Uruguay's late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economic modernisation and political institutionalisation were accompanied by the education reform led by José Pedro and Jacobo Varela, which was extended to the whole country during the administrations of José Batlle y Ordóñez. Schools were to insert future generations into the capitalist world market and a more liberal polity. This article explores how official manuals and related texts constructed the nation. They invented a foundation narrative that made José Artigas a protagonist of independence; converted Amerindians into extinct ancestors; represented European immigrants as dynamic elements who, rightly mixed, would form a new ethnic group and help the cosmopolitan lettered city to civilise the gaucho; and taught children that hard work and education held the key to prosperity.

Although partisan bias – when an authority transfers discretionary public resources to a politically aligned receiver − has been extensively studied, less is known about how this practice is affected by the voting regime − compulsory or voluntary voting. In this article, I study partisan bias in Chile, using administrative data of transfers from the central authority to local governments, highlighting two relevant scope conditions: the electoral cycle, and electoral uncertainty caused by the adoption of voluntary voting. I found strong evidence of partisan bias, especially in election years and in electorally riskier municipalities. This suggests that the uncertainty introduced by this electoral reform induced politicians to allocate a large share of resources to risky municipalities, because such resources would play a more significant role in the electoral outcome. Overall, these results imply that voluntary voting has a large impact on the way that resources are allocated across subnational units.

Recent explanations of the crisis in Uruguay have tended to focus either on the inadequacies of economic policy in the 1950s, or on the financial and moral implications of the social legislation of Uruguay. This article puts forward an alternative interpretation of the crisis, finding the fundamental causes of it in the manner in which modernizing forces were reconciled to traditional structures in the early decades of this century. The first section discusses the nature of the economic crisis, its immediate causes and some of its political repercussions. The second analyses Uruguay's reputation for political and social modernity. The third suggests the origins of the crisis in the policies of José Batlle y Ordóñez and the consequences they have had. The sections, therefore, broadly correspond to three different perspectives on the crisis–the first economic, the second political, the third historical.

Social scientists make a fundamental assumption about the nature of the relationship between theory and fact. For them, theories are seen, not as guides to individual behaviour, but as tools for the clinical investigation of social processes. The end of this search is a better theory. A theory has most chance of acceptance if it seems elegantly to order a very large number of hitherto unrelated facts.

Does political science advance or do fashions merely change? There can be no doubt that this past decade has seen a major change in the ways in which the nature of military rule in Latin America has been examined. To a large extent, this has been due to changes in the nature of Latin American governments themselves and, more particularly, to the emergence of the long term military-bureaucratic (sometimes called bureaucratic-authotitarian) government.

The growth of a transportation system in Minas Gerais, especially the construction of a rail network in the province's booming coffee region, the Zona da Mata (the Forest Zone) in the late Empire, is an important chapter in the state's history. A close look at railroads in the Mata and in Minas tells us much about politics and the power and influence of certain groups, particularly planters and planter-politicians. Conflicts over railroad concessions provoked much rivalry within the Mata, but all mineiros agreed that transportation was the most important issue of the day. Meanwhile, flumimnses and paulistas were more preoccupied with the labour crisis. Hindsight permits us to say that transportation is not the key to understanding the development of Minas, at least not to the extent that contemporaries thought it was. Ecological factors, labour conditions and the onset of the national overproduction crisis in 1896 had more to do with the rise and fall of coffee exports than did railroads. However, coffee planters from the wealthy Mata and other mineiros from the province's less prosperous regions always credited railroads with the good things that went with economic development.

Even at first glance, one can see remarkable similarities in the topography, geography and patterns of land use of the west coast republics of South America and of the states of Australia which stretch along that continent's eastern and southeastern shores. Not only are the latitudinal parameters comparable, but similarities in climate and patterns of agriculture abound. The resemblances are particularly defined as we consider the geographical extravagance of Chile and compare it alone to the eastern edge of Australia.

On 7 November 1961, a crucial date in modern Ecuadorian political history, Dr José María Velasco Ibarra, constitutional President of the Republic of Ecuador, was deposed from his high office and sought refuge in the Mexican Embassy. The apparent stability that had characterized the country's political life since 1948 was shattered. The pattern of politics since November 1961 is similar in many respects to that which occurred in the decades between the two World Wars. Coups d'état, dictatorships and military juntas are political phenomena common to both periods. The military intervention which to Velasco's dewnfall in 1961 re-established a convention which had been dormant since 1947.

By the time Evita* died on 26 July 1952, she had become the source of two widely contradictory myths coexisting side by side as if their subject were two different persons. In one, she was the beloved saint who had sacrificed her life for the poor; in the other, the ambitious parvenue who used her power to satisfy her insatiable thirst for revenge.