Luiz da França Pinto Garcez, a representative nineteenth-century Brazilian general, was born in Lisbon in 1799, the son of General Luiz Paulino de Oliveira Pinto da França. His family migrated to Brazil in 1808 with João VI and in September, 1811 at the age of twelve, young Luiz joined the Bahia light infantry legion as a cadet, a position open to him because of his father's military rank. After obtaining a transfer to the First Cavalry Regiment in Rio de Janeiro in 1813, he received permission to enroll at the Royal Military Academy. His studies were interrupted four years later when he joined the government force sent to crush the 1817 Pernambuco revolt. For his services in that campaign, he was awarded the rank of lieutenant and, upon return to the imperial capital in 1819, he learned of his appointment as adjutant to the Inspector General of Cavalry and light Infantry in Bahia with the rank of captain.

Scholars have long taken interest in the conversion of African slaves to Christianity in the New World which have mixed, to one degree or another, African religious forms with Christianity. The process has been studied in greatest depth by sociologists, such as Roger Bastide, anthropologists like Melville Herskovitts or art historians such as Robert Farris Thompson. Although the most devoted of the scholars concerned with this have not been historians, and much of the basic research has been in current practices rather than historic origins of African and Afro-New World religions, all scholars share some vision of the historical process. In this vision African and European religions and world views meshed in a past which is far beyond the memory of modern informants and probably dates back to the early days of Afro-European contacts.

In the twilight years of the eighteenth century, Spanish authorities of church and state resolved that the original Franciscan missions of Texas had achieved the goal of their early foundation, namely conversion of indigenous cultures to an Hispano-European lifestyle. Cognizant that the mission as a frontier agency had gained souls for the Catholic faith and citizens for the empire, Hispanic officials initiated secularization of the Texas establishments with the longest tenure, beginning with the missions along the upper San Antonio River. Less than a generation later, in the transition from Spanish dominion to Mexican rule in the nineteenth century, the Franciscan institutions, woefully in a condition of material neglect, engendered widespread secular avarice as numerous applicants with political contact in municipal government energetically competed to obtain land grants among the former mission temporalities.

Mexico's Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition founded by Philip II in January 1569 had developed its bureacratic structure by the first decade of the seventeenth century. Spectacular autos de fé between 1574 and 1601 allowed the Tribunal to establish its reputation in the colony and to augment its financial base beyond the yearly 10,000 peso subvention provided by the Spanish monarchy. Trials of crypto-Jews in the 1590s netted considerable income and caused the king to cease his payment of inquisitional salaries for a time. During the first decade of the seventeenth century the Tribunal petitioned the crown to assign the income from a series of cathedral canonries for support of the Inquisition bureaucracy. Between 1629 and 1636 “reserved” canonries were established for Holy Office income and by 1650 nine of these were generating the Inquisition's salary budget. It was always understood that royal subsidies were to decrease as canonry income paid salaries. All other expenses had to come from judicial fines.

Historians have long been interested in shedding light on the numerous, habitual transactions that constitute economic life at its basic level. Yet, questions about how men transact business as individuals, and how they feel about it are largely unanswered by traditional political and bureaucratic records, perhaps because these activities were so commonplace to the society, so well-known and unremarkable to contemporaries as to obviate remark in the records. A study of the extensive records of the Roman Catholic Church, however, can shed light on this, and many other aspects of Spanish colonial society in Mexico.

Muffled by the night and sobered by their unexpectedly serious task, Corregidor José Manrique y Guzmán and two squads of militia quietly approached the Jesuit college of Arequipa at four o'clock on the morning of September 17, 1767. Manrique had secretly gathered his scribe and the troops during the night after receiving an astounding royal decree from Viceroy Amat in Lima. The top-secret dispatch ordered Manrique to detain all Jesuits within the province of Arequipa in preparation for their expulsion from the Spanish empire. Similar orders had gone out to royal officials throughout Charles III's domains. In Arequipa Manrique found all but three of the local Jesuits housed within the college. He read them the royal edict, placed them under house arrest until provisions could be made for transporting them to Lima, ordered the detention of the three padres absent from the college, and confiscated all the Jesuits' properties.

