In the present issue, LARR initiates a change in its Current Research Inventory section. The Research Inventory now will be published only once a year, in the final number of each volume, rather than in three installments broken down along geographical lines.

Why Should Anyone be Interested in the Spanish Borderlands of the southeastern United States during the last years of the Spanish occupation, and what has occurred that makes the area of more than passing interest at the present time ? First, this area of Spain's New World colonial empire was unique. And second, the availability of a significant amount of new source material has given rise to a healthy increase in scholarly interest and productivity during the past decade.

The Prevalent Theory of Revolution—After Restricting the Dimensions of the phenomenon under study to only one aspect, that ending with the seizure of power—distinguishes between preconditions and precipitants. Preconditions are “the crucial concern of men of affairs….” Precipitants, “by their very nature,” are ephemeral phenomena and cannot be anticipated. The conservative bias of this elaboration is obvious. By definition revolution is subsumed into the category of “civil strife,” thus eliminating all those phases of the process potentially as creative as the one following the seizure of power. Theoretical relevance, then, is assigned only to those elements of the phenomenon susceptible of preventive treatment—the preconditions. Finally, the events able to unleash the revolutionary process are relegated to the conditions of accidents—“they only happen”—and, consequently, are disregarded.

When One Examines the Research and Writing on Spanish Colonial Alabama, 1780-1813, it is possible to conclude that this area has received the least emphasis of all Spanish Borderlands. This is unfortunate because there are tens of thousands of original sources extant. As the director of a University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa research project, which began in 1966, Holmes collected some 20,000 pages of documents from Sevilla and Simancas on microfilm. The so-called “Holmes Collection” has been copied for several libraries in the Southeast, including Alabama, Auburn, Florida, West Florida and Tulane universities. A brief description of the twenty-nine reels appears in Coker and Holmes (1971).

In this issue of larr we publish a symposium of three interconnected Articles on the developing subject of the social history of Latin America in the colonial period.

The three papers originated with a session of the 1968 annual meeting of the American Historical Association. At that meeting, Professors Frederick P. Bowser and Karen Spalding presented papers, Professor James Lockhart gave a commentary, and the Editor was chairman. The three authors* negative reaction to the conventional wording of the session title, together with other historiographical positions they held in common, made them aware that a new movement in social and ethnic history was taking shape in the colonial Spanish American field. The three colonialists and the Editor of LARR therefore began to plan the joint publication in LARR of articles which would take formal cognizance of the movement and make its scattered members more aware of the issues in the field and of the activities of other scholars engaged in related research.

“Social History” should be readily definable as the study of historical phenomena which transcend the individual and manifest themselves in human groups. But such a definition includes almost all meaningful history; it seems to fit precisely those political and institutional studies to which social history is ordinarily contrasted. Since our main concern here is with practical historiography rather than with questions of genre, I will simply indicate through description and elimination the kind of history I mean.

The Resort to Violence by University Students Has Become A Common occurrence not only in developing countries but also in the more industrialized ones. Voluminous recent literature on the general subject of violence has not greatly expanded our understanding of this important problem. Similarly, literature on student movements is increasing but analyses of student violence per se are still scarce. We know less about the causes of student violence than we do about the scope and intensity of the phenomenon, yet why, when, how, and under what conditions people resort to violence are still unresolved questions. Partial answers are in, although to what effect remains to be seen.

In the Great Struggle for the Mastery of the North American Continent during the second half of the eighteenth century, the major European powers—Britain, France, and Spain—confronted each other on the lower Mississippi and along the Florida frontier. The fate of both East and West Florida was determined by this titanic struggle. Britain emerged from the Seven Years' War as the mightiest nation on earth. Her fleet had captured Havana, and to redeem this valuable port Spain agreed to cede the Floridas.

Historians who have sought to examine the native societies of the Americas, whether before or after the European conquest, have often felt a need to go beyond the traditional bounds of the discipline, loose as they are, in their efforts to comprehend the values and the actions of people whose societies did not conform to the European pattern. In the study of Indian societies, anthropology and history joined early and have continued to collaborate; the very term ethnohistory, which some would consider an unnecessary coining of a new name for social history, is clear evidence of this union. Further evidence, if such be necessary, is provided by the degree to which scholars have drawn upon the approaches and conclusions of both disciplines in their work. While this practice is of long standing, earlier work showed a general tendency to utilize the data and the conclusions of other disciplines, rather than drawing upon the theories and the approaches developed by others in order to reexamine one's own materials. This highly pragmatic approach to the potential contributions of other disciplines is increasingly giving way to deeper collaboration and interchange.

Establishing Boundaries for Spanish West Florida is No Simple Matter. Under consideration is not the entire province of Spanish West Florida stretching to the Mississippi but the smaller region bounded on the west by the Perdido River, the Suwannee River on the east, the Gulf of Mexico on the south, and the uncertain boundary with the United States on the north. Pensacola and San Marcos are two principal settlements, and this area approximates the western panhandle of the present-day state of Florida. When Spain acquired West Florida in 1783 the British boundary was the Apalachicola River, but Spain in 1785 moved it eastward to the the Suwanee River. (Few maps indicate this eastward shift.) The purpose of making the Suwannee River the eastern boundary was to transfer San Marcos and the province of Apalachee from East Florida to West Florida. After the 1795 Pinckney Treaty Spain and the United States agreed that the northern boundary was the thirty-first parallel west from the Chattahoochee River and the parallel intersecting the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers running eastward. Until after the Pinckney Treaty went into effect in the late 1790s, Spanish West Florida's northern boundary was indefinite. Spain regarded the Yazoo parallel, the Tennessee, Cumberland, or even Ohio rivers as the northern limit. This meant that for well over a decade Spain considered the western part of Georgia, the eastern part of Alabama, along with bits of Tennessee and North Carolina, as part of West Florida.

The Renaissance of Interest in Spanish Louisiana Over the Past Ten Years owes much to the acquisition of important document collections by such universities as Loyola in New Orleans, Northwestern of Louisiana, Tulane and Memphis State. Graduate students and scholars who lacked sufficient funds for research in Europe now find adequate materials in the United States.

In the last four decades, forces and events too obvious and too menacing for restatement here have prompted a dramatic increase in scholarly investigation of all facets of the African experience in the Western Hemisphere. The study of the black man in colonial Spanish America, which dates from the early seventeenth century, has profited as a matter of course from this development. The bibliography for the colonial period increases with every passing year, and virtually every region of Spanish America, from Hispaniola and Mexico to Argentina and Chile, is represented by at least one scholarly work. Further, continuing scholarly endeavor is certain to increase both the depth and breadth of our knowledge in the immediate future.

Throughout most of the fifties and sixties many latin american governments adopted Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) as their principal method to achieve economic growth and socio-economic modernization. By the opening of the Seventies, however, there is considerable doubt about ISI's success in solving the region's development problems. In many countries the possibilities for further import-substitution had disappeared. Industrial growth had slowed, job opportunities in industry for Latin America's rapidly growing urban population were scarce, income distribution had in many countries either remained unchanged or had become more concentrated than in the early post-World War II years, and most industrial goods produced within the region were priced so high that export possibilities were severely limited.

One of the Reasons Given for the Neglect of the Spanish Era in Mississippi history has been the concentration of historians and writers on the Civil War which has overshadowed everything else. To that conclusion should be added a second consideration. The attention of a large number of graduate students has been centered on those four horsemen (one horsewoman) of Mississippi literature, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, James Street and Eudora Welty. A brief examination suggests that there have been more graduate studies written on these authors in the last thirty years than on any single topic of Mississippi history, the Civil War notwithstanding. The number of theses and dissertations on Faulkner alone would make an impressive bibliography. Without any visible decrease in the devotion shown Faulkner and his literary companions, the decade of the 1960s may be considered the renaissance for the study of Spanish Mississippi. Not that there have been any large number of people working in that period; but, because a few dedicated scholars of the younger generation, notably Jack D. L. Holmes, have worked energetically and productively on the years of the Spanish domination. The renewed interest in that fascinating age stimulated by Holmes and others is responsible for this survey which attempts to assess the state of historical and other scholarly studies for Spanish Mississippi. But what specific geographic area does this term embrace?