It is curious to observe how local historians generally lack historical perspective. The local historian or chronicler of a city is usually a man who in most cases has lived in the city itself, knows its little hidden corners, its narrow streets and small plazas, its characters, such as Don Francisco, Doña Agata, Jovita, etc., as Azorín would say, but, absorbed by the minutiae, the legacy of an era of leadership in government, he lives estranged from the outside world, as though the happenings in it did not affect his own city.

There existed in the United States in the late nineteenth century a strong conviction that the Nicaragua route utilizing the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua was the only satisfactory route for an interoceanic canal across the American Isthmus. Not only had Lesseps earlier favored this route for a lock canal, but the activity of the French interests in Panama, and then their failure there, had reinforced in the minds of many United States citizens their old desire for a canal across Nicaragua. But the United States interest in a Nicaragua canal had never been dependent upon what happened in Panama; in the early 1880’s, as the French began work in Panama, and later as well, sentiment in the United States favored a Nicaragua canal even though the French should ultimately succeed, for influential persons in the United States—President Hayes and General Grant among them—feared foreign monopoly of a single interoceanic waterway at a time when they had come to regard our free access to such a transit as vital to the national interest.

If, as has been asserted, the Mexican Indian owes his daily wage to the Third Mexican Council, then the attitude of that Council toward the question of Indian labor must be of surpassing importance for Mexican history. The transition of the Indian from an economy in which the wage system was unknow to a totally European system was the aim of the Spanish crown, despite such aberrations as the encomienda and the repartimiento. Any influence exercised on this progress by the Church is deserving of special study, not only because of the positive accomplishments that resulted but also because of the light that it can shed on the labor system as actually practiced in colonial Mexico.

The landing of marines in Haiti on July 28, 1915, was the climax to more than a century of political, financial, and diplomatic problems on that unhappy island. The Haitians had not been prepared for the hard-fought independence proclaimed on January 1, 1804. In the intervening years, they had been theoretically governed under fourteen constitutions. Only two of their twenty-six chief executives had managed to serve a regular constitutional term of office and then retire alive. Indeed, the occuption forces landed when an enraged mob was cutting President J. V. Guillaume Sam into pieces.

Although a border question had existed between Ecuador and Peru since independence, it was not until 1887 that they made serious efforts to resolve their mutual frontiers. The formative first phase of the dispute extended from the creation of Ecuador in 1830; the second began August 1, 1887, with the Bonifaz-Espinosa agreement and concluded in 1910 with the total collapse of the settlement procedures therein pacted. The intervening twenty-three years saw the development of arguments destined to be used to some extent even down to the present, witnessed the futile attempt of the mother country to arbitrate, and brought the major American powers into the matter for the first time.

On April 28, 1774, the Boston News-Letter published at the bottom of its first page the following “extract” of a letter it had recently received from Fayal, the Azores:

By a Vessel that arrived here last Month from Rio de Janeiro in the Brazils, we have accounts of a small Whaling Brig belonging to some Part of North-America, putting in there for Refreshments, but that Part of the crew were prevailed on either by fair or foul Means to enter on board a Portuguese Scow, to go on a Cruise of three Months a Whaling…. That the Brig still remained there in October last, with only the Captain and three People on board…. That the Portuguese provided themselves with Harpoons and other Necessaries, agreeable to the English Model, and were gone in Search of Spermaceti Whales, a Trade they have hitherto been entirely ignorant of, and are very desirous of acquiring some Knowledge in. All the oil they used to make in the Brazils was from the Bone Whales, and those they caught in such Abundance in open boats along the Shore that they migh[t] undersell any other Europeans if they were expert in their Business, but they never venture out of Sight of Shore.

On April 28, 1822, His Britannic Majesty's ship Doris, outward bound from Portsmouth, by way of Rio de Janeiro, entered the bay of Valparaíso in Chile with her flag halfmast. Aboard was the body of her captain, Thomas Graham, who had died as the vessel rounded Cape Horn. His widow Maria, looking out at the town that Sunday night, wrote in her journal:

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.

An adventuresome human experience unfolds in telling the life story of Granville Stuart, a genuine pioneer of the American West and United States minister to Uruguay and Paraguay from 1894 to 1898. Three years after his birth in Virginia in 1834, Stuart's parents moved to Iowa where he grew up in a frontier community. His father went to California in the first year of the Gold Rush, returned to Iowa in 1851 and the next spring the senior Stuart and two of his sons, Granville and James, crossed the continent to the Pacific gold fields where they mined with indifferent luck until 1857 when Stuart's sons decided to return to Iowa. The “ Mormon War ” diverted then? progress across the Great Basin, causing them to detour north into Southeastern Montana where they mined for a while and became part of that wave of settlers that pushed back the frontier in the Rocky Mountains. Stuart's first wife, an Indian woman he had married in 1862, died in 1887, leaving him with several grown children. Three years later he married Mrs. Allis Brown Fairfield, a Montana school teacher, nearly thirty years his junior, and who, like himself, had been born in Virginia and reared in Iowa. Miss Brown's parents had moved to Montana in 1879 after she had attended Sioux City (Iowa) public schools; she later studied at Vassar College and Northern Indiana Normal School, and before her marriage to Granville Stuart she taught in several one-room rural Montana schools.

Cuba experienced during the early 19th century an intellectual explosion whose impact has reverberated into the 20th century. It was sparked by a shabby, ascetic little priest with luminous eyes and an eloquent smile, who, while laboring for 25 years as a missionary in New York, kept the lines of contact open with his forward-looking followers. He believed in dignity, social justice, and freedom, under God and His Church, for every people, and he did not consider these obtainable for Cuba under Spanish rule. A Cuban scholar in our times has designated him, “Forger of the Conscience of Cuba.”

Since 1773 various official and semi-official lists of the California missions with their founding dates have been compiled, but the lists do not all agree with one another nor with the founding reports. This paper is an attempt at a critical and analytical study of the founding dates based on the founding reports, on the annual reports (estados) of the individual missions, on the beginning dates (comenzadas) on the title pages of the parochial books, on the traditional lists, and on the factors involved in the founding of the establishments. In the 1920's Father Engelhardt made some study of these lists in his various histories of the missions, but some of the findings may be questioned.

Spanish preoccupation with what seemed to be the inexhaustible mineral resources of the Andes contributed to the collapse of the highly developed agrarian economy of the Incas. The disruption of stable food production and the end of Inca political authority, which had prohibited the indiscriminate chewing of coca, led to the extensive use of the leaf among the Indians as a stimulant, a nutritive substitute, and a fetish. Within a generation after the conquest, several missionaries began to oppose the use of coca by the indigenous population. The leaf soon became the center of a controversy in the Viceroyalty of Peru, which endured in varying degrees of intensity for nearly a century.

Among the numerous failures of the Porfirio Díaz government was the lack of education in rural Mexico. Statistics reveal only a fraction of the problem. In 1910 there were 11,750,996 illiterates in the population of 15,103,542, or a total of 3,352,546 who could read or write. Illiteracy may have been even more rampant than these figures indicate. Most of Mexico was rural, and most of the effective educational efforts were in urban areas.

The question arises as to whether the leading influential groups in Mexico gave serious attention to the problem. The purpose of this article is to examine the views of five important groups or persons during that period just preceding the revolution, to determine the extent of importance assigned rural education in Mexico. The viewpoints are those of the Díaz administration, the Labor group under Ricardo Flores Magón, the Catholic Church, Francisco I. Madero, and General Bernardo Reyes.

Since Mexico now seems to be the key nation in Latin America in the implementation of President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, it becomes even more pressing that we in the United States understand the nature of the Mexican social order. As a point of departure for this effort, one might well begin by considering the basis for contemporary industrial and political development of Mexico as formulated in the years 1934-1940 under Mexico's New Deal of Lázaro Cárdenas. Sanford Mosk noted, “… what went on during the time of Cárdenas has had an indirect effect on the subsequent industrial development.” Or, as the United States Tariff Commission claimed, the reorientation of Mexico's economic and social policy has been an important part of her political life since 1910. The new program was given impetus by the Constitution of 1917, which contained important provisions for agrarian reform and for the protection of labor. Yet, aggressive implementation of the new policy began under president Lazaro Cardenas with the inauguration of the Six-Year Plan in 1934.

Before you bombard with the china and charge with the cutlery, know that I have taken counsel with my peers. My topic I put to them with a plea that they give me a judgment of my theme, or some notion of the tack I should take. “Singularly barren, your theme,” came the first response. Said the next: “You ask for a tack; I suggest a sledge hammer.” Awesome, though, was this: “If you say what ought to be said, you will be crucified; and if you don’t, can you be pleased with that?” “If you can do it undetected, slide off the subject,” advised a wily one. Another, though he discounted them, had heard rumbles, womblings I take to spring from the viscera, not the head. The secretaries of our academy assure me, however, that these infirmities, already affecting the skin, often break out in a rash upon their records.

The recent discovery of an unknown document in the Archivo General de la Nación, Caracas, Venezuela, revealed a new detail concerning the life of Simón Bolívar. This document shows the effort exerted by the Spanish colonial government in Venezuela to extradite Bolívar from Haiti in 1816.

Bolívar was forced to seek refuge abroad following a cycle of military defeats. In early 1815, Bolívar found himself outside the walls of Cartagena in need of supplies from the revolutionary forces holding that city. General Manuel del Castillo, military commander of Cartagena and an enemy and rival of Bolívar, refused to furnish the supplies or to permit Bolívar's entrance into the city. While the two rivals glared at each other in costly stalemate, Spanish troops marched victoriously toward Cartagena, pinching Bolívar between them and the hostile Castillo forces. Under these circumstances, Bolívar concluded that it would be better to leave the scene of battle and, thus, to avoid dividing the patriot army in the presence of a strong Spanish force. Bolívar resigned his commission, and on May 9, 1815, he sailed for Jamaica aboard a British vessel.