Belice, or British Honduras, has been the subject of dispute throughout its history. Although the Spanish claim to the Caribbean and Central America was clear in theory, the British distinguished between title by discovery and title by occupation. In their eyes this jungle terrain along the shores of the Caribbean Sea was “ res nullius ”—uninhabited territory, i.e., not occupied by Europeans—and hence subject to seizure by anyone who chose to effectively populate it. Spanish settlements in neighboring portions of Central America, in the British view, conveyed only dubious title to this area. Moreover, the original settlers of the town of Belize were freebooters who were not accustomed to paying heed to Spanish claims.

Traveling on the Pan-American Highway from Mexico City to Puebla, the tourist may feel invited to stop at the small and somnolent town of Huejotzingo. After having succeeded in shaking off the vendors of gaudy sarapes and having tasted the local cider, he may walk around the typical plaza and then he will not fail to be attracted by the old fortress-like church belonging to the sixteenthcentury monastery. In the atrium a pleasant shade of old giant trees shields the visitor, refreshingly, from the tropical heat. As he wanders around, a bunch of youngsters, just dismissed by a friar clad in brown cloth, will watch him from a safe distance. First he will pause before the posas (secondary chapels) at the four corners of the atrium. As he approaches the church a rather sober façade awaits him. The interior of the nave, too, is meager; only a few colonial retablos try to hide the otherwise naked walls. But the gilded high altar with its paintings and carved sculptures still stands in its old place covering the entire rear wall of the apse and commands the admiration of everybody who enters the church.

Photographs probably expanded more horizons and redefined more ways of knowing the world than any other product of nineteenth-century technology. The first daguerreotypes appeared in the Western Hemisphere merely months after the triumphal announcement of Daguerre's process by the French Academy in 1839. In the next three decades, millions of photographic images were produced. Three distinct categories predominated: studio portraits, scenic views for collectors and, after the early 1850s, photographic images transferred to woodcuts and, later, lithographs for publication as line sketches in illustrated newspapers and magazines. Photographic “science” complemented neatly the elite's striving for ways to affirm the region's material progress. Photographers played a vital role in presenting to the world a vision rooted in the aspirations of the dominant members of society.

In 1843, two friends, one Scottish and one American, published books about Mexico which were to become essential reading for students of Mexican history. Much the better known of the two is William Hickling Prescott whose History of the Conquest of Mexico became an instant best-seller and remains to this day one of the classics of Mexican historiography. Less well-known but equally valuable to historians of nineteenth-century Mexico is Frances Calderón de la Barca's vivid account of Life in Mexico based on her experiences during the two years from 1840-1841 when she lived in the country as the wife of the first Spanish ambassador. By coincidence, Prescott and Sra. Calderón were close personal friends and regular correspondents and they gave each other much assistance in preparing their respective books for publication. Both their works were greeted with critical and public acclaim in the English-speaking world of Europe and North America but reactions in Mexico were markedly different. While Prescott's book was received with qualified enthusiasm, Life in Mexico was the subject of hostile reviews and its author much vitriolic, personal abuse.

In the course of its “ nation saving ” in the Caribbean in the first third of this century, the United States government created native constabularies in each of the nations it temporarily occupied. In three countries, these forces—the Garde d'Haiti, the Guardia Nacionál de Nicaragua, and the Guardia Nacional Dominicana—became military Mr. Hydes. Raised, trained, and indoctrinated by American officers to preserve civil government from subversion, the Caribbean constabularies instead served as the backbone of military dictatorships after the Americans sailed away. In Cuba, however, the native constabulary did not become the dominant military power base for uniformed politicians. Instead it was itself subverted by both Cubans and Americans until it lost the institutional stability and professional autonomy which would have made it politically powerful. How this constabulary was reshaped, consciously and unconsciously, is the tale of the rise and the fall of the Cuban Rural Guard.

When Expelling the Jesuits from his realm in 1767, Charles III of Spain explained this extraordinary measure in only vague and mysterious terms. He said he was “moved by weighty reasons, conscious of his duty to uphold obedience, tranquility and justice among his people, and (was also acting) for other urgent, just, and compelling causes, which he was locking away in his royal breast.” Furthermore, the first part of the report of the committee preparing the expulsion, the Extraordinary Council of Castile, a report which must have contained the motivation, has been missing since at least 1815. The whole history of the expulsion has thus been shrouded in an air of mystery. Historians have not been satisfied with pointing to possible Jesuit implication in the so-called “Hat and Cloak Riots ” of 1766, which caused the Extraordinary Council to be set up to undertake the inquiry that less than a year later produced the royal decision to expel the Jesuits. Instead, they have suggested other explanations according to their gift of imagination and their religio-political orientation. Several theories of “conspiracy ” have been advanced. Either the Freemasons, impious Voltairians or the manteistas, that is, intellectuals of poor background, supposedly resentful of the snobbism of Jesuit education, have been held responsible for such “conspiracies ” against the Jesuits. Important documentation from the Extraordinary Council, which almost compensates for the lost piece, has been easily available since the 1890’s.

