The Programa de Estudios de Historia Económica y Social Americana (PEHESA) was established in 1977 in association with the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales sobre el Estado y la Administración (CISEA) by a group of Argentine historians committed to the study of social history. This field has not had too fortunate a fate in our country; political, academic, and institutional reasons have condemned it to the fringe.

Trapped in the nineteenth-century view of the humanities until the 1950s, our academic world produced traditional history based upon empirical study of political events and of the institutional development of the country. With few exceptions, history was the history of great public figures or at best, of successful enterprises carried out by distinguished members of society. Yet historical works were not produced only in the academic world. Ideologues from different sectors of society looked to the past in search of arguments, models, and stereotypes, and although they did not write an alternative history, in some cases they did raise new issues or question old assumptions.

In 1877 Miguel Luis Amunátegui, noted historian and Chile's Minister of Education, observed aptly that while the Chinese bound their daughters' feet, his countrymen bound their daughters' minds. Amunátegui's dictum reveals an official concern for women's education that was unique in nineteenth-century Latin America. Chile's efforts to remove the “bindings” from the minds of its young women are important in several respects. Education was in fact the linchpin of an ambitious strategy to revamp and modernize every aspect of Chilean society. Because of the centrality of formal education in this experiment and the intensity of thinking on the subject, when women's education was addressed in official circles, female roles were being defined as part of a coherent national ideology. The Chilean experiments in education thus provide a rare opportunity to observe explicit, detailed reflection on women's roles. Unequivocal official commitment to public education in Chile also resulted in the creation of a large bureaucracy that in turn collected immense quantities of data on household size, family income, occupation, and related subjects. Much of this data concerns women and insofar as it documents the “social bedrock” so often obscured to scholars, it is immensely useful for women's history.

El Instituto Ibero-Americano de Berlín fue fundado en el año 1930 como centro de enlace científico y cultural, con miras a fomentar la continuación de la expansión socioeconómica de Alemania hacia los países latinoamericanos e ibéricos. Incentiva primordial para este propósito fue la adquisición de una vasta biblioteca particular y un archivo de documentos históricos por intermedio del Ministerio Prusiano de Artes, Ciencias, y Educación Popular. Propietario de esta biblioteca y del archivo fue el argentino Ernesto Quesada (1858-1934). Las partes más antiguas del Fondo, recolectadas por su padre Vicente G. Quesada (1830-1913) a partir de mediados del siglo XIX, pudieron ser completadas y ampliadas constantemente por él mismo. La colección, que en total abarcó unos ochenta y dos mil volúmenes y legajos,1 constituye aún hoy en día, a pesar de las pérdidas sufridas a finales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, una excelente base documental para investigaciones sobre la historia moderna de la Argentina. Las monografías, revistas y diarios de la antigua Biblioteca Quesada hace muchos años pudieron ser integrados en su totalidad a los fondos bibliotecarios temáticamente clasificados del Instituto Ibero-Americano y, sin haber sufrido mayores pérdidas durante los años de guerra, fue posible conservarlos hasta la fecha. En cambio, aquellas partes del Archivo Quesada que hacia fines de la guerra fueron depositadas en la hacienda Hohenlandin cerca de Angermünde (hoy RDA) fueron presa de la destrucción.2 Para poder precisar más ciertamente la importancia del Fondo Quesada para el historiador, se describirán brevemente en este aporte primero, la biografía de los dos Quesada, y segundo, las existencias que aún se conservan del Archivo Quesada, y las consistentes en diarios de la Argentina y sus países vecinos.

In recent years, considerable scholarly and popular attention has been extended to the Jewish populations of regions beyond those traditionally discussed—the United States, Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Particular attempts have been made to record and analyze the experience of Jews residing in Latin America. The dramatic deterioration in the situation of the Argentine Jewish community over the past five years has given special visibility to this group, both because of widespread concern over the human rights issues involved and because of the appearance of Jewish-Argentine exiles in the United States and other areas heavily covered by the media. The difficulties experienced by Jewish citizens of Latin American countries certainly are deserving of attention, but one would hope that the interest aroused by these circumstances would lead to a more general curiosity about the many aspects of Jewish culture in this region.

The decade of the 1960s ushered in a “New Frontier” for scholarly interest in all aspects of Latin American life. This trend was reflected in the curricula of American and Canadian institutions of higher education as they embarked on expanded programs in Latin American studies. This intensified effort resulted in an unprecedented number of doctoral dissertations on Latin American topics being submitted at 152 U.S. and Canadian universities. This research will be analyzed by drawing primarily on two bibliographic works: Allen Bushong's 1967 work, “Doctoral Dissertations on Pan American Topics Accepted by United States and Canadian Colleges and Universities 1961-1965” (LARR 2, No. 2 Supplement [Spring 1967]), and my Doctoral Dissertations on Latin America and the Caribbean: An Analysis and Bibliography of Dissertations Accepted at American and Canadian Universities, 1966-1970 (Publication No. 10 of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, 1980). A comparison of the decade will also be made with the period 1861-1960.

Historiographical advances in recent decades have emphasized increasingly the twentieth-century sources of American hegemony in Cuba. Two specific periods have served as the focus of these arguments: the years of the military occupation (1899-1902) and the decades of the Plattist republic, namely those years when Cuba was linked to the United States by virtue of the Permanent and Reciprocity treaties (1903-34). During these years, Cuban dependency certainly deepened and the character of the island acquired its definitive features as a client state. These twentieth-century developments, however, originated in nineteenth-century antecedents that contributed decisively to shaping events after 1895.

As in other European socialist countries, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), research on Latin America has increased steadily since the 1960s. After the reopening in 1946 of the high schools and universities in what was then the Soviet Occupied Zone, research and teaching on problems of Latin America developed initially in a sporadic way according to the personal interests of scholars within various scientific disciplines. From the beginning, however, these efforts were founded upon the democratic and humanistic traditions of German research on Latin America. The scholars tried consciously to uphold the heritage of Alexander von Humboldt, above all his idea of mutual give-and-take and his sympathy for the fight for independence against the Spanish colonial regime.1 By eschewing nationalistic, racist, and eurocentrist biases, Latin American studies in the German Democratic Republic aim, in the von Humboldt tradition, to avoid patronizing the Latin American people.

While information regarding Latin American studies programs in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union is becoming widely available to North American scholars, Latin Americanists in the United States may be surprised to know that a small, but growing, number of scholars, teachers, and researchers are studying Latin America in the People's Republic of China. This report describes the state of Latin American studies in China, its principal universities, research centers, scholarly organizations, and periodicals devoted to research on Latin America, as well as the research topics that interest Chinese scholars and the professional problems confronting Latin American studies in China. The interviews and research were conducted, usually in Chinese, in Peking and Shanghai.

This note reports on research in Latin America and the Caribbean concerning international relations and foreign policy. It lists persons in the region who are working on these subjects, comments on changing priorities in research by Latin Americans, broadly evaluates the quality of their research, considers the institutional loci and contexts for Latin American work in this field, and discusses the relevance of work in Latin America and the Caribbean to scholars in the United States and other Northern countries, and to those in developing countries beyond Latin America. The report draws on a considerable number of books, journal articles, and unpublished memoranda made available by colleagues, on correspondence with a number of Latin American social scientists, and on several interviews. These notes are surely not complete, and inadvertent inaccuracies may be included, but this version is presented with the hope that it will be helpful to others in its present form and that it may stimulate the submission to LARR of additional pertinent material.

Educated classes in India have long been accustomed to talk of the “common problems” of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the past, they have been content to rely almost exclusively on popular books in the English language published in Britain and the United States for information concerning those regions. Of the three continents with a sense of common identity, Latin America is physically the farthest from India and also the area that has afforded least direct contact. While these factors contributed to an attitude towards Latin America that was friendly and devoid of negative sentiments, they also resulted in a much slower awakening among the educated and elite groups of the desirability of initiating rigorous programs of study and research on contemporary Latin American institutions and developments. It was only a decade ago that a modest effort in this direction was begun in the School of International Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. The program is now attracting somewhat greater interest from students, researchers, and agencies than was anticipated by the few enthusiasts who launched it ten years ago without any prospect of financial support from educational authorities and funding agencies.

La Fundación para el Estudio de los Problemas Argentinos (FEPA) fue creada el 28 de diciembre de 1977 por un grupo de profesores universitarios de la Escuela de Ciencias Políticas de la Universidad Católica Argentina de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, pero su funcionamiento pleno comenzó el 8 de mayo de 1978. El edificio que actualmente ocupa cuenta con tres plantas, con una superficie total de 750 metros cuadrados. En la planta baja funciona la subdirección, los servicios de recepción y administración y algunas jefaturas; en la planta siguiente la dirección y un auditorio con capacidad para sesenta personas. El último piso es el dedicado a tareas de investigación. FEPA cuenta con personal administrativo adecuado y profesionales en ciencias sociales, provenientes de Ciencias Políticas, Economía, Sociología, Historia y Derecho. Desde su iniciación, está dirigida por el Dr. Francisco Arias Pelerano, especialista en Ciencias Políticas; actuando como Subdirector el Dr. Joaquín Rafael Ledesma, especializado en Economía.