Following more than three decades of conservative dictatorship in Mexico Porfirio Díaz was overthrown by the idealistic Francisco Madero in 1911. Madero was impractical and disorganized and the unrest, which had characterized the last years under Díaz, continued throughout the brief presidency of his successor. In February 1913 a rising under Félix Díaz, nephew of the old dictator, led to civil war within the capital. The fall of Madero was assured when General Victoriano Huerta, who commanded the government forces, switched sides and implemented the arrest of the President. A pact between Félix Díaz and Huerta led to the provisional presidency of Huerta with Díaz lurking in the background as potential candidate for the permanent presidency.

In November of 1898, Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, lashed out at the expansionists and denied most emphatically that there was “justification for our enforced conquest and annexation ”of the “semi-nude people ”of Puerto Rico, living in a state of “peonage.” At large, the American trade union movement appears to have been caught up in the movement for Cuban independence—both political and economic. Puerto Rico, however, was a different matter. The trade union leadership had shown no special awareness of the island or of conditions prevailing there and, following the American occupation, adopted a strongly anti-imperialist stand. Yet, in February of 1901, the American Federationist (edited by Gompers) warmly applauded the Louisville conventions decision “. . .to organize the 15,000 skilled workers of the island of Puerto Rico on the unshakable basis of the trade union.” By the summer of 1902, trade union opinion had largely reversed itself and fraternal ties between the American Federation of Labor and the Federación Libre of Puerto Rico had been irrevocably forged.

On September 11, 1875, a select group of intellectuals met in the house of Don Alejandro Arango y Escandón. They came for the purpose of organizing and constituting in Mexico the Academia Mexicana Correspondiente de la Real Española. The group was made up of Don José María Bassoco, Don Alejandro Arango y Escandón, Don Casimiro del Collado, Don Francisco Pimentel, Don José Sebastián Segura, Don Manuel Peredo, Don José María Roa Barcena, Don Manuel Orozco y Berra, and Don Rafael Angel de la Peña. Also among them was a man in the prime of life : strong of body, with a kind but penetrating gaze, totally without affectation, yet extremely persuasive; his whole manner attractive and distinguished. What was he doing among all these others whom Fame had already made her chosen favorites, since this man always modestly recalled the fact that he had never had the opportunity of attending a public school? Yet that same gentleman was to become the very soul of this scholarly body, even though he insistently declared the contrary through the succeeding years; the succeeding years in which he was to mount that height in which his name would live both within and without our country from generation to generation. This genius in the world of letters was Don Joaquín García Icazbalceta.

In accordance with the terms of the 1867 convention which effected the transfer of Russian America to the United States, the archives of the Russian American Company at Novoarkhangelsk (Sitka) were transmitted to Washington, D. C. Inventoried and bound in 67 volumes and labeled Archives of the Russian American Company, they are now in the National Archives. Although microfilmed for the University of California at Berkeley, these archives have not been translated or published, and apparently, scant use has been made of them, although Bancroft had extracts made of many documents and used some of the material in his histories of Alaska, California, and of the Northwest Coast.

Leaders of the american independence movements thought in concepts of natural law and natural rights. They assumed that a society not only should but could be based upon reason and liberty rather than authority or tradition. Even those who took the more dismal Hobbsian view believed that there was a large measure of rational consent to the laws which necessity forced upon men who were dominated by passion rather than by reason. In any case, Nature was believed to have a universal character, and differences in geographical background were thought to have relatively little importance in shaping society and civilization. Nor did they think in terms of the historical determinism, whether idealistic or materialistic, which dominated nineteenth-century thought. The New World was held to be the seat of liberty and equality, not because American soil necessarily produced freedom, but because in America man had freedom to reach his fullest development. The New World thus differed from the Old chiefly in the institutions and civilization which man had created here. Incidentally, this rationalist view had much in common with the older Utopian concept of America, from which, in no small measure, it was derived. Moreover, the very idea of Utopia was partly American in origin. Thomas More, for example, based his Utopia upon what he knew of Inca civilization. For a long time, therefore, Europeans had thought of America as a Utopia in which liberty, equality and opportunity for the immigrant were natural products of man’s freedom to live a life more in accord with Nature than Europe permitted.

