Abolition forced planters in the post-Civil War US South to consider new sources and forms of labor. Some looked to Spanish America for answers. Cuba had long played a prominent role in the American imagination because of its proximity, geostrategic location, and potential as a slave state prior to the Civil War. Even as the United States embraced abolition and Cuba maintained slavery, the island presented Southern planters with potential labor solutions. Cuban elites had been using male Chinese indentured workers (“coolies” or colonos asiáticos) to supplement slave labor and delay the rise of free labor since 1847. Planters in coastal Peru similarly embraced Chinese indentured labor in 1849 as abolition neared. Before the Civil War, Southerners generally had noted these developments with anxiety, fearing that coolies were morally corrupt and detrimental to slavery. However, for many, these concerns receded once legal slavery ended. Planters wanted cheap exploitable labor, which coolies appeared to offer. Thus, during Reconstruction, Southern elites, especially in Louisiana, attempted to use Chinese indentured workers to minimize changes in labor relations.

On March 10, 1910, Pío Coronel informed his readers that he was abandoning his home in the western province of Pinar del Río and saddling up his horse to set out on an important journalistic and political assignment. The black press journalist noted that once he got wind of Cuban president José Miguel Gómez's plans to set off from the presidential palace on a political campaign across the island, he kissed his wife goodbye and took off in pursuit with little more than a pen and a shoulder bag. In the following weeks, Pío galloped hundreds of miles across the Cuban countryside, or, as he called it, the “ill-fated American Colony,” to report on how black communities from Havana to Guantánamo received President Gómez. In other words, Pío showcased Cuba's black public sphere, which despite its effervescent political and civic life was outside the purview of Cuba's mainstream reporters. As this article argues, it was also largely neglected by subsequent generations of historians.

In March 1855, a literary newspaper in Rio de Janeiro printed the first installment of Nísia Floresta's “Páginas de uma vida obscura,” a serialized short story inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Seven more chapters followed, keeping “Páginas” in the public eye for months. The Jornal do Commercio, arguably the national paper of record, mentioned the story in its announcements. Floresta (pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto, 1810–1885) centered her storyline on the Congo-born Domingos, the “Brazilian Tom,” who exemplified the attributes of Christian virtuosity and resignation found in Stowe's internationally famous novel. Set in the nineteenth century, “Páginas” begins with the ten-year-old Domingos's enslavement on the African coast, and highlights the human devastation of the internal slave trade through his movements across Minas Gerais and on to Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro. It ends with Domingos's death, at age 54, grief-stricken over his son's recent passing. In part, Floresta's “Páginas” emerged from the Brazilian schoolteacher's longstanding critiques of patriarchy, nation, and education. Twenty years earlier, Floresta had drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to write Direito das mulheres e injustiça dos homens (1832), a book that went through three editions in its first decade. More directly though, Floresta had connected to the so-called “Tom mania” while living in Paris in 1852. The following year, back in Rio, she wrote a pamphlet on women's education—Opúsculo humanitário (1853)—that parsed key aspects of Uncle Tom's Cabin, among a larger discussion of women's achievements internationally. Two Rio newspapers excerpted the pamphlet, and, boldly, published the chapters focused on Uncle Tom. This attention in the press raised the profile of a book the public already knew to be controversial, as newspapers had earlier carried reports of port authorities seizing shipments of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Rio, Salvador, