The current analysis of slave society in Brazil has involved a rethinking of the traditional plantation-dominated model, with a new stress on the wide dispersion of slaves among whites and non-whites and their involvement in a lively internal economy as well as in extractive industries. This general picture is confirmed in a detailed analysis of the economy and slavery practised in the two major provinces of Minas Gerais and São Paulo in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Slaves were held in small units and they could be found in every region and occupied in every major economic activity. Some regions even had positive growth rates of the resident slave population despite the massive arrival of Africans. Finally we find women and free coloured as significant slave-owners, with the latter especially concentrated in the trades.

Joseph Welsh was the British Vice Consul in the port of Veracruz at the time of the uprising of 1832 by General Antonio López de Santa Anna against the government of Anastasio Bustamante. Contravening the orders of his superiors, who reiterated the view that it was his obligation to observe the strictest neutrality in the conflict and not interfere in Mexican politics, Welsh found himself supporting Santa Anna and the rebels. As a result, at the end of March, Bustamante's administration demanded that he be removed from office. The British Minister Plenipotentiary, Richard Pakenham, acquiesced. This article provides a narrative of the events that led to Welsh's forced resignation and explores what they tell us about British diplomacy in Mexico during the early national period. It also analyses Welsh's understanding of the revolt and his views on Santa Anna, providing some insights, from a generally ignored British perspective, into Santa Anna's notorious appeal and politico-military measures.

This study examines the relationship between labour and nation in nineteenth-century Nicaragua by exploring how the state's institutional efforts to control labour coincided with a prevailing discourse of nation that idealised farmers (agricultores) and wage labourers (jornaleros and operarios) at opposite ends of the spectrum of national citizenship. The article focuses on the towns of the ethnically diverse region of the Prefecture of Granada, an area that included the present-day departments of Granada, Carazo and Masaya, and where coffee production first boomed in Nicaragua. It is argued that labour coercion rested not simply on the building of national, regional and municipal institutions of labour control, but also on defining the political and social role of labourers within the national community. At the same time, subaltern communities, especially indigenous ones, contested these efforts not merely through evasion and subterfuge, but by engaging the discourse of nation-state to claim citizenship as farmers and assert independence from landlords.

Since Nicaragua's endorsement of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the legislative passage of its own Code of Childhood and Adolescence, improvements in the welfare of marginalised youth have depended largely on community-based actions that are sponsored by NGOs and civic groups, many of which function in tangent with municipal government authorities and international aid agencies. In this article we review three community initiatives that have aimed at resolving problems associated with youth alienation and violence in a poor, heavily populated district of Managua. While some modest successes have been achieved, these relatively isolated initiatives have had no evident effect on either the magnitude or the systemic nature of youth marginalisation in Managua. In a context in which the central state is severely constrained by fiscal weakness and corporatist traditions, it is questionable whether in fact the organs of civil society do in fact possess the organisational capacity to generate the structural reforms necessary for the advancement of children's rights at community levels. Nevertheless, despite the amorphous nature of much of civil society in Nicaragua, in the long run children's rights legislation may help to foster growing solidarity among disparate civic forces working to improve the bleak livelihoods of many children.

As Brazilian federal deputies approach the end of their legislative terms, they have four major political career options: to retire from electoral politics; to run for state legislative office (regressive ambition); to run for re-election (static ambition); or to run for higher offices (progressive ambition). We developed a model that focuses on the determinants of political career choices by incumbent federal deputies in the 1998 Brazilian election. We argue that it is not the nature of political ambition that determines the career choices of federal deputies, but the evaluation of the risks and costs. A nested logit regression was used to estimate the impact of the distinct political strategies used by incumbents during their terms and their previous electoral campaigns in their choices of career. The main findings suggest that an incumbent's career choice is decisively influenced by the strategies they adopt to effectively use their resources.

Over a period of half a century, from the 1940s to the 1990s, Edmundo O'Gorman came to occupy a unique place in Mexican historiography. Though he might be considered as quasi-aristocratic in his thought and in his bearing, he spent his entire career as teacher and scholar at the popular Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), not at the more elitist El Colegio de México. Unlike Daniel Cosío Villegas, with whom he is often paired as the leading Mexican historians of their generation, he was not politically engaged, nor was he a ‘cultural caudillo’; he appeared to shun the attractions of academic administration and power. He was, however, an avid intellectual organiser and provocateur, who relished debate and welcomed polemical interchanges with colleagues at home and abroad.