One of the major obstacles preventing Argentine national unificacation in the 1870s was the hostility of the poor interior provinces, victims of the ravages of civil wars and economic stagnation, toward the richer and more powerful coastal area dominated by export-oriented merchants and cattlemen. From 1874 until the first decade of the twentieth century, a major attempt was made to resolve longstanding grievances. A definitive political compromise and program of economic integration emerged in 1880 when a group of politicians, representing both the interior and the littoral, joined together and made their slogan a reality: Peace and administration. This group, known as the Generation of Eighty, brought a national capital and a modicum of peace to Argentina in 1880. Eventually they helped create a new Argentina linked by networks of transportation, communication, banking facilities and other trappings of modernity. They courted regional industries with protective tariffs and political favors in hopes of providing an economic stimulus to the interior which would complement rapid growth in the littoral. But even though Buenos Aires and surrounding areas flourished, by the turn of the century most interior provinces remained as destitute as they had been thirty years earlier.

The erosion of Great Britain's economic and political foothold in Brazil reached critical proportions during the 1870's, at which time England sustained dual commercial assaults by German and American interest groups. In his study of British Preëminence in Brazil, Alan K. Manchester says that the first rival to seriously threaten Britain's role in Brazil was Germany and he goes on to cite examples of this threat during 1873. While Manchester alludes to the United States as another economic rival of Great Britain during the nineteenth century, he suggests that the United States figured only as a minor competitor until World War I, when it would supplant Great Britain as the principal supplier of the South American nation. A closer examination of the sources, however, indicates that the United States was anything but a minor competitor and actually a very real threat to Great Britain during the 1870's. The study undertaken by Richard Graham discloses that the British investment in Brazil slowed down during the years 1873-1879. During this period the United States took advantage of the opportunity to increase its economic role and its political prestige in Brazil at the expense of the British.

William Wheelwright, an American merchant-mariner and entrepreneur from Massachusetts, was the successful pioneer of commercial steam navigation in the Pacific in 1840 but, as is frequently the case, his predecessors prepared the way. Steam powered the Industrial Revolution from the late eighteenth century, and was soon applied to the movement of ships. Practical steam navigation on sheltered inland waters or open oceans depended upon James Watt's development of the steam engine from 1769 to 1782, including such improvements as the use of expansive steam, external condensers which reduced the loss of heat and power, and double-acting pistons. Inventors quickly adapted the new power mechanism to boats.

The Rebellion of Paraguay (1721–1735) reveals much about imperial administration in eighteenth century Spanish South America. It demonstrates the contradictions built into an imperial structure in which a variety of people and groups with conflicting vested interests tried to influence policy. In the case of Paraguay, this situation contributed directly to rebellion. Although it sprang immediately from local economic grievances, the Rebellion was also caused by a jurisdictional dispute over who should direct the affairs of Paraguay, the audiencia of Charcas or viceroy of Peru. It thus raised the question of whom local inhabitants should obey when their superiors disagreed.

Despite the fact that the conquest of Spanish America had been primarily a military undertaking, during two centuries of Hapsburg rule the army played a secondary role, with real power and authority being vested in a pervasive civil bureaucracy. The armed groups of adelantados who had initially conquered Peru lacked the objectives and organizational structure of true militaries. Fighters rather than soldiers, their social positions defined more through the possession of encomiendas than by military functions, they cannot be ragarded as constituting a true army. In 1615, Viceroy Montesclaros informed the Crown that in any other area these soldados would be regarded as dangerous vagabonds who posed a threat to public safety.

On the 23rd of November 1876 Porfirio Díaz rode into Mexico City at the head of a “regenerating army” that had just toppled liberal President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada from power through armed insurrection. This was not an unusual incident in Mexico. Since the establishment of the Republic only two presidents had left office voluntarily at the end of their elected terms. The rest had all been deposed, usually after only a year or so in executive power, with the notable exception of Benito Juárez, who died in the office that he apparently intended to retain indefinitely, having held onto it in one way and another for fifteen years.

The years of violence in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1924) have been viewed as a period of upheaval and disruption in which governments toppled, politicians were killed or banished, and the caudillo held sway. However, in such times ideas and institutions often continue to evolve in spite of revolutionary chaos. Mexican education in the second decade of the twentieth century revealed at least two important trends of a peaceful nature: the growth of socially cohesive nationalism and the triumph of the principle of federalism in public education.

The chances of an eighteenth-century merchant's business correspondence surviving to the present are remote, but it is even less likely that an editor could persuade publishers today to issue a five-volume collection of such material. Apart from its sheer massiveness —5,600 documents and nearly 4,000 pages of text—there are several reasons that make the appearance of Negócios colonials an event of unusual significance. First, it represents a major addition to the scant literature available concerning the activities of Portuguese merchants during the first imperial centuries; second, it is by far the most extensive and diversified published collection of mercantile papers pertaining to the colonial era of the New World; and thirdly, since the papers relate to the activities of a prominent Lisbon merchant during most of Brazil's Golden Age (1695-1760), they make it possible for the first time to comprehend many of the strategies and difficulties that arose in the conduct of trade between Portugal and her most important colony during that aureate era.

Historians studying the Church in Latin American have recently been receiving excellent assistance from political scientists and sociologists such as Ivan Vallier and François Houtart, and now the present author, Thomas C. Bruneau. There certainly is a place for sociology in the study of the Catholic Church. Bruneau’s theses concerning Church development in Brazil are, therefore, vitally interesting to professional historians of this country.

The desire to see a restoration of full corporate privilege for their estate encouraged a group of New Granada’s clergymen to support the attempt of leading Creole families to replace the political predominance of the Spanish peninsulares. This political revolution contained both traditionalist and radical aspects. Most clerics strongly opposed the policies of Charles IV’s ministers, and singled out for especial criticism the favourite, Godoy. A particular cause of resentment in New Granada, as elsewhere in Spanish America, was the Consolidación de Vales Reales legislated on 28 November and 26 December 1804. Grievances extended generally to the metropolitan government’s fiscal policies, for a large measure of taxation fell upon the clergy. As in New Spain the defence of the fuero eclesiástico provided a rallying cry.