The purpose of this study is to trace the development of Portuguese Indian policy m America from 1500 to 1755 as reflected in Indian labor legislation. Special attention will be paid to the northern, more tropical part of Portuguese America which was known during a large part of the colonial period as the State of Maranhão.

The State of Maranhão must not be confused with the modern Brazilian state of the same name. Colonial Maranhão included an enormous territory, very largely Amazonian, extending from Ceará on the East to Grão Pará on the West. It was created in 1624 as a separate administrative unit of Portuguese America, and its capital was São Luiz. The other unit of the Portuguese possessions in the New World was the State of Brazil, extending south from Pernambuco, with its capital at Baía. Our interest will lie primarily in Maranhão, although the legislation on Indian labor passed before the establishment of Maranhão will be considered for background purposes.

Before the argentine revolution of 1810, land was the principal source of wealth and the sanction of social position in the otherwise resourceless Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. The revolution of May did not significantly alter the fundamental social, political and economic relationships between the masses of the people, the landowners and the soil. And although the administration of Rivadavia in the 1820’s and the dictatorship of Rosas in the next two decades were poles apart in their philosophies of society and government, each bore the same fruit in the further concentration of land in the hands of a relatively few men. After the fall of Rosas and the return of the exiled unitarios in 1852, the position of the landed gentry was not changed, despite the work of men like Urquiza, Mitre and Sarmiento, who applied themselves to the task of awaking Argentina from its long sleep of reaction. These victorious leaders were liberal and pragmatic, but there was no Argentine Homestead Act during their administrations. They accepted the land system as it was and tried to build upon it by spinning out the means of communication and transportation and technical development that would make it workable and by bringing in immigrants to make it fruitful. Aside from the establishment of a few colonies, the methods of land distribution and the laws of landownership remained essentially unchanged. Indeed, the governments that came after the Rosas regime, needful of revenue and concerned with the white elephant that was the government domain, embarked on much the same types of real estate deals as had the tyrant. In one case, in 1857, the government leased 3,000,000 hectares of land to 373 people; in 1867 Mitre’s government sold this land on easy terms to its renters.

Economic considerations all but dominate recent historical writing in this country about the railroads of Mexico. Technical matters of construction and operation, as well as the role of the state in both, are touched upon, but economic interpretation, whether of the development of a railway system or of its impact on the nation, is the watchword if not catchword of most writing. Probably the leading example of the dominant approach is Growth against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico (Northern Illinois University Press, 1981), by John H. Coatsworth, in which the author concludes that, while “the short run contribution of railroads to economic growth was large,” their longrun impact helped “to create the underdeveloped country Mexico has become.” Applying economic theory and measuring, Coatsworth in essence proves with numbers a case argued more elegantly in straight prose early in this century: that the application of a modern transportation network to a staple producing economy will do little more than extend and intensify the production system so as to increase the staple output.

For early North America and particularly its first creative writers (to 1831), William Robertson (1721–1793) seems to have been the chief source for all things pertaining to the Spanish in the New World. King’s chaplain, principal of the University of Edinburgh, and historiographer-royal of Scotland, Robertson achieved world-wide fame with his histories of Scotland, the reign of Charles V, and with A History of America. Of this last, the first eight books, published in 1777, dealt with the discovery of the western hemisphere and the conquests of Mexico and Peru.

These eight books furnished North America’s nationalist and early romantic writers, the epic poets of the late eighteenth century, and the romantic poets, novelists, and dramatists, even historians, writing into the early nineteenth with facts to be developed into Hispanic themes. One is led to suspect, moreover, that Robertson not only provided facts but, what may be more important, guided North America’s interpretation of them and the themes in the light of the popular fancies of the heroic Columbus, the “black legend,” and the “noble savage.”