Popular disturbances can assume a wide variety of forms which account for the efforts of sociologists, psychologists, and historians to formulate crowd-classification systems. The classification and description of a popular disturbance, however, is not an end in itself, but is useful primarily as a tool to allow the historian to peer more closely at the society suffering conflict. The study of popular disturbances yields historical information on two levels: information about the disturbance itself; and, much more significantly, information about the social, political, and economic relationships evident among sectors of the population at the time of the disturbance. This paper, based principally on archival records only recently brought to light, proposes to examine the mining revolt of August 1766 in Real del Monte of New Spain on these two levels.

Scholars of the British experience in Latin America have given considerable attention to the adventures of the two Scottish merchants John Parish Robertson and his brother William, who visited Paraguay between 1811 and 1814. The image of the taciturn Dictator José Gaspar de Francia attempting to use the two British subjects to establish commercial links with Europe has appeared in virtually all histories of the period. Francia's failure in this regard, we are frequently told, ushered in a period of self-imposed isolation for Paraguay. Few foreigners, merchants or otherwise, were permitted to breech the barriers set up by the Dictator and Paraguay quickly took on the reputation of an “inland Japan.” That these barriers were not as absolute as the traditional portrayal would suggest has been established only in the last fifteen years. With few exceptions, the historical accounts have assumed that, with the departure of the Robertsons, British merchants lost all interest in Paraguay. In fact, however, a strong desire to “open” the trade of that country characterized the British mercantile community of Buenos Aires throughout the life of the Dictator and, on one occasion at the very end of Dr. Francia's reign, a concerted effort was made by certain Britons to reintroduce British commerce to Paraguay.

The history of African slave societies in the New World can be divided into three distinct phases—formation, maturity and decline. The third, the demise of the slave order, will be the focus of attention in the present discussion. There appear to be three general patterns to the decline of slave societies in the Americas. The first, exemplified by the United States and Haiti, came quickly, but at a time when the slave order was deeply entrenched, engendering profound resistance accompanied by a civil war. In the second, demonstrated by Cuba and Brazil, it occurred over the course of a few decades, involving a more varied combination of international pressure, slave resistance and a transformation of the labor regime utilizing both recently freed slaves and imported foreign workers. Of the third prototype, in which Mexico and Colombia represent cases in point, it was a seemingly undramatic, very slow process encompassing several generations, during which slavery appeared to wither away. This essay will examine the fate of slavery in Mexico, a topic which has been mentioned in various works, but has not been examined in detail. It is important not only for comparative purposes, but also for understanding the social history of late-colonial Mexico.

The existence of racial democracy in Brazil has long since come into serious question. The work of sociologists like Florestan Fernandes and historians like Carl Degler has demonstrated the fact of racial discrimination in Brazil, yet the history of race relations in Brazil still seems to stand in contrast to that of the United States. Occurrences of widespread racial violence and the organization of militant movements for social, economic, and political equality take up little space in the historical literature dealing with Brazil. The apparent lack of endemic racial conflict in Brazil has been explained as the result of the marginalization of black people in Brazilian capitalism or as the result of a social mechanism like Degler's “mulatto escape hatch,” which separates the mass of black people from their natural leaders. Consequently, a consciousness of racial solidarity did not develop as the basis for political organization. Without such organization, black people could not effectively confront the white power structure on the issues of race, and, ultimately, class discrimination.

With the acceptance of the Federal Constitution of 1853 by the province of Buenos Aires in 1862 and the assumption of the presidency of the Nation by Bartolomé Mitre, the main constitutional problem besetting the region since independence was, in theory at least, solved. The permanent location of the capital had not been settled, but a national government was a reality. Leaders who had brought about the downfall of Rosas, negotiated an end to full-scale civil war, and organized the outline of the patria grande now faced new challenges. The spirit of anarchy, the rule of force, provincial allegiances, and a widely scattered, largely illiterate population were awesome impediments to the creation of a modern nation state. The response to these problems by the politicians, economists, scholars, technocrats, artists, and soldiers of Argentina during the last forty years of the nineteenth century, working towards the goal of a unified, peaceful and cultivated nation, is an enthralling topic.

In June, 1945, Time Magazine informed its readers that the North American singer, Robert Todd Duncan, had been refused accomodations by three prominent hotels in Caracas, Venezuela. This news, came as a shock to many Venezuelans who had considered their nation a racial democracy in which discrimination and prejudice did not exist. They felt doubly disturbed because a North American news magazine charged that the hotels had refused to admit Duncan, his wife, and his accompanist, William Allen, because of their race. They resented the fact that representatives of the press in the most racist society of the Americas accused Venezuelans of practicing racial discrimination of the sort found in the United States.

