Early in the year 1776 the Franciscan missionary college of San Fernando at Mexico addressed the Spanish throne with a report on “ the felicitous new discoveries (above the anciently conquered part of California) made between 1769 and the present year 1776, and contained between 30° 26′ and 57° 18′ north latitude.” In claiming His Majesty’s attention, the College felt itself justified by the importance of “ the missions founded under its charge in this space of over five hundred leagues of the South Sea coasts,” and by the fact that “its Religious have been in all the Expeditions by sea and land, everywhere observing all so much as they have judged conducive to the Service of both Majesties, and to the good of the countless unhappy Heathens who inhabit those remote regions of the North.”

Es de conocimiento general la parte tan importante que en la evangelización de la Nueva España tomó la Orden de San Francisco, a la que pertenecían los primeros apóstoles que en estas tierras comenzaron a predicar y a enseñar el cristianismo.

Conforme fué ensanchándose el territorio conquistado ensanchábase también la labor de los religiosos, pues que sin abandonar los puntos de sus primeras predicaciones y trabajos que amparaban para su continuación con las doctrinas y conventos que iban estableciendo, se extendían en su misión de predicar a los indios en los territorios en donde se iba introduciendo la conquista yendo a la par de los conquistadores y aún, en ocasiones, adelantándose a éstos para ir atrayendo al cristianismo a las gentes de las tribus que esparcidas se encontraban en los nuevos territorios que se iban descubriendo.

In the Mendel Collection at the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, is an unpublished diary of over 400 pages written by a Spanish soldier during his voyage from Spain to New Spain, and his return voyage to the Iberian Peninsula, between May 30, 1821, and May 17, 1822. The document is titled Apuntaciones que en su viaje a ultramar ha tomado el oficial de infantería Modesto de la Torre (Notes Written by Infantry Officer Modesto de la Torre During His Voyage Overseas). Lieutenant De la Torre was part of the delegation that accompanied General Juan O'Donojú when he assumed the position of captain-general and chief policy officer of New Spain, the highest-ranking office in Spain's overseas territories, following the reinstatement of die Constitution of Cádiz in 1820. The diary discusses a wide variety of topics, including the defeat of the Royalist army at Puerto Cabello (Carabobo, Venezuela) and the subsequent exodus of loyalist officers and troops to Havana. The diary also presents portraits of the people, cities, villages, towns, and flora and fauna that the lieutenant saw during his journey.

As the United States went into the second year of civil strife in 1862, Abraham Lincoln was under strong pressure to find some acceptable solution to the problem of the Negro. Though the Republican Party had made no emancipation pledges, and both President and Congress had denied any intention to interfere with established state institutions, conditions changed swiftly in the months that followed these disclaimers. It became increasingly awkward to allow each regional commander to handle the Negro refugees as he saw fit—returning the men and their families to their erstwhile owners, chasing them out of the camps, or holding them in labor battalions as “contraband of war.” Still more important was the dilemma caused by the Radicals both in and out of Congress who saw only a clear-cut case of right versus wrong, and who felt that victory would surely be forthcoming once the shackles of servitude had been cut off. Neither the unwillingness of Union Democrats to enter upon an abolitionist crusade, nor the administration's need to retain the support of border state slaveholders served to quiet their clamor. Accordingly, Lincoln was forced against his will into piecemeal and sometimes contradictory measures ending with his proclamation of January 1, 1863, when what he actually preferred was a long-range program of compensated emancipation that would include voluntary colonization of a large portion of the Negroes thus set free.

Jesuits arrived in Mexico in 1572. They had come from a Spain unified by an imperial ideology—its prime components a single faith, shared cultural values and traditions, and belief in a royal mystique—allowing, indeed encouraging, expansion of the monarchy overseas. Spanish Jesuits, some of whom articulated adherence to this ideology, by 1580 had established their religious order among the most respected corporations in Mexican society. Through preaching, ministering to the needy, and missionary work, but above all through gaining a near monopoly on secondary education in New Spain, members of the Society of Jesus achieved a position of prestige and influence within all strata of society. In order to understand, therefore, how Jesuits contributed to the maintenance of Mexican ties to Spanish empire, it is first necessary to get some idea of the nature of their system of education, its curriculum, teaching methods, and aims in New Spain.

