After enduring heart surgery in 2015 and a stroke in 2016, Fernando Picó, Puerto Rico's leading historian and a figure renowned all over the Caribbean, passed away on June 27, 2017, at the age of 75. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Picó attended high school at the Colegio San Ignacio, where he received “the call” and decided to become a priest. In 1959, he joined the seminary of Saint Andrew-on-Hudson, Hyde Park, New York, and later went on to Loyola Seminary in Shrub Oak, New York, where he studied philosophy and theology. In addition, he earned a BA in History at Fordham University in 1965 and then an MA in 1966. In 1970, he received a PhD in Medieval History from Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation devolved around on what he jokingly called “the contentious bishops” of Laon, France, during the thirteenth century. He was ordained as a priest a year later.

Judith Ewell has been a major figure in modern Latin American history, both as a research scholar and as a teacher. Just before receiving her PhD at the University of New Mexico in 1972, Ewell began teaching at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, from which she retired in 2004. Ewell's books include The Indictment of a Dictator: The Extradition and Trial of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1981); Venezuela: A Century of Change (1984); and Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe's Hemisphere to Petroleum's Empire (1996, Spanish ed. 1998). Ewell has also published numerous articles and book chapters on modern Latin American history and women's history. She is co-editor of the much-loved biographical essay collection, The Human Tradition in Latin America (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) with William H. Beezley, with whom she served on the editorial board of Scholarly Resources Press (now Rowman & Littlefield). Most importantly, Ewell served as chief editor of this journal, The Americas, from 1998 to 2003.

The greatest thrill that any researcher can experience is coming across, quite unforeseen, priceless documents long given up as lost. In the case of myself and two close colleagues, Wendy Kramer and Christopher H. Lutz, the documents that have come to light and that have so delighted us include Libros de Cabildo numbers two and three of the city of Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of Spanish Central America. Libro Segundo is a register of events that took place between 1530 and 1541; Libro Tercero is a log spanning the years 1541 to 1553. Our incredulity at learning the whereabouts of these two volumes was matched, if not surpassed, by the anticipation of verifying their existence and thereafter consulting them, something that has not occurred (as best we can determine) in over a century. Far more than the minutes of mundane municipal affairs, these two Libros de Cabildo contain valuable information about Spanish conquest and colonization, and indigenous resistance to it, that will enhance considerably our understanding of the early colonial period, not only in Guatemala but throughout Central America. Furthermore, the Libros de Cabildo have proven to be the proverbial tip of the iceberg, for the cache of which they form part contains other treasures perhaps not quite so unique but nonetheless of significant historical worth.

The editorial office receives a number of edited volumes and other texts that will be of interest to our readership. When these works tend to be less suitable for unified reviews than monographs, we list them here. To introduce these volumes, we include the publication information and tables of contents. The volume selected for this issue is a recently received anthology.