In 1742, a highland Andean named Juan Santos led a group of mainly Asháninka and Yanesha warriors against a handful of isolated Franciscan missions in the central high jungle of Peru. Over the next ten years the rebellion smoldered, occasionally sparking to life, as Santos's forces pushed the missionaries based out of the College of Santa Rosa de Ocopa (near Jauja, Peru) back to the highlands. The uprising culminated in a brief foray into the highlands, but never effectively reached beyond the security of the densely vegetated high jungle, known locally as the central montaña region. Despite its modest accomplishments, the rebellion secured autonomy for the combatant nations during the rest of the colonial period.

Of all Woodrow Wilson's foreign policies, none is more deserving of criticism than his non-recognition policy. This policy, initiated by the President within a week after his accession to office on March 4, 1913, in response to the news of violent revolutionary disturbances in Mexico and Nicaragua, was primarily predicated on Wilson's assumption that the best way to prevent the recurrence of revolutions in Caribbean nations would be to warn all would-be revolutionists that they could expect no political or financial support from the United States. Ultimately he hoped that he could end the threat of revolution and induce all Latin American nations to abide by constitutional and democratic forms of government.

By the late seventeenth century, the cult of San Felipe de Jesús (ca. 1572-97), native of Mexico City and martyr in Japan, had taken a stable form in Mexico City, where he was born. Each year on February 5, the dignitaries of the viceregal capital gathered for a procession through the city center and a liturgical ceremony in the cathedral to praise the saint and his city, but for the rest of the year, residents largely ignored him. A multitude of social interests had led to this less-than-wholehearted embrace, among them rivalry between religious orders, civic self-promotion, and religious beliefs.

The Atlantic slave trade extracted kidnapped populations from the entirety of the western African coast between what are now Senegal and Angola, as well as parts of the east African coast in what is now Mozambique. Western slave traders and buyers regularly classified their human merchandise in terms of the African region, coastal town, or commercial fortress from which they had embarked, or in terms of an ethnic group that presumably derived from that place. With such presumptions, ethnic groupings such as Congo, Angola, Carabalí, Ibo, Nagô, Lucumí, Mina, Arará, Koromantee, and so forth were called “nations.”

On January 13, 1803, the French notary Derieux visited the first of several estates owned by Domingo Rodríguez, recently deceased. Rodríguez's property lay in the environs of Santiago de los Caballeros, a town in the north-central valley of Santo Domingo on eastern Hispaniola (today, the Dominican Republic). Over a three-week period, Derieux traveled with a team of witnesses and assessors to properties as far away as coastal Puerto Plata in order to assess the value of Rodríguez's cloth store, home, cabins, pasture land, livestock, cane and foodstuff fields, and sugar-processing equipment. Two of the three plantations also included a different kind of asset. At the sugar estate Gourave, Derieux wrote down the names of the 35 cultivateurs, cultivatrices, and enfants, that is, male and female agricultural workers and their children.

With his television blaring in the corner, Don Isidro Durán spoke of the men whom his neighbors had once chosen as leaders, men those neighbors labeled “colonels.” As Don Isidro described the indigenous political mobilization that rocked his rural Ayacucho community back in 1923, he explained that these colonels led their supporters in military exercises and proclaimed that President Augusto B. Leguía was “bad for the Pueblo.” Although the elderly Durán spoke with the authority of an eyewitness and the eloquence of a local intellectual, the indigenous leaders he described are essentially absent from the extensive literature on indigenous politics during Peru's 1920s. That absence is surprising, for reports of various popularly appointed colonels fill Ayacucho's archival records during Leguia's oncenio (his 1919-1930 presidency). These Ayacuchano civilian colonels were typically literate, indigenous men witxiout formal standing in the Peruvian armed forces. During the first years of the 1920s, Ayacucho peasants embraced rliese indigenous men as leaders because of their profound anger at official government authorities and their agents.

About 60 years after the Spanish invasion and conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals gathered in Tenochtitlan. On the very site of the heart of the Aztec empire stood a city of a new name: Mexico City, capital of New Spain. There the Nahuas set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, now known as the Codex Mexicanus. Owned by the Bibliothèque National de France, the codex includes records pertaining to the Christian and Aztec calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and the annals of preconquest and early colonial Mexico City, among other intriguing topics.

The novel Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda may be considered one of the outstanding products of her early Cuban environment. The work was begun in 1836 or earlier (while the author was traveling with her family to Spain), completed by 1838, and first published in 1841. In order to prepare the way for a favorable reception of the novel in her native land, as well as on the continent, la Avellaneda submitted the first ten chapters in 1839 to a “compatriota” residing in Sevilla:

Historical demography—the study of the growth, decline, and movement of past populations—has played a critical role in efforts to reconstruct the historical experiences of native peoples during New World colonization. The subject of historical demography has been of interest because it is closely connected to a wide range of still significant issues, including the nature of prehispanic Indian societies, the brutality of conquest, and the degree of disruption wrought by colonization. Nonetheless, scholars have yet to calculate a measurement of the precolonial New World population that meets with general acceptance.

AFTER the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition was established in Mexico in 1571, one of its functionaries, Antonio de Espejo, became a wealthy cattle rancher and entrepreneur in the Bajío (lowlands) region north of Mexico City, an area which today stretches from San Juan del Río through Querétaro to Aguascalientes. During November 1582 until September 1583, Espejo made a reconnaissance of New Mexico and he became a strong contender for the royal contract to colonize New Mexico as the Spanish king and the Mexican viceroy began to screen suitable applicants. It is probable that Antonio de Espejo would have been awarded the New Mexico patent had he not fled central Mexico for the north in the spring of 1581, because there was a warrant out for his arrest on a murder charge. As a Familiar of the Inquisition Espejo attempted to claim immunity from criminal persecution. His uncle and legal representative, Francisco de Santiago, handled his affairs during the civil trial and as the Inquisition investigated the murder charges, because Espejo had already gone to the Nueva Vizcaya frontier.

