Scholars who have studied the Franciscan effort in New Mexico during the Spanish colonial epoch have generally posited that the watershed event in the missionary program was the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Thus, the periodization for the Order's evangelical effort has been structured in two parts: pre-1680 and post-reconquest (1692-1821). One need only compare Fray Alonso de Benavides's glowing description of his brethren's work in the region in 1630 with that of Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante's harsh rebuke to the friars in 1777 to realize fundamental changes had occurred in the missionization process. Benavides's Franciscans are ardent, ascetic, and capable missionary priests. Consequently, prior to 1680, the Franciscan Order, in what the Spanish called the Kingdom of New Mexico, was able to maintain a high degree of authority, power, and prestige especially in regard to its relations with the local population and civil government. On the other hand, the missionaries condemned by Escalante are complacent, contentious idlers. While there are a dearth of studies on the post-1692 Franciscans, historians who have ventured into the era suggest a significant erosion in the quality and dedication of the later missionaries. The conclusion, then, is that these less committed friars were at least partially responsible for the decline of the Order's position within the Kingdom.

The end of World War I marked the beginning of a new era in European migration to Brazil. The immigrants that had poured into the “país do futuro” (country of the future) now came at only a trickle and the number of entries fell by over fifty percent between 1913 and 1914 and by another sixty percent the year after. In 1918 fewer than 20,000 immigrants entered Brazil, a low that would not again be approached until 1936. Even so, between 1918 and 1919 the number of arrivals to Brazil's ports almost doubled, and in 1920 almost doubled again, reaching 69,000.

Post-war immigrants to Brazil differed in many ways from the pre-war group, both in national origin and in their views of success and opportunity. Although Portuguese, Italians, Spanish, and German immigrants continued to predominate, between 1924 and 1934 East European immigration to Brazil increased almost ten times to more than 93,000, representing about 8.5 percent of the total. Most of the East Europeans who migrated to Brazil in the quarter century after World War I were those fleeing the upheavals created by the establishment of the state of Poland. At the same time quotas and other forms of restriction in the U.S., Argentina, and Canada increasingly led potential migrants to look towards Brazil. The frequently destitute East Europeans rarely enjoyed the support of their often powerless governments, a factor that made such immigrants attractive to Brazil's large landowners. In 1927, a contract between the Polish Government and Brazil's Secretary of Agriculture for the transportation of 2,000 Polish families was partially based on the belief that the mixing of “docile” East Europeans with more “volatile” Southern Europeans would “go a long way to obviate any labor trouble that might otherwise occur.” Whatever positive attributes the East Europeans might have presented to Brazilian elites in terms of “dividing and conquering,” the Lithuanian government complained that the condition of its 20,000 immigrants was “so pitiable … that (we) might be forced to repatriate them.”

A recent edited study of U.S. ambassadors assigned to Latin American countries beset by economic and political crises assesses the importance of individuals as determinants of U.S. foreign policy. Although the authors differed in their conclusions, two in particular suggested that even ambassadors who enjoyed great operational independence rarely disagreed with the ideological premises of their superiors in Washington. Historian Louis A. Pérez, for example, portrayed U.S. ambassador to Cuba Sumner Welles as “an active powerbroker” who “operated out of a defined ideological framework, a world view that allowed him to recognize social forces as potential friend or likely foe to U.S. interests.” Welles's attempt in 1933 to remove Cuban President Ramón Grau San Martin, who had abrogated the Platt Amendment, coincided with the State Department's policy of keeping Cuba favorable to U.S. economic and strategic interests. Scholar Jan Knippers Black came to a similar conclusion about the role of Ambassador Lincoln Gordon in the 1964 overthrow of leftist Brazilian President João Goulart. Black found it “extremely difficult to isolate his [Gordon's] imprint on more fundamental aspects of policy … it seems unlikely that U.S. policies and actions would have differed in any significant way, had some other individual been serving at that time and place as ambassador.”

About twenty years ago, the Mexican SepSetentas series published La historia económica en América Latina, the proceedings of a symposium held at the thirty-ninth International Congress of Americanists. For many novice historians of Mexico, the SepSetentas collectionavailable for ten (very old) pesos each at fine shops in the Metro, or at Sanborns-were Penguins or Pelicans of a lesser sort. Graduate students eagerly awaited new volumes, and scoured the streets for older ones. SepSetentas published some first-rate items, and, alas, some not-so-first-rate ones. La historia económica en América Latina was a keeper. Its second volume contained useful bibliographies and historiographical essays by Enrique Florescano, David Brading, Woodrow Borah and Sherburne Cook, and Jan Bazant. To take just one example, Brading noticed that no one had reconciled Chevalier's Land and Society with Borah's New Spain's Century of Depression. “Where should one look to study domestic industry or commerce?” Brading wondered. The accounts of the Royal Treasury had not been systematically exploited. The tobacco industry had yet to find its historian. The costs of Spanish colonialism were essentially unknown. The proper scope of rural history was the regional study. And so on. Obviously, Brading's essay proved remarkably prescient. Historians in Mexico, Great Britain, Western Europe, the United States and Canada have all had a hand in carrying out the agenda that Brading proposed. We have, as the song says, come a long way. The latest and most comprehensive measure of our progress is the long-awaited appearance of Richard Garner's (with Spiro E. Stefanou) Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).