The economic transformations which the new exigencies of capitalism brought to Brazil at the end of the second half of the nineteenth century caused the emergence of new urban sectors, the end of slavery, the utilization of free labor and the rise of a dynamic agrarian bourgeoisie. These in turn provoked a crisis of hegemony within the dominant classes in the final moments of the Empire which reached the sphere of political domination. Their loss of hegemony resulted in administrative inertia and the impression of a power vacuum since the coffee bourgeoisie was not yet able to exercise the direction of the State alone. With the advent of the Republic, it fell to the army to temporarily occupy power and to institutionalize the new regime, while the bourgeoisie was organizing itself to take charge definitively in a hegemonic form.

After receiving official permission on September 13, 1969 “ to do research in the nunciature's archives,” I was allowed to spend about forty days during the months of May and June, 1970, in the rich collection of materials in this nunciature, situated in the Lagoinha district of Santa Teresa in Rio de Janeiro. It was a tantalizing situation for me as a historian, since the time limit and the prohibition against microfilming enabled me only to glance at much of the documentation, without being able to copy it or even to take copious notes. Perhaps as a result of my interest in these papers, it has been determined by the papal Secretary of State to send all these nunciature documents up to the reign of Pius XII to the Vatican Archive before the end of 1970. There, I was assured, all facilities would be given to scholars to work in this material. The collection when I saw it was intact, containing original materials from 1808 to the present, with apparently hardly a document missing, except for a few letters on the Religious Question of 1873-76, sent to Rome some time after these dates. Apparently very little else of the original papers had been forwarded to Rome during all those years, although copious reports in Italian were sent, of course, to Rome.

Unique sources of historical, demographic, toponymic, and linguistic information, the mission registers (baptisms, matrimonial inquiries, marriages, burials, and census) of Baja California have been used in varying degrees to good effect by Carl Sauer, Peveril Meigs, Sherburne Cook, Homer Aschmann, and Pablo L. Martínez, among others. What is, alas, not so unique, but true of many parochial archives in Mexico, is the fact that until quite recently they were often left exposed to the elements, rodents, insects, and looters. Gerhard attempted to make an inventory of the known surviving registers in 1952-1953, when he found some of them totally unguarded and uncared-for. This work was followed by Woodrow Borah in the 1970s, and since 1971 Mathes has brought this calendar upto-date, and has obtained or personally produced microfilm of the entire corpus, including certain folios which have since disappeared. Here we shall summarize the tortuous history of the dispersal of these documents.

A social revolution must concern itself immediately with the past, since it is a basic conviction of the revolutionist that the moribund and corrupt order which causes society's distress makes impossible the kind of future that he sees as desirable and necessary. Old institutions, structures, and habits of thought must be abolished or severely modified, and persons who direct or personify those vestiges must change, step aside, or be removed from positions of power and influence.

Religious institutions and beliefs present a peculiarly complicated problem to a social revolution. Invariably associated with traditional ways, they are often too deeply rooted in the national mentality and sentiment to admit of any easy or rapid modification. Obliteration, even if though to be the desirable solution, is usually recognized as impossible; and to change mass attitudes by persuasion alone, is at best a long and uncertain process.

While the negotiations between the United States and Ecuador in the period 1909 to 1913 came to no fruitful conclusion, they still remain a subject of interest because in microcosm they illustrate so well how the Department of State operated in the Taft administration. The negotiations embraced all the standard considerations: strategy, vested American interests, projected loans, power politics, and “ up-lift.” The Department's interest in Ecuador quickened in this period because Ecuador owned the Galápagos Islands, an archipelago which lay six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador and about one thousand miles southwest of the Isthmus of Panama, where the canal was under construction.

Among the branches of Romance philology Hispanic philology is at the present time the most flourishing one. This is due in great measure to the fact that the seeds sown by the great master Ramón Menéndez Pidal are bringing forth remarkable fruit in Spain, Portugal and the United States. The newest feature in the picture is that Argentina, with the Instituto de Filología de Buenos Aires under the leadership of Amado Alonso, has become a center of Hispanic studies for the entire world. This seems to be one of the changes in scholarship which hint that in the future, the New World will take over, whereas Europe has to struggle desperately to hold her own. The change will appear the more considerable in the light of the endeavor since the early nineteenth century on the part of Latin America to do something in this field, although for the most part amateurish.

The missionary effort of the Church has been sometimes judged rather harshly and often quite unfairly. This is not to deny that missionaries have somehow always shared with their contemporaries not only the human goodness, idealism, and heroism of their times but also the ignorance, paternalism, racism, and imperialism that happened to be a part of the age itself. Above all, missionaries have been repeatedly caught in the questionable marriage between Church and State. It is, of course, easy to pass judgment on past mistakes in light of our present-day knowledge, attitudes, opportunities, and general cultural and social context and to forget that a generation or two from now it will be our turn to be similarly criticized and condemned for what is impossible for us to know or to appreciate in our times. Junípero Serra, despite the shortcomings that might be pointed out regarding his missionary methods, was certainly one of the greatest frontiersmen the Americas have ever seen, one of the greatest friends the American Indians have ever known, and one of the greatest missionary saints the Church has ever produced.

The metropolis made full and very exacting regulations for everything that referred to the obtaining and control of precious metals and stones. Even in the first days of Spanish colonial expansion in America, the regulations contained in capitulations and instructions were innumerable. Later on, laws, royal cedulas, ordinances, and other juridical norms ordained in a detailed manner the requisites to which all had to submit who proposed to exploit the deposits of precious metals or the pearl fisheries. They regulated the manner in which they were to be established, the work of the Indians in them, and, above all, the control of production and the participation of the crown in the benefit obtained.

The year 1976 is correctly taken to be the bicentennial year of United States independence, which officially began on July 4, 1776. In a broader sense, however, the year 1776 was also pivotal year in the “Age of the Democratic Revolution” that swept through the entire Atlantic Community of nations during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth.

This year, 1976, therefore, may also be properly considered the bicentennial of the opening year of the “age of revolutions” in the whole of America. Professor Robert R. Palmer, in his distinguished work on the subject, convincingly shows that, as he says,

This article will argue that a seemingly trivial dispute between the Nicaraguan government and an American lumber company operating on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast escalated to become a major source of tension between the U.S. State Department and Nicaragua, as well as a catalyst that drew U.S. banks into Nicaragua. Despite its significance, the convoluted story of this dispute has attracted little scholarly attention. The importance of the Emery claim was widely acknowledged at the time, however. Stories about it appeared in contemporary newspapers and magazines, and it became a topic worthy of discussion by a U.S. Senate hearing. The claim was also connected to José Santos Zelaya's resignation as president of Nicaragua in the autumn of 1909, a gesture that came shortly after he had agreed to settle the Emery claim.

The history of Cuba from the 1860s to 1898 has been written largely from the revolutionary, independentista perspective. It is a perspective that has been appealing to U.S. and Cuban historians alike, but it may well be a perspective that has distorted the Cuban political experience and made it more difficult to understand the Cuban reality. That this perspective is alive and well can be seen in recent publications which give short shrift to the Cuban Autonomist movement, a movement that was essentially Cuban and whose leadership came from the largely urban, professional elite that rejected both annexation and independence.

The 1824 Chumash uprising against three Franciscan missions in the central section of the California chain—Santa Inés, La Purísima Concepción, and Santa Bárbara—was the largest organized revolt in the history of the Alta California missions. The Chumash burned most of the Santa Inés mission complex. At La Purísima, they drove out the mission guard and one of the two priests in residence. The mission was not forcibly retaken by the Mexican army for almost a month. At Santa Bárbara, the Chumash disarmed the soldiers stationed at the mission and sent them back to the presidio. After an inconclusive battle against troops who were sent out against them from the presidio, most of the rebels retired to the interior, where they set up their own community. The revolt was finally brought to an end when a military expedition led by Pablo de la Portilla negotiated the return of this group to the Santa Bárbara Mission. The role of the Prefect of the Missions, Father Vicente í, in bringing the revolt to an end by persuading this group to return to the Santa Bárbara Mission has long been recognized. Antonio María Osio, most likely relying on what he had been told by his brother-in-law, Governor Luis Argüello, stated in 1851, “They [the Chumash] had decided not to return to the missions and expressed the low regard in which they generally held the inhabitants of California. Yet, at the same time, they revered Reverend Father Vicente í for his many virtues. Only he had the necessary power of persuasion to calm the Indians’ fears.” In 1885, as he described the negotiations between the Mexican military and the Chumash, Theodore S. Hittell wrote, “Communications were opened and a conference held; the two missionaries, Father President Vicente í and Father Antonio Ripoll of Santa Bárbara, acted as negotiators; and the result was that the Indians submitted unconditionally; were pardoned, and the fugitive neophytes marched back to their respective missions.” We offer here a translation of a letter which í wrote to the Bishop of Sonora, Bernardo Martínez Ocejo, a few months after these events. The document provides an excellent first-hand account of the conclusion of the revolt. It also offers a close view of the growing fear and anxiety the missionaries were experiencing in the early years of Mexican independence. As a context for the letter, let us briefly summarize the Chumash revolt.