In Latin America in the twentieth century, nation after nation has revised its concepts of constitutional law to take into account the whole new realm of state responsibility for the economic and social welfare of its citizens. Beginning most dramatically with the Mexican Constitution of 1917, Latin American states have written into their constitutional charters detailed chapters on the social responsibility of capital, the economic rights of the worker, and the state responsibility for the protection and security of the family and for the physical and mental welfare of all its citizens and classes. In rewriting their national constitutions, the Latin Americans have deliberately broken with the classic liberal constitutionalism of the nineteenth century and adopted what some have called a “social constitutionalist” position.

Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the colonial policy devised by the Hapsburgs to govern Spanish holdings in America was the system of intervention, checks, balances, and overlapping authority. Many modern students express impatient disapproval of this system, assuming that it resulted in governmental inefficiency if not complete stagnation. By applying a different set of criteria, however, and one which was certainly more in the minds of those who fashioned the Spanish colonial structure, intervention, checks and balances may be judged a brilliantly conceived means of maintaining under colonial status a vast overseas empire. Considered in these terms, it is the opinion of the writer that nowhere was the success of this system more evident than on the level of local administration in the “ Indies,” where it served to prevent the rise of an unchecked spirit of local autonomy while tending to preserve sentiments of loyalty to the crown.

In considering acts of military intervention by foreign powers which occurred in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution, one is apt to think of the years 1914, 1916 and 1919, when U.S. forces invaded or occupied portions of Mexican territory. There was, however, one case of intervention of this sort during the revolution in which U.S. military personnel were not involved–the landing of a small party of British marines belonging to the H.M.S. “Shearwater” at the port of San Quintín on the northwest coast of the Baja Californian peninsula in April 1911.

The British landing at San Quintm constituted a vestige or remnant of "gunboat diplomacy", an aspect of English foreign policy that had originated in the age of Palmerston and which reflected the unrivaled naval supremacy enjoyed by Great Britain during the period extending from the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 to the end of the Second World War. The episode represented, in a rather overt way, the hard-nosed attitude characteristic of British foreign policy at that time with regards to Latin America in general and other so-called "backward" regions of the globe.

The news of the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais at the threshold of the eighteenth century spread like wildfire. Inebriated with the wealth which many thought would be perpetual, Brazil lived hours of rare exultation. “…those Mines,” wrote a former governor-general of Baía at the beginning of the eighteenth century, “are said to be so permanent that it will not be possible to exhaust them as long as the World lasts….” As early as 1697 the governor of Rio could write that the Caeté mines “extend in such a fashion along the foot of a mountain that miners are led to believe that [the extraction of] gold in that locality will be of great duration….” In the absence of more precise information, fantastic rumors became current. The new mining fields were of such dimensions, another contemporary affirmed, that they spread over the vast Brazilian hinterland. In 1709 the Overseas Council (Conselho Ultramarino) was willing to believe that the mines were the richest that had ever been discovered; the Council was certain that they would provoke the jealousy of foreign nations. After so many years of futile search Portugal had at length found another Potosí in the “most expansive heart of that world Emporium,” in that “resplendent diamond” of the finest quality which was Brazil.

The functions of the city are legion; and to a certain extent every city in Latin America performs nearly all of them. Trade and commerce, manufacturing and processing, communication and transportation, government and public administration, educational and cultural activities, religious and ceremonial observances, financial and personal services, servicing and repair, and recreation and welfare work, are a few of the better known categories. This list does not include, however, residence per se which is one of the principal raisons d’etre of cities in general. Moreover, even these better known urban functions can be subdivided into many varieties and classes, without in any way being exhaustive. Familiar examples are wholesale and retail trade; motor, rail, water, and air transportation; light and heavy manufacturing; and national, provincial, and local government and administration. In addition some of them tend to overlap, as in the cases of educational and cultural activities, or government and protection. Finally, the absolute and relative importance of any one of the functions, or of any particular combination of them, varies greatly from one city to another and in the same city from one time to another.

On January 4, 1614, a fat thirty-year old mulatto with reddish-black hair rode into the town of Tula and stopped at the inn. The man's horse was a roan mare, thin, saddle-backed, and run down. The stirrups of his saddle were barely intact. Such arrivals, however commonplace, never failed to interest the curious, this time to the stranger's harm. Onlookers told don Gabriel Arías de Riquelme, alcalde mayor, that the man was Juan Vázquez, a bigamist. Don Gabriel, always ready to strike against the lawless, especially one of the “unruly ox drivers” so irksome to the town, acted at once. He arrested Juan, placed him in the local jail, and reported to the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico City.

Water is a Prominent Theme in Mexican place names. Of at least 50,000 Indian toponyms, an untold number of references are made to water: its abundance, scarcity, shape, size and quality (i.e., color, taste and purity for drinking).

A study of Mexican place names makes it apparent that the proper distribution of water is historically one of the basic problems confronting the country; this is indirectly substantiated by many allusions to aqueducts and to the question of water ownerships in a given place. Rivers, too, play an important part in Mexican toponyms; the same applies perhaps more so to springs. Vegetation and fauna frequently are identified with hydronyms in Mexican place names. Diverse actions are associated with another group, while stones and soil figure in still another class. Canoes appear in another cluster of place names.