A nation's image of its past helps to determine its conduct through continuing history. When this image is particularly sharp, it becomes a sacred reference for the formulation of policy. A national image is a melange of fact, fancy, and fiction. Carefully preserved in folklore and enthroned as tradition, this image can be invoked for political purposes that transcend party and class factionalism, and serve to unite the nation in a supreme sacrifice for national purpose.

Paraguay has such an image. In its past the Paraguay of 1928 saw a peaceful, progressive people who had been plunged into a war of extermination. “Veneer ó morir!” was no idle slogan of another era. It was a destroyed, shattered Paraguay that died with the Marshal on the banks of the Aquidabán. From the terrible conflict of 1864-1870, Paraguay emerged with large areas of its claimed territory forever lost, and with much of the rest in jeopardy. The arbitration of 1878, which eliminated one greedy enemy, was still fresh in Paraguayan memories when the Vanguardia incident of 1928 once more sounded the alarm. In the intervening years an image of the Paraguayan War had taken shape.

In 1821, an independent Mexico, developing a national conscience and abundant enthusiasm, planned to declare its independence economically and socially as well as in political affairs. Unfortunately, many prominent Mexicans were unable to realize that their new nation could escape neither the Spanish past nor its Mexican present.

Mercantilism had been the prime characteristic of colonial commerce. During the colonial period, only two Mexican ports were provided for importation and exportation. These were Vera Cruz, for Atlantic trade, and Acapulco, for the Manila shipments. The whole export-import commerce of the New World was forced to pass through Spain's ports of Cádiz and Seville, and only in Spanish ships. Licensed vessels embarked at certain prescribed periods when they traveled with a convoy.

It is a notable fact that Nuño Beltrán de Guzman, whom many regard as second only in importance to Hernán Cortés in the early history of New Spain, should have escaped for so long the detailed attention of historians. Because of this neglect several false notions have gained currency. For instance, it has been customarily assumed that a Nuño de Guzmán, encomendero of Puerto Plata, Española, was the man who became governor of Panuco, president of the First Audiencia of New Spain, and governor of New Galicia; and wide acceptance has been given to the belief that the man who held these important positions in New Spain died a lonely, despised man in the royal prison of Torrejón de Velasco. Recent investigations by the author in the Spanish archives of Sevilla, Madrid, Guadalajara, and Simancas strongly suggest that the Nuño de Guzmán of Puerto Plata was not the same as the more famous Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán of Guadalajara, Spain, who held three important positions in sixteenth-century New Spain. This research has also lent new insights into the life of Nuño de Guzmán of Guadalajara before and after his career in the Indies.

The list of memorable European musicians working in New Granada begins with a chance arrival at Cartagena in 1537—Juan Pérez Materano. Dispatched from Spain with a royal appointment to head the music in a Mexican or Central American cathedral, he landed first at Cartagena. In a letter to Charles V dated October 7, 1537, the Cartagena civil officials laud his voice and bearing: these have proved so agreeable during his stopover that they have prevailed upon him to stay and to become chantre of the already functioning Cartagena cathedral, rather than continuing to Yucatán. Arriving between first and second bishops of Cartagena, Pérez Materano found a wooden cathedral but with a “very imposing and good” coro dominated by an elegant choirbook stand. By the time this primitive cathedral was burned in February of 1552, he was already teaching or was soon to teach Juan de Castellanos, the imitator of Ercilla. Castellanos in his long poem on the foundation of New Granada calls Pérez Materano a “Josquin dez Prez” in theoretical knowledge.

Mexico in the 1860's was torn by bloody civil war between liberals and conservatives, aggravated by the intervention of thousands of French troops who supported the conservative faction. This latter group set up a monarchy in Mexico headed by Emperor Maximilian von Hapsburg and soon controlled most of the country. However, the liberals and republicans under President Benito Juárez were never completely conquered; they eventually rallied and their triumph was symbolized by the execution of Maximilian in 1867. The European intervention forced President Juárez to seek aid from the United States, and he dispatched several secret agents north with orders to secure arms, men, and moral support for his government.

The student of history who is concerned with the historical past of the American Indian and who is also a reader of general American historical works is faced with a provocative problem which apparently does not seriously bother other members of the historical profession. That is, he is aware of the question of defining what is meant by the concepts of “United States history “and “American history.” Most historically minded people would solve the problem very simply: American history is the story of America’s past (meaning by “American “the United States of America only) or, Unįted States history is the story of the development of the United States as a nation and as a region.

British interest in the region of the River Plate developed relatively early, but, due to Spain's monopolistic trade policies regarding her American possessions, few Englishmen were allowed to visit that area during the colonial period. It was not until after 1810, with the declaration of independence of Argentina, that trade barriers were lifted, and countless Englishmen sailed to the port of Buenos Aires with adventure and profit in mind. This little known part of the globe attracted the most diverse personalities—unemployed soldiers, tradesmen, mining engineers, scientists, missionaries, diplomats, and just plain adventurers. The great majority seemed to have one characteristic in common, however—the English mania for keeping extensive diaries and journals.

