For eight years I was associated with one of the most quixotic efforts in academic publishing—a journal concerned comprehensively with research about an area of the world. I must admit that when the Latin American Research Review (LARR) was about to move to Chapel Hill, I thought the original idea that had given birth to the journal had lost its vitality. The notion of reviewing research seemed restrictive and either excessively specialized or hopelessly protean. The dramatic increase in the training of Latin Americanists and the resulting explosion of publications about the region by the end of the 1960s seemed to threaten with extinction the rara avis that had been the journal's stock in trade, the review of the literature. In 1974, when John Martz and I assumed control of LARR, it was hard to imagine anyone repeating Richard Morse's feat in the two-part article on urban studies, “Trends and Issues in Latin American Urban Research, 1965-1970” (LARR volume 6, numbers 1 and 2 [1971]). The mere suggestion of surveying the field of colonial history in three articles, as James Lockhart, Karen Spalding, and Frederick Bowser had done in 1972, would have brought an incredulous curl to the nether lip of a student of that field just two years later. The fact that we received virtually no backlog of manuscripts from our predecessors appeared symbolic of the well having run dry.