alters his conclusions. Perhaps the latter is the lesser danger because it at least permits part of the historical record to reach the public. It may be that I am prejudiced in that regard, having suffered this very experience. In a recent biography of Pedro Moya de Contreras, the first inquisitor of New Spain, third archbishop of Mexico, and interim viceroy, I wrote of his last years in Spain “one can only hope that future research and perhaps fortuitous discoveries will complete that part of his life's story.” The fortuitous discoveries were made within a few months after publication, happily by the author himself. They consist for the most part of a collection of documents in the library of the Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan in Madrid, especially the papers of Mateo Vázquez de Leca (1543-1591), Philip II's private secretary and an indefatigable hoarder of valuable documents.

As the novels of Machado de Assis make clear, for most Brazilians the War of Triple Alliance against Paraguay in the 1860s was a remote affair which scarcely impinged on their lives. In this respect the impact of the Paraguayan war on Brazil may be compared with that of the Napoleonic wars on the world of Jane Austen. In Argentina it was a different story. The war with Paraguay produced a sense of national trauma and crisis that makes it not hyperbolic to regard it as Argentina's Vietnam. This article seeks to trace the effect of the bloody conflict with Francisco Solano López on Argentine society. To simplify the analysis, the consequences of the war have been considered below under four headings which do not purport to be exhaustive or mutually exclusive: military, political (i.e., relating to the internal politics of Argentina), economic and international (concerned with Argentina's external relations).

Although virtually unstudied, the introduction of the philosophy of positivism into Chile acted as a catalyst upon the development of that country during the decade before the War of the Pacific. Scholars have given appropriate attention to the influence of positivism as it became significant in other Latin American countries during the eighteen-seventies, and Leopold Zea has discussed the importance of that philosophic system in Chile during the years which followed the west coast conflict of 1879-1883. However, despite the ever increasing number of articles and monographs dealing with positivism, the historians of Latin America have ignored the philosophy's growth in the Republic of Chile before the war and the effect of that growth upon the ideologies already extant in the Pacific coast nation.

A distinguished British historian, commenting on the trial and execution of “ Edmund Arrowsmith, a Papist burned by pious Englishmen at Lancaster in 1628,” claims that “ clearly … there is no rational comparison between a victim of the bloody Spanish Tribunal and one who suffered at the hands of cool headed English justice.” Considering that Magistrate Henry Yelverton judged Arrowsmith guilty of high treason for being a priest, refused to allow the accused to testify in his own defense, and then gleefully witnessed the execution, it is possible that “ cool headed English justice ” might not compare so favorably with the proceedings of the Inquisition. This is particularly true when the Inquisition in eighteenth-century New Spain is studied, for although the Holy Office was then in decline and under the control of regalist prelates, its operations exhibited marked deliberation in the pursuit of justice as defined by the courts of that period.

Yanque, a village in the Colca Valley of southern Peru, was the capital of the Spanish province of Collaguas during the colonial period (1532-1821). It was also the seat of a Franciscan convent responsible for baptizing the native population, instructing them in Catholic doctrine and Spanish social customs, and discouraging indigenous worship of ancestors, mountains, and forces of nature. Supervised by Franciscan friars and “master builders” hired in the nearby town of Arequipa, native workers constructed a church in the sixteenth century and rebuilt it on a grander scale after the walls and roof collapsed during the 1668 earthquake.

A Water passage to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans became a passionate desire of Spain “from the year 1513 in which Núñez de Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean.” When the search for a natural water route failed, Spain decided to build a canal. In 1528 Spain proposed to cut four canals through Middle America: from the Lake of Nicaragua to the South Sea, from the River Chagres to Panama, across the Isthmus of Tecoantepec (sic), and from Nombre de Dios to Panama. In 1800 she added two more possible canal sites to her list, from Rio Grande near Panama to Rio Chagres and from Rio Caymito to the Embarcadero of Rio Trinidad. But none of Spain’s plans came to fruition, and independence came to Spanish America without the construction of an interoceanic canal.

The dramatic changes in the Latin American church since the Second Vatican Council have taken many observers by surprise. In search of an explanation for these changes, much recent scholarship has devoted itself to analyzing the changing political climate, the influx of foreign religious personnel, the creation of radical priests' groups, the impact of Vatican II itself and the episcopal assemblies of Medellín and Puebla and, of course, the varying currents of liberation theology. In contrast, the tendency has been to overlook pre-Vatican II history. The pre-conciliar Peruvian church in particular has been characterized as tradition-bound, obscurantist or subservient to the upper classes. One author writing in the early seventies stated:

After The Fall of Tenochtitlán in 1521, the focus of Spanish attention was quickly shifted to the peripheral areas of New Spain. One of such areas, variously known in colonial times as Panuco, the Huasteca, or Vitoria Garayana, was conquered by Cortés in late 1522 or early 1523. In the spring of 1523 the Conqueror founded the villa of Santisteban del Puerto on the Panuco River; granted encomiendas to some one hundred Spaniards; and returned to Mexico City. Despite an early challenge by Francisco de Garay, the governor of Jamaica, Pánuco was administered by Cortés or the royal treasury officials of New Spain until May, 1527. At this time the crown appointee, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, arrived in the province with the title of Governor of Panuco which he held until the last months of 1533. In the pages that follow, an attempt will be made to present evidence relating to a decade of slaving in Panuco. This will involve the activities of both Cortés and Guzmán, as well as some traditional accounts relating to the topic. The author wishes to state at the outset that he is neither defending nor prosecuting the moral issue of Indian slavery.