The British involvement with Argentina has a long and, at times, tumultous history. Dating as far back as the 18th century the Rio de la Plata basin held a great attraction for British merchants. England needed Spanish America as a source of bullion and an outlet for individual goods.

As early as the 1540s British vessels explored the coastlines, of Argentina. There already existed a considerable amount of trade between Brazil and England throughout the sixteenth century. The buccaneer William Hawkins, along with other Englishmen, was intent on expanding on this clandestine trade to other areas in the New World. Sometimes with the cooperation of the Spanish authorities, certain British merchants were able to maneuver themselves into the commercial life of these new colonies. By the eighteenth century the British had established numerous slave markets in Hispanic America including one in Buenos Aires.

The massive efforts of the Bourbon monarchs of the late colonial period to give their Spanish-American empire a modern state apparatus, extract more revenues from it, and defend it effectively from foreign interlopers involved an unprecedented assertion of royal authority at all levels of government, including the local one. Municipal government throughout the Americas became both an object of reform and one of the chief instruments of Bourbon reorganization at ground level. All the major activities and changes that required direct contact with the general population, from the taking of censuses and the establishment of militia units to the imposition of new taxes and the reorganization of the colonial financial structure, depended on municipal governments for their effective implementation. When the world wars for empires among Britain, France, and Spain reached a crisis stage for the Bourbons with Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808, the municipal governments became even more vital to the maintenance of the viceroyalties and the survival of the Spanish monarchy.

Jemmy Button was an Indian of Tierra del Fuego who inadvertently inspired four generations of nineteenth-century English missionaries to risk their earthly lives to save his eternal soul. These earnest evangelicals made five expeditions to Jemmy's South American homeland to make Christians of him and his countrymen. One of these ventures was an embarrassing fiasco, another ended in death by starvation, and a third led to a treacherous massacre.

This young Indian's unintended influence also touched evolutionary thought. Jemmy Button was a friend and companion to Charles Darwin on the famous voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. Jemmy's versatile personality was intriguing to Darwin. He could be a naked Indian hunter when in Tierra del Fuego, and a foppish English gentleman when in the company of British naval officers. His ability to change like this inspired Darwin's earliest written reflections on the human capacity to progress from savagery to civilization.

Frontiers are, by definition, unsettled and wild places; populations are shifting and mobile, social conditions are in state of constant flux, and governmental authority is generally weak. Frontier populations tend to be resentful of any type of control, and are often engaged in entreprenurial activities whose degree of legality varies widely. In frontier conditions, people the state defines as vagabonds and marginal tend to flourish. Their tenure as frontiersmen is usually brief, for they depend on the very conditions of instability which exist in areas with underdeveloped economies, weak authority, and sparse and spatially dispersed populations. Nevertheless, they can have an effect out of proportion to their numbers in a frontier society.

Historical demography—the study of the growth, decline, and movement of past populations—has played a critical role in efforts to reconstruct the historical experiences of native peoples during New World colonization. The subject of historical demography has been of interest because it is closely connected to a wide range of still significant issues, including the nature of prehispanic Indian societies, the brutality of conquest, and the degree of disruption wrought by colonization. Nonetheless, scholars have yet to calculate a measurement of the precolonial New World population that meets with general acceptance.

By the turn of the seventeenth century a generation of Andean natives, both Inca and aboriginal, had made lifelong homes within the strongholds of the European invaders. As they entered old age they inhabited an urban landscape whose “Indian” sector had become very diverse. In Quito and other colonial cities some of them dwelled in old pre-hispanic settlements whose closeness to new Hispanic centers had turned them into multiethnic “Indian” ghettos. Quito's Añaquito and Machángara are examples. Many others had settled illegally but permanently inside the Spanish nuclear city, so much so that in the 1580s Spaniards remarked on the growth of a “big shanty town” in its midst. Notarial records show, too, that center city streets housed colonies of “Indian” artisans specializing in European arts like iron working, embroidery, and tailoring. Rich enclaves of Inca and aboriginal nobles lived close to Spanish clerics and officials. Specialist traders delegated by native lords, and native entrepreneurs in the Spanish economy, rented permanent workplaces and dwellings downtown. Finally a large contingent, especially of women, lived as servants or concubines in Spanish houses or had usufruct of separate urban houses. In 1600 there were probably more different ways to be an urban Indian than there are today.