In 1964, U.S. civilian teenagers managed a rare feat by sparking a major foreign policy crisis. Even more remarkable, they were abroad when they did it, and they caused the crisis out of what many considered too much patriotism. The riots that rocked Panama beginning on 9 January of that year started as a scuffle between Panamanian and U.S. high school students in front of Balboa High School (BHS), a “Zonian” institution mostly for U.S. citizens. The immediate circumstances were complicated: teenagers from Panama City marched into the town of Balboa in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone to protest the fact that BHS was not flying the Panamanian flag. Balboa High students, in turn, were already demanding that their flag continue to fly. President John Kennedy had ordered that both nations' flags be hoisted in the Zone, but implementation was slow. Then, local administrators decreed that neither flag would fly at BHS. The flag dispute seemed trivial, but its resolution could change which nation enjoyed sovereignty over the Zone. On 9 January, in the scuffle between Panamanian and U.S. students, the Panamanians' flag was torn. Then came the crisis. Within hours of the altercation, thousands of adults unleashed a bloody violence that lasted four days and killed twenty-one Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers. The U.S. Army took control of the Zone and Panama suspended diplomatic relations with the U.S. government. Panamanians further insisted on the scrapping of the 1903 Treaty that had established U.S. control over the Canal Zone. After years of negotiations, these riots led to the Panama Canal treaties in the 1970s and to the transfer of the Canal from U.S. to Panamanian hands in 1999.

Among the numerous failures of the Porfirio Díaz government was the lack of education in rural Mexico. Statistics reveal only a fraction of the problem. In 1910 there were 11,750,996 illiterates in the population of 15,103,542, or a total of 3,352,546 who could read or write. Illiteracy may have been even more rampant than these figures indicate. Most of Mexico was rural, and most of the effective educational efforts were in urban areas.

The question arises as to whether the leading influential groups in Mexico gave serious attention to the problem. The purpose of this article is to examine the views of five important groups or persons during that period just preceding the revolution, to determine the extent of importance assigned rural education in Mexico. The viewpoints are those of the Díaz administration, the Labor group under Ricardo Flores Magón, the Catholic Church, Francisco I. Madero, and General Bernardo Reyes.

Since 1773 various official and semi-official lists of the California missions with their founding dates have been compiled, but the lists do not all agree with one another nor with the founding reports. This paper is an attempt at a critical and analytical study of the founding dates based on the founding reports, on the annual reports (estados) of the individual missions, on the beginning dates (comenzadas) on the title pages of the parochial books, on the traditional lists, and on the factors involved in the founding of the establishments. In the 1920's Father Engelhardt made some study of these lists in his various histories of the missions, but some of the findings may be questioned.

The geographical configuration of a territory undoubtedly has great influence on events there. Geography guides migration, decides the economic life of the region, weakens or strengthens its people, and opens or closes the roads to cultural influences and to foreign invasions.

On the other hand the influence of “false geography,” that is the mistaken ideas of the location of a certain territory, carried on by tradition penetrates the minds of people and lures them to attempt enterprises they would not try otherwise. And even though these projects originate in erroneous, objectively false concepts, they still produce important historical events of decisive importance.

Few Countries have so consistently captured the interest of writers as Mexico; and in the writing of their reflections and observations, historians and literary people have accentuated their own opinions of what the religious crisis of 1926-1930 was. The purpose of this article is to present the attitude of the United States government toward that internal conflict in Mexico; and to stress the policy of unofficial intervention that resulted. The period that we have selected is one of explosive relations between church and state. The figures who dominate the Mexican scene are Plutarco Elias Calles who was president of Mexico from 1924 to 1928; and Emilio Portes Gil, who was interim president of Mexico from 1928 to February 4, 1930, and completely under the policy determination of Calles. During this period we have two Secretaries of State who fashioned United States policy: Frank B. Kellogg (1925-1929) and Henry L. Stimson (1929-1933); but the designers of policy in the field were James Rockwell Sheffield (1924-1927) and Dwight W. Morrow (1927-1930).