On May 5, 1865, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento returned to the United States as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the Argentine Republic. A more accurate title would have been Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Peripatetic, for no other minister or ambassador has ever spent as much time traveling through the United States, talking to its people, and studying its institutions. He was fifty-four years old now, an aging man whose clothes were formal but untidy, whose manner was truculent and conceited, a passionately opinionated man who stated his beliefs with fire and vigor and was rude to the point of insolence to those who sought to waste his time with frivolity—and yet who managed to form many warm friendships and to arouse in many Americans a personal liking for himself and an interest in his country. He was to spend three years and four months in the United States, and they were to be years crammed with work—studying, collecting information to send to Argentina, traveling, and writing. He wrote constantly. Dozens of letters came to him every day, and he wrote dozens himself. He reported often to Argentina's Minister of Foreign Relations, and he wrote constantly to friends and advisers in the United States. During his stay in America he wrote numerous newspaper articles, on topics as varied as grape culture, votes for women, and export laws. He started a periodical, Ambas Américas, whose mission was to draw the United States and all Latin American countries closer together. He wrote and published two books: Vida de Abrán Lincoln, the first biography of Lincoln in Spanish, and Las escuelas: base de la prosperidad y la república en los Estados Unidos. He translated a book on school architecture and a biography of Horace Mann into Spanish.

There are epochs in the history of a literature which do not produce masterpieces but which contribute, nevertheless, to the history of that culture by providing new concepts and values which, in the long run, may become the germ of literary works of a broader and more universal nature. These are generally epochs of transition, lacking repose and stability, and which usually precede others more fortunate in the literary harvest. In Spain one of these periods is from 1809–1823, a turbulent, revolutionary epoch, of conspirators, pamphleteers, and philosophers, of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812, and in large measure precursor of the generation of ‘98 and its great literary flowering.

The title of this article seems to give the impression that its author is a financial expert. Unhappily, this is not the case. But—for quite unknown reasons—college professors are apt to acquire some empirical knowledge of credit facilities. Besides, I do not intend to give practical advice to anybody. I shall only try to show, how people in Puerto Rico, a century and a half ago, managed to survive—and at times prosper—in the midst of what some people used to call, not very affectionately, the “money complex.”

What makes the question interesting is the lack of banks or other credit institutions. Apparently, the first small savings banks did not appear until the 1870's. The paucity, if not the absolute absence, of liquid capital characterizes Puerto Rico until the period under study. Such a state of affairs had remote causes. Puerto Rico, as Spain's second colony in the New World, had had a prosperous start in the sixteenth century. Some gold was found, and the first ingenio was set up. But in the 1520's an exodus was set off by the attraction of the fabulous mineral wealth of the continent that was being conquered, an exodus that the threat of the death penalty was not able to stop effectively. The lack of sufficient settlers was then the initial cause of Puerto Rico's economic stagnation. Naturally, the following two hundred years should have been more than sufficient to allow recovery, for—popular beliefs to the contrary—mineral wealth was not the only source of economic prosperity in the Spanish monarchy. As a sample, the Philippines exported Chinese goods, Central America cocoa and dyestuff, Venezuela cocoa and tobacco, Guayaquil cocoa and timber, Quito textiles, Peru wine and flour, Chile flour and timber, Tucumán mules, Buenos Aires hides, and Cuba sugar and tobacco.

In the history of Spain's spiritual conquest of the New World, a definite cycle of enthusiasm may be observed. In the seventeenth century, for example, there was a noticeable falling off of Spanish missionary effort in the direction of the tribes yet to be converted. It is interesting to speculate on the causes of this phenomenon. An obvious cause, and certainly a contributing one, lies in the very nature of man. Human endeavor in the temporal order tends now to wax, now to wane in enthusiasm, and since the mission effort in question was human as well as divine, this cycle would tend to appear here as well. Around midcentury this problem of lessening enthusiasm became acute.

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.

It is a well known fact that Brazil today is the greatest producer of iron and steel in all of Latin America. It is less well known that this industry is one of the oldest in the nation. Any effort to trace the development of this iron-working industry from its earliest sources should take into consideration the contributions of the Jesuits. As early as 1554, Father José Anchieta informed his Jesuit superiors and the king of Portugal of the existence of iron ore deposits in the interior of the captaincy of São Vicente (later São Paulo). Even more important in this respect was a forge established by the Jesuit Mateus Nogueira which in 1556 was instrumental in the manufacture of fishhooks, knives, wedges, shovels and other such implements used in the support of his community. These are claimed to be the first implements made from iron in Brazil.

In 1898 the United States fought Spain, terminating her colonial empire in the Americas and in the Pacific. With this conquest came problems for the United States in Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. From October 18, 1898, to May 1, 1900, United States military governments controlled the island of Puerto Rico; and on April 12, 1900 the President of the United States approved the organic act (Foraker Act) which Congress had passed as the first civil government for Puerto Rico. The study of Church-state relations in this period is an interesting one, since it represents the conflict of two widely different conćepts: a residue of Spanish patronage which fostered the Church and its schools while confining the activity of the Church because of paternalism, anti-clericalism and a trend toward the philosophy of positivism; and Yankee-Americanism that was dominantly Protestant and wedded to the proposition that the Church must be separated from the state. It was a rugged wrenching that brought the Puerto Rican Church from a position of dependency to that of autonomy and self-support. The Church, moreover, had to engage in a political and legal fight for the retention of such properties as schools, churches, and cemeteries. Into the fray came such interested competitors as a United States Commission sent by President McKinley to report on the conditions in Puerto Rico, a small but vocal group of anti-clerical Puerto Ricans, three military governments, and the first civil governors.

In our preoccupation with the Spaniards of earlier centuries and their subsequent impact on the history of the United States, we have tended to overlook the Spanish immigrants of modern decades. The presence of large numbers of Spanish family names in the United States, particularly in New York City and in western states, has obscured the fact that very few Spaniards have come to the United States directly from Spain. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate the data on modern movements of Spaniards to the Americas in general, with special emphasis on the United States, and to consider the pattern of Spanish settlement in the United States that resulted from these movements.

Civil War broke out in Spain in 1936. Following eight years of dictatorship by General Primo de Rivera, who had acted with the approval of King Alfonso XIII, elections were held in June, 1931, for a constituent assembly. The election returns brought in a republican-socialist majority, which forbade the king’s return, confiscated his property, and proclaimed Spain a republic. The republic had enemies on both the right and the left. The large landholders, the army, and the Church had vested interests which the republic proceeded to attack. On the left, the anarchists and socialists became more /radical, competing for the loyalty of the Spanish workers. The republic’s problems were compounded by the traditional separatist movements of Catalans, Basques, and Gallegans. Power shifted from the left in 1931 to the right in 1933, and, finally, in February, 1936, to a “popular front “government. The Popular Front, however, proved to be a coalition for election purposes only. Largo Caballero, the leader of the left wing of the socialists, declined to serve in the moderate Azaña cabinet. In July, 1936, army, monarchist, clerical, and Carlist groups joined with the Falange to bring about a counter-revolutionary coup under the leadership of General Francisco Franco. The Civil War had started. It was to last for three brutality-filled years.

During the conquest of New Spain the Tarascan kingdom of Michoacán was one of the richest areas to submit to Spanish control without significant resistance. Shortly after the capitulation of Tenochtitlán the native king of Michoacán, called the Cazonci, exchanged ambassadors of peace and friendship with Henando Cortés. The Spanish commander gladly accepted the submission of this strong Indian nation which had repelled all attempts at conquest by the Mexican Empire.

The Mexican savant, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700), was mathematician, astronomer, linguist, cartographer, historian, and New Spain's most successful collector of manuscripts containing Mexican antiquities. His generosity in helping other scholars knew no bounds, as Vetancurt, Gemelli Carreri and even European and Oriental savants attested. Don Carlos not only devoted himself to the acquisition of an encyclopedic knowledge, to the collecting of valuable documents and to the helping of fellow scholars, but he also found time to publish numerous books, for the most part of a historical nature. Unlike his contemporary Kino or Bolton of our own days, Sigüenza y Góngora ordinarily did not pursue his historical investigation over desert and ocean trail. He preferred the quiet of his study to the excitement of distant exploration.

The publication of a handsome facsimile edition of the Cortés Codex in the National Library at Vienna makes it peculiarly appropriate to raise again the long-disputed question why the volume was prepared and what the circumstances were that brought it to the Imperial Library at Vienna. The story of how the codex came to the attention of scholars is well known. In preparing his History of America, William Robertson hunted for Cortés' first letter in Spain without success. He then thought that since Charles V was in the Germanies when the letter arrived in Spain, it might have been forwarded to him and thereafter deposited in the Hapsburg Imperial Library in Vienna. Through the good offices of Sir Robert Murray, then British ambassador at the imperial court, permission was obtained from Empress Maria Theresa for a search not merely for the letter but also for any papers of interest for the History of America. The search did not bring to light the lost first letter but did uncover the Cortés Codex, and in it the letter of the city council of Veracruz written at the same time as Cortés' first letter. The codex contains also a copy of the fifth carta de relatión of Cortés, unknown until then but now known to exist in other manuscript versions. Since Robertson's day, the Cortés Codex has been consulted continually. It has served as the basis for verifying the texts of those relaciones for which there are other copies, and is the sole source for the letter of the city council of Veracruz, which is usually published as the first carta de relatión.