Who supported National Socialism in Germany, and why? The conventional answers are well-supported and satisfying. The Nazis, we know, gained their decisive electoral support from those “middle” groups of German society that belonged neither to the elite nor to the proletariat and that lay outside the two great “camps”-Socialist and Catholic-of German political life. That means, to name the most significant categories, Protestant (or at least secularized) peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and white-collar workers, and even some nonunionized manual workers, most of them probably skilled.

The theories which have been offered to explain the governmental instability and persistent political fragmentation of the Third Republic have been of two basic types. Either specific institutional structures have been blamed, or the French national character has been cited. Often-mentioned institutional weaknesses have included the multi-party system, the dominance of the legislative branch, the independent and authoritarian civil service, the various electoral systems tried–especially the two-ballot system and proportional representation–and so on. Aspects of political culture which are said to have contributed to instability and ineffective government include an innate distrust of leaders, the avoidance of face-to-face confrontation and compromise, the lack of a training for democracy in voluntary associations, and an authoritarian educational system. The common element in all of these explanations is that they begin at the top; they see France as a uniform society with “average” ways of doing things. That is, these explanations assume that the explanation to instability and fragmentation can be found at the national level by studying the aggregate characteristics of French men and women or by analyzing the political institutions of the nation-state.

Colonial Latin American societies have generally been presented as systems of estates following forms that were firmly entrenched in Europe before the Spanish conquest in America, an estate being “a legally defined segment of the population of a society which has distinctive rights and duties established by law” (Lenski 1966:77). Lyle McAlister suggests that the American equivalent of a threefold European system of noble—clergy—commoner estates was represented by broad racial classifications: Spaniards—Castas—Indians.

Most runaway slave communities in the Americas were quickly overcome by whites. However, a good many of those communities not only survived but became legally recognized towns whose residents eventually blended into the surrounding population. The first part of this article attempts to demonstrate that, although whites managed to eventually destroy most New World fugitive slave settlements, a surprising number of them managed to survive. The second section analyzes the social, demographic, and economic changes that one such community, called Mandinga, went through in evolving from a runaway hideout to a legal township.

The role of regional associations in urbanization has been the subject of recent debate. From the study of clubs in Lima, Peru, Mangin( 1959) and Doughty (1969) conclude that their role is threefold: to act as a mechanism to integrate the rural migrant into the urban and potentially hostile environment, to act as an agent to promote home-town development, and to contribute to the social and political integration of the nation. The evidence discussed by Little (1973) from a number of African countries supports the first of these contentions. However, in an article in volume 17 of CSSH, Jongkind (1974), also using data from Lima, has strongly challenged these three supposed roles, finding that they cannot “survive the test of empirical criticism.” He argues that the regional associations are composed of elitist, well adjusted and successful migrants and that they are definitely urban institutions, not rural enclaves in the city as Mangin and Doughty have implied.