The Regional Security provisions of the Rio Treaty of Mutual Assistance dealing with individual and collective defense, along with the structural and juridical reorganization of the inter-American system of Bogotá in 1948, constitute to a certain degree a return to Bolivarian political concepts of a Hispanic-American union or confederation. This was the dominant theme and leitmotiv of inter-American relations from 1830 to 1865. It is our purpose in this present study to present the attitude and position of Chile towards these expressions of hemisphere solidarity during this period of the mid-nineteenth century.

During the 1930s Argentina's two railroad unions were the dominant labor organizations in the country. Their members considered themselves the elite of the working class. Through collective contracts and the efforts of the unions, the workers had gained favorable conditions for themselves, so that they were in many ways an elite, despite the harsh reality that the industry in which they worked was in decay.

Why were they able to do this? Not because they all possessed special skills. Groups of skilled workers have often been able to secure for themselves a strong position, as have the engineers and firemen who make up La Fraternidad. In countries in which the position of labor unions is not protected by law the ability of widely differentiated groups to organize successfully is unusual. Therefore, this paper will concentrate on the members of the Unión Ferroviaria. Membership in the Unión Ferroviaria was extended all along the far-flung railroad network and ranged from craftsmen in the repair shops to poorly paid and unskilled crews that maintained the tracks.

In 1850, after four terms in the United States Congress as a Whig from the Dayton, Ohio district, Robert Cumming Schenck decided not to run for reelection. Despondent over the recent death of his wife, Schenck yearned for a restful stay in a warmer clime. Consequently, he applied for a diplomatic post, the customary reward for loyal party service. President Millard Fillmore, a fellow Whig, obliged Schenck with an appointment as Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to Brazil. A railroad promoter, land speculator and politician, Schenck had few formal qualifications for diplomatic service other than the confidence of Secretary of State Daniel Webster and a fluent command of the French language. These were, however, more substantial assets than most nineteenth century American diplomats could boast, and to them Schenck added a brisk, businesslike manner, immense energy and a certain gruff charm.

Land ho!” rang out in the stillness of that fateful dawn in October, 1492, when a New World was discovered. After months of suspense the approaches to a land whose existence was unknown had been reached. It was not India, nor fabled Cipango and Cathay. It was, as Columbus said after his third voyage, Otro Mundo, another world, risen out of the unknown to confound an astonished world, where an era was closing and a new one opening. It lay athwart the route to the desired goal, a vast land mass, peopled by many men of varying cultures, who emerged in their seemingly guileless nakedness to confuse the theologians and learned men of the Renaissance.

As a Part of the Centennial celebration of the death of José de San Martín, the year 1950 was designated by the Congress of Argentina as the “Year of San Martin.” Article 2 of Law 13,661 reads as follows: “From the first day of January until the thirty-first of December of the year 1950, all official documents of national, provincial and municipal authorities; the titles and diplomas granted by institutions of learning of all ranks and jurisdictions, be they of the State or incorporated; diplomatic dispatches and the notations and colophons of books, periodicals, dailies, reviews and every other class of publications whether they be official or private, national or foreign, shall be preceded by the denomination of ‘Year of the Liberator General San Martin’ to indicate the year 1950.”

José Francisco de San Martín is best known as the military genius on whose successes was founded the political independence of Argentina, Chile and Peru. In writing the account of his life, biographers have used such titles as “Captain of the Andes” and “Saint of the Sword.” Born of Spanish parents on the Argentinian frontier at Yapeyu, February 25, 1778, he accompanied them to Spain at the age of seven and was educated for a military career. Joining the Spanish army, he fought in Africa and defended the mother country against Republican France, England, Portugal and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) is known to most students of Brazilian history as an abolitionist, a member of the Second Reign's Liberal opposition and, perhaps, as the first Brazilian ambassador to the United States. Some of us, however, note that Nabuco was also an important spokesman for the monarchist reaction against the early Republic and an outstanding historian and apologist for the Monarchy. He thus suggests something of both the range, contradictions, and limits of elite political thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

This presentation will attempt to go beyond the commonplace solution to the apparent contradiction in Nabuco—his liberal monarchism—to suggest the nature of his socio-political assumptions as they evolved from his more radical youth to his rather conservative maturity. It will also attempt, as an integral part of this, to identify Nabuco's role in clarifying and promoting elite conservative social thought through the use and interpretation of Brazil's national history.

Founded in 1947 by a Catholic priest, Acción Cultural Popular (ACPO) was a pioneer in radio education. Offering a radio station (Radio Sutatenza), study manuals, and a newspaper, ACPO provided basic education and encouraged campesinos to seek personal development and to “vivir mejor”--to live better. From 1947 to 1994, it attracted over four million subscribers and became a model in 13 Latin American countries. In this article I show how ACPO's approach to rural development and communication style evolved between 1960 and 1980. As a consequence of technological, economic, and cultural developments, Radio Sutatenza, a station with a more or less captive audience of illiterate peasants, changed as it was forced to respond to rural Colombians’ shifting aspirations and competition from commercial radio. While the organization's founding principles remained constant throughout this period, its articulation of what it meant to “live better” changed over time, reflecting the struggles of a religious organization to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world. While ACPO saw itself as the bearer of modernity, it was often confronted by independent processes of change already occurring in rural communities.

One of the most popular and enduring legends in the Andean city of Quito recounts the vivid tale of a young Indian named Francisco Cantuña, the son of a powerful Inca captain, who lived and died in the sixteenth century. Maimed and horribly disfigured when the Inca general Rumiñahui burned the city of Quito, Cantuña was present when the general hid the treasure of Atahualpa before the arrival of the conquering Spaniards. In the aftermath of occupation, the young Cantuña was adopted by a benevolent Spaniard who taught him to read, write, and live a good Christian life. In return, Cantuña rewarded the Spaniard, as well as several local churches and chapels, with large sums of gold, which he secretly melted down from Atahualpa's hidden treasure. News of Cantuna's beneficence prompted all manner of speculation and suspicion among the local populace, to the extent that he was called before a tribunal to account for his mysterious wealth. In order to preserve the secret of the Inca treasure, Cantuña testified that he had acquired his riches by signing a pact with the devil. On this point, the earliest published version of the legend affirms that his testimony was a deliberate lie intended to quiet the gullible authorities, because Cantuna “was in reality a good Christian” who was very devoted to a local image of the Dolorosa (Virgin of Sorrows).

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Mexican traditionalist Catholics mobilized in apparent unity against Catholic “progressivism” and the Left. Yet, they succumbed to their own internecine fights. This article examines the conflicts within Mexico's post-Cristero Right during the 1960s and 70s by tackling the ruptures and realignments surrounding the excommunication of Fr. Joaquín Sáenz Arriaga, a traditionalist Jesuit famed for attacking conciliar reforms and the legitimacy of Paul VI's papacy. I argue that the ensuing debates put into question the apparent coherence of conservatives in the face of social unrest after 1968, highlighting the long-standing entropy of right-wing Catholicism, as traditionalists clashed over matters of orthodoxy, Catholics’ historical relationship with the postrevolutionary state, and the contested memory of the Cristero War, which they used to legitimize their positions and define the terms of their traditionalism. Using anticommunism and anti-Semitism to wage their battles, these traditionalists occupied important spaces in the public sphere, contributed to Mexico's Cold War polarizations, and shaped the Mexican Right's international outlook. Their conflicts attest to the contentious plurality of the Mexican Right during this period, which invites further study to better understand how these actors situated themselves in a rapidly changing world.

The Great Seal of the United States, designed in the early days of the Republic, has on it symbolism whose significance is often overlooked. On one side is an eagle which grasps with one talon a branch and with the other a sheaf of arrows. Above its head are “E Pluribus Unum” and thirteen stars for the original states bound together in one nation. The other side has on it an unfinished pyramid. The foundation bears the number MDCCLXXVI. Above the pyramid is the eye of God flanked by the words “Annuit Coeptis,” namely, “He smiles on the undertakings.” Underneath is the phrase “Novus Ordo Seculorum,” meaning “New Order of the Ages.” Here succinctly is the vision which inspired the founding fathers of the new nation. The thirteen colonies had become one, prepared to face together the exigencies of the future, whether for preservation in self-defense or for cooperation in the arts of peace. Here was an attempt at building something novel in the history of mankind—a new and ordered structure. That structure, as yet incomplete, was based upon the Declaration of Independence, with its best-remembered phrases: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Here is “the American dream.” As “four score and seven years” later Abraham Lincoln even more briefly described it, the new nation was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and its success or failure was a test whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people” could “long endure.” To that dream faith in God, in His creative activity, and in His sovereignty was basic.

In recent years, most historians have abandoned the idea that the revolutions that shook the Atlantic world between 1776 and 1848 were the work of a single social class. A number of studies on the social composition of the groups that ignited and propelled the different revolutionary processes demonstrate the diversity of conditions and social backgrounds of the revolutionaries. However, this revisionism is posing new questions as to why these contingencies in Europe and the Americas decided to mobilize, to construct new liberal national states, and how they carried it out.

Spain is a good sample case for this historiographical inquiry. At present, few historians accept the idea that the series of upheavals that brought about a new liberal state during the 19th century resulted from the exclusive pressure of a national bourgeoisie. Recent scholarship has revisited the classic bourgeois revolution paradigm by presenting liberalism as an ideology that captivated the imagination of Spaniards of a variety of social ranks, with special impact among urban middle and popular groups. But if Spanish scholars are providing better explanations regarding who embraced liberal ideas and facilitated their spread, the answers for the “why” and “how” this process occurred are, in my opinion, less convincing.

In 1975, Richard Graham asked me to give a paper on Mexican women at the Southwestern Social Science Association meeting. Surely, he asked me only because he thought that as a woman I would know something about women—I am sure that was my only qualification in his mind. Thankfully, he also asked Dawn Keremitsis, who had done work on Mexican women workers. Fortunately, I had included in my 1973 dissertation a chapter on women's vocational education. I wrote my entire dissertation on José Vasconcelos's educational crusade in a state of shock at the race and class biases I encountered in the documents. In the case of women, my outrage soared, propelled by my second-wave-feminist conviction that women had to be liberated from the slavery of the home. So I had written a dogmatic chapter and paper on how revolutionary educators wanted to remove women from the workforce, restore them to domesticity, train them to work in small, badly paid, home-based industries, and subordinate them to men and motherhood. Middle-class women prescribed class practices of motherhood and domesticity as if, I argued, women of the subaltern classes knew nothing of homemaking and mothering.

This article analyzes the revolutionary diplomacy of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) through the prism of Nicaraguan and Western European relations during the final decade of the Cold War. It contends that —despite the FSLN's ideological affiliation with Third World national liberation movements, Cuba, and the socialist bloc—the campaign to influence Western European foreign policies was central to the Sandinista government's international strategy. By pushing Western European governments to play a prominent role in Central America's violent Cold War conflicts, the Sandinistas sought to undermine US power in the isthmus and alter the inter-American dynamics that shaped their region's history up to the late 1970s. Furthermore, by building financial ties with Western European countries, the FSLN could avoid complete financial dependency on the Soviet bloc and strengthen Nicaragua's image as a nonaligned state. The Sandinistas’ campaign to challenge US hegemony in Central America through a pragmatic outreach to Western Europe was largely successful, but it came at the cost of implementing domestic reforms that ran counter to their own ambitions. Ultimately, this prompted the FSLN to hold elections in 1990, which resulted in their removal from power.

In the years prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the Hamburg-American-Lines (HAPAG) steamer Ypiranga gained a special reputation in the Western hemisphere. It was known for transporting several Mexican Presidents into exile, and it became especially famous for its 26th voyage, a trip from Hamburg to Veracruz in the spring of 1914.

Its hold filled with weapons for the Mexican President Huerta, the steamer approached the entrance to the Veracruz harbor on April 21. At that time, its captain had not the slightest idea that on Woodrow Wilson's order American troops had landed to take control of the harbor in order to prevent the weapons his ship carried from reaching the Mexican President.