Trans-Pacific relations of Japan and Latin America began toward the end of the sixteenth century, but it was not until almost three centuries later that continuous contact was established. A seclusion law, adopted in 1638 by the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan, was enforced until the late nineteenth century. During this period Japanese citizens going abroad were subject to the death penalty upon returning, and foreigners, except for a limited number of Chinese and Dutch traders, were excluded from Japan. The expedition of Commodore Matthew C. Perry was instrumental in reestablishing Japan's relations with the West. Following the restoration of the Meiji Emperor, Mitsuhito, in 1868, Japanese were encouraged to seek knowledge throughout the world; however, the emigration of Japanese subjects, in general, was not legalized until 1885.

The most important public ritual to arise from the experience of Mexico's Revolution of 1910 came to be held on November 20—“Revolution Day.” The date commemorates Francisco I. Madero's famous call to arms: on November 20 all towns in Mexico were to rise up against the 34-year rule of Porfirio Díaz. Although Madero was forced to take action before the appointed date and the Revolution got off to a premature start, November 20 has generally been accepted as the inception of the violent phase of the revolutionary struggle.

In 1519 Spanish conquistadors arrived on the shores of Mesoamerica under the leadership of Hernando Cortés. Following the defeat of Mexico-Tenochtidan, the Aztec capital, Cortés requested that members of the Franciscan order be sent from Spain to lead the conversion effort. In 1523 the first three Franciscans arrived, among them fray Pedro de Gante. One year later another 12 Franciscans made the journey. They established themselves in the southeastern portion of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and under their direction Nahua laborers built the principal Franciscan religious compound, San Francisco, and the first indigenous chapel in New Spain, San Josef de los Naturales. Together this friary and chapel served as the main point of interaction for Franciscan conversion efforts within the altepetl, ethnic state, of Mexico-Tenochtidan. In the courtyard of San Francisco, next to the indigenous chapel, fray Pedro established an indigenous school aimed at the indoctrination of the Nahua peoples of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and other outlying altepetl. Although its students were primarily members of indigenous nobility, other promising Nahuas received an education there as well.

This article analyzes the impact that religion had on the act of lynching and its legitimation in postrevolutionary Mexico. Basing its argument on the examination of several cases of lynching that took place after the religiously motivated Cristero War had ended, the article argues that the profanation of religious objects and precincts revered by Catholics, the propagation of conservative and reactionary ideologies among Catholic believers, and parish priests’ implicit or explicit endorsement of belligerent forms of Catholic activism all contributed to the perpetuation of lynching from the 1930s through the 1950s. Taking together, these three factors point at the relationship between violence and the material, symbolic, and political dimensions of Catholics’ religious experience in postrevolutionary Mexico. The fact that lynching continued well into the 1940s and 1950s, when Mexican authorities and the Catholic hierarchy reached a closer, even collaborative relationship, shows the modus vivendi between state and Church did not bring an end to religious violence in Mexico. This continuity in lynching also illuminates the centrality that popular – as opposed to official or institutional - strands of Catholicism had in construing the use of violence as a legitimate means to defend religious beliefs and symbols, and protect the social and political orders associated with Catholic religion at the local level. Victims of religiously motivated lynchings included blasphemous and anticlerical individuals, people that endorsed socialist and communist ideas, as well as people that professed Protestant beliefs and practices.

On May 1, 1989, María, a high school teacher from Buenos Aires, wrote a letter to President Raúl Alfonsín as he began his final months in office. The country was in the midst of a hyperinflation crisis and elections were set for just two weeks away. Earlier in the day, María had heard the president's last address to the congress, and she felt compelled to write him. “My friend,” she began, as she recounted how she and her husband, an adjunct university instructor, had worked hard over two decades of marriage, weathering continuous financial difficulties and the sensation of “always having to start over.” María emphasized that she had no political affiliations that would cloud her judgment, lest the president think she was writing to ask for political favors.

On February 1, 1584, Pedro Moya de Contreras, archbishop of Mexico City, dispatched the official summons to the bishops of his ecclesiastical province to attend the Third Mexican Council set for the ninth of December of that same year. At the request of the bishop of the distant diocese of Guatemala, Fray Fernando Gómez de Córdoba, of the Order of St. Jerome, the opening date was postponed to January 20, 1585.

One of the Archbishop's letters of convocation was addressed to the first bishop of the Philippines, Fray Domingo de Salazar, Dominican. From Salazar's reply we know that the Archbishop did not insist on his personal attendance nor did he even suggest that he send a delegate. The purpose of the letter was to inform Salazar of the convocation of the Council and invite him to send a written report on conditions of the Church in the Islands, and propose such problems as he thought the assembled bishop should discuss and strive to solve.

The relations between the Chilean Movimiento Nacional Socialista (MNS, or Nacismo) and the German-Chilean community, i.e., Chilean citizens of German origin, as well as the attitude of the former towards the Third Reich are still largely unexplored topics. Despite the growing number of studies on the nacista movement since the late 1980s, which rounded off and partly corrected earlier studies, and thereby substantially increased our knowledge of its ideology, political activities and leader, Jorge González von Marées, they have received little scholarly attention so far. In general, and this reservation applies to earlier as well as more recent publications, authors only briefly refer to the similarities between Chilean Nacismo and German Nazism, and either note the important role German-Chileans played in the organization or state that they were insignificant for its overall development. The only partial exceptions to this rule are Olaf Gaudig and Peter Veit’s as well as Jiirgen Muller’s works, which provide some information about these issues, and especially the relationships between the Chilean fascists and the German-Chileans.