Although the study of the liberal republic (1870-1936) could shed considerable light on the overall pattern of political development, this period has remained one of the most under-studied and undervalued of the already under-researched history of Paraguay. In an attempt to fill that lacuna—albeit partially—this article reexamines the available data, discusses new evidence, and reinterprets the period with different theoretical categories. In this manner, it seeks to answer the question of why, in spite of a relatively favorable ideological environment, liberal democracy failed to consolidate and how this failure eventually opened the doors to the authoritarian regime of General Alfredo Stroessner.

In June, 1945, Time Magazine informed its readers that the North American singer, Robert Todd Duncan, had been refused accomodations by three prominent hotels in Caracas, Venezuela. This news, came as a shock to many Venezuelans who had considered their nation a racial democracy in which discrimination and prejudice did not exist. They felt doubly disturbed because a North American news magazine charged that the hotels had refused to admit Duncan, his wife, and his accompanist, William Allen, because of their race. They resented the fact that representatives of the press in the most racist society of the Americas accused Venezuelans of practicing racial discrimination of the sort found in the United States.

It Has Been Commonly stated for almost two centuries now that the reason why the celebrated Mexican Jesuit, Francisco Javier Clavigero, was unable to publish the Spanish original of his Storia antica del Messico (Ancient History of Mexico) in Madrid stemmed from the savage attack made on the Italian edition by a highly nationalistic Spanish Jesuit, Ramón Diosdado Caballero, who considered it highly insulting and injurious to Spain and who urged the Spanish Government not to allow its publication until the author publicly retracted his damaging statements. That his bitter criticism prevented immediate publication there is no doubt, but on the basis of newly gathered evidence in Spanish and Roman archives, it is by no means clear that it was the ultimate cause for its not appearing.

The European Movement to the New World began before Protestantism had made its appearance. In the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal had the Western Hemisphere largely to themselves, and all religious and missionary effort from those countries was naturally Catholic. Protestant states did not colonize in any substantial way until after 1600. But meanwhile a few sporadic efforts had come from France, where Calvinism had begun to loom as a major religious and political force. French Huguenots played some part in these attempts. Their share in the settlement made by Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon at Rio de Janeiro in 1555 has been noticed by historians, but in general has been misunderstood.

The year 2013 marked the tercentennial of Fr. Junípero Serra’s birth. That same year, historian Steven Hackel anointed Serra (1713-1784) California’s Founding Father, thereby echoing the glory attached to such American greats as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson. But Hackel also noted that Serra remains “America’s least understood founder,” with a legacy that is today decidedly “divisive … contentious and contested.”

PERHAPS the most vexing problem in the historiography of Michoacán is the question of the authorship of the Relación de las ceremonias y ritos y población y gobernación de los indios de la Provincia de Michoacán, commonly known as the Relación de Michoacán. This small volume, conserved in the Library of the Escorial in Spain (MS. Ç. IV.5.), is our principal source of information regarding the pre-conquest history and culture of the Tarascan Indians of Michoacán and their first contacts with the Spaniards. It originally consisted of three parts, which the author described in his introductory letter as follows:

A nation's image of its past helps to determine its conduct through continuing history. When this image is particularly sharp, it becomes a sacred reference for the formulation of policy. A national image is a melange of fact, fancy, and fiction. Carefully preserved in folklore and enthroned as tradition, this image can be invoked for political purposes that transcend party and class factionalism, and serve to unite the nation in a supreme sacrifice for national purpose.

Paraguay has such an image. In its past the Paraguay of 1928 saw a peaceful, progressive people who had been plunged into a war of extermination. “Veneer ó morir!” was no idle slogan of another era. It was a destroyed, shattered Paraguay that died with the Marshal on the banks of the Aquidabán. From the terrible conflict of 1864-1870, Paraguay emerged with large areas of its claimed territory forever lost, and with much of the rest in jeopardy. The arbitration of 1878, which eliminated one greedy enemy, was still fresh in Paraguayan memories when the Vanguardia incident of 1928 once more sounded the alarm. In the intervening years an image of the Paraguayan War had taken shape.

The roots of Spain’s policy of attempted exclusion of the foreigner from her New World possessions, whether in trade or in immigration, reach deep into the Iberian religious consciousness of the fifteenth century. The religious pulse of the Catholic Kings was beating strongly and quickly as a result of the coincidence of the momentous events of the year 1492: expulsion of the Jews, conquest of Granada from the Moors, and the discovery of the New World. It is not surprising that the Spanish conception of religiosity should have been linked inseparably with the attitude of exclusion of the foreigner. Expulsion of the hated infidel-foreigner Moor from Spain was integrally associated with the Jews, since the latter had often been in close cooperation with the former (The fact that they had also cooperated with their rulers in Christian-held parts of Spain was swept aside in wake of the religious zeal of the Reconquista.). On the one hand, there was the religious cause of Catholic Christianity to be served, and, on the other, the secular goal of the consolidation of Castilian rule throughout the Spanish portion of the Iberian Peninsula.

During the nine months prior to the writing of this report to the Guadalajara See, the parishioners of Santa Maria del Oro had presented a series of demands for money in the priest’s possession. Some 400 pesos had been gained from the forced sale of their lay brotherhood’s property, and they wanted the money so they could buy back the land. By August 1857, however, the parishioners’ attempts at legitimate reclamation, through both ecclesiastical and civil channels, had ended in disappointment. Rumors had long circulated that these Indian parishioners were allied with a prominent gang leader in the region, Manuel Lozada. Thus it likely came as little surprise when Martinez found himself huddled in his church in late September as Lozada’s gang ringed the town, accompanied by the town’s prominent Indians, and demanded that the priest and the local magistrate come out and surrender. Martinez was rescued only by the intervention of state troops, who scattered Lozada’s gang and allowed the priest to flee.

The administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico is famous for the enormous distribution of lands that it undertook, the prize of the bloody and protracted revolution that had promised tierra to the nation’s peasants two decades earlier. Less well remembered are the actions the administration took against the peasantry, when federal troops stationed in southwestern Chihuahua killed several Mexicans while protecting a colony of Canadian-born Mennonite fanners. This quiet display of the central government’s authority was not the first of its kind in the area around the growing town of Cuauhtémoc. President Alvaro Obregón’s administration had also sent troops to Cuauhtémoc, and their mission then as under Cárdenas was the protection of the lives and properties of the small Mennonite enclave that resided in the area south of Chihuahua City. It was Obregón who invited the religious minority to settle in Mexico shortly after his election, and it was he who pledged federal government protection of the Mennonites’ interests. The incongruities evident in the case begin therefore not with the stationing of the troops in Cuauhtémoc, but much earlier, with the very concessions that Obregón gave the Mennonites in the years after the Mexican Revolution.

Interest in the nature of Brazilian slavery has increased dramatically during the last ten years. In part this interest has been stimulated by the desire of North American social scientists to examine what was initially viewed to be the striking differences between patterns of race relations and slavery as they developed in the United States and Brazil. Among Brazilians the interest in slavery is older, beginning as an aspect of the larger evolution of cultural nationalism which sought to demonstrate the unique nature of the Brazilian solution to a multiracial society. Among both North American and Brazilian writers the initial tendency was to emphasize the more “humane” nature of slavery in Brazil. This was attributed to a number of factors of which the Portuguese concept of the slave as a human being based on cultural and religious traits was paramount. Increasingly this view has been subjected to intense criticism and recent works have focused on the harshness of Brazilian slavery and have sought to stress the similarities between the two systems.

Georges Baudot has written a lengthy book (554 pages) which bears a beautiful and suggestive title: Utopia and History in Mexico. In publishing this work, he seems to have had two very clear purposes in mind. The first is to fill an enormous gap since “strange as it may seem, the authentic sources for most of our knowledge about pre-Columbian civilization in central Mexico have never been studied.” (p. ix) The second, is to demonstrate the grandeur of the Franciscan work in the sixteenth century, impelled by millenarian fervor.

With respect to the manner in which Baudot fulfills his first and commendable purpose, there is nothing more to be said after the two articles Dr. Edmundo O'Gorman has published in Historia Mexicana. With regard to the second, I must admit that the reading of the book provoked in me, in almost equal measures, amazement and envy. I will explain. It amazes me (and not just a little) that an author who confronts what is for me, at least, such a difficult topic as Franciscan millenarianism can establish the antecedents of this tendency in only twenty pages (71-90) and utilize for it only a single biblical citation (p. 78, note 14: Revelations XX:4-6). Envy presents itself after concluding that such frugality must be due to the vast culture of the French public to whom the work is addressed.

The nations of the free New World have produced but seven sovereigns; all have been deposed. Some were ridiculous and cruel, but Haiti’s third and last monarchical attempt was the most ludicrous and probably the bloodiest of them all. This drama of strangely mingled comedy and tragedy was directed by an equally paradoxical man, Faustin Soulouque.