Students of Latin American art of the colonial period will agree that this book, which deals with the development of architecture in Spanish America during the sixteenth century, is the most important analysis of the subject that has yet been made. Prepared with the assistance of the Spanish government and the cooperation of private investigators and government agencies in Latin America, this book is the first of a series of volumes which, it is to be hoped, will eventually present the whole history of Hispanic American art. It brings together for the first time a mass of factual information taken from source material of the period concerning the earliest monuments of Spanish building from Mexico to BoliVia and interprets it in the light of Spanish architecture of the time with a knowledge and an attention to detail never before applied on such a scale. Almost without exception every building mentioned is fully illustrated, plans of the more important are provided, together with diagrams of variant architectural details such as moldings, bases and arches, and whenever possible contemporary architect’s drawings from the Archivo de Indias in Seville are submitted as well. Although a good deal of this material had previously been published in one form or another, there is much that had not been, especially in the chapters devoted to South America. The work therefore goes beyond the mere compilation of facts already recorded and presents a whole series of new monuments on the basis of original investigation.

IN the 1840s Chile witnessed the ascendancy of a group of young liberal intellectuals and politicians who were determined to alter their nation politically, economically and socially. They wanted first to curb the conservative-dominated government that had directed the country from 1830 on, and, additionally, they hoped to create the kind of liberal democracy which they believed the wars for independence had promised but conservative governments had refused to implement. They also hoped to strengthen the economy by changing landholding patterns and increasing the wages of both rural and urban workers. Finally, they wanted to eliminate the most glaring social evils of their day, thereby making a better life available for all Chileans.

In the Treaty of Ancón ending the War of the Pacific, the government of Peru signed away two provinces on the south coast and much of the country's future guano income. The settlement stripped Peru's treasury bare and exposed the narrow, extractive and agricultural base of the country's economy. A few years later the same Peruvian government, led by the hero of the Chilean war General Andrés Cáceres, signed the Grace Contract whereby the foreign debt was canceled and railway development for the next 66 years fell under the control of the foreign-owned W. R. Grace corporation. The economic and political consequences of these decisions were deeply felt in Peruvian society. Economically, they placed renewed emphasis on export agriculture and mining at the expense of primary industrial development and made stronger demands upon the rural labor force. Led by these sectors, modernization of the economy proceeded in a regional form, with accelerated growth in the coastal valleys and a few highland areas and stagnation elsewhere. A shift of population from the highlands to the coast accompanied this process.

Each nation views its own statesmen with a particular bias. This prejudiced opinion is generally more pronounced when the statesmen involved are “ founding father ” types. Other eyes, though not perhaps objective, saw prominent figures in United States history in a different light, and an alien culture elicited unique comments by one particularly literate and vocal observer.

Hipólito da Costa would probably be quite content (perhaps even a little surprised) at being feted as the father of the Brazilian press and probably he would not demand the additional title of political philosopher. But, in the fashion of his age, he discoursed at length on politics, and the pages of the Correio Braziliense which he edited show the ideas on governmental theory of a particular, early nineteenth-century liberal, a Portuguese influenced by the English liberalism which seems so far from radical today as to be almost blatantly conservative.

Between 1791 when the Haitian revolution began, and the death of Henri Christophe in 1820, important economic changes occurred in Haiti which transformed one of the most prosperous plantation economies in the New World into a republic of peasant proprietors. While the political history of the revolution has received a moderate amount of attention, the economic and social changes which accompanied it have been poorly understood. It is the purpose of this study to focus on the internal developments which were occurring in an irresistible way to bring about a peasant economy and to delineate the responses of a variety of governments, both French and Haitian, to try to halt these changes.

“Peru lives in a psychological moment of singular confusion,” Argentine Ambassador Hugo Oderigo wrote in 1947, suggesting that “the United States and Argentina are its two great realities. It is attracted to our country by the community of historical origin, lives our reality, and recognizes the greatness” of General Juan Domingo Perón. On the other hand, the hegemonic United States, with its vast wealth and modern industrial order, offered promise for the future. In the years following the Second World War, both Perón and the Harry S. Truman administration forced two Peruvian presidents to choose between what one Lima journalist called “short-term Argentine imperialism” and the “exclusive domination which the Great Democracy of the North today exercises.” Perón's road promised rapid industrialization and liberation from foreign exploitation through statist corporatism and membership in a “southern bloc” of economically-integrated South American states, while Washington stood as the guardian of a new global order based on liberal capitalism and multilateral commerce. This conflict represents an important international aspect of what has heretofore been considered a domestic struggle within Peru from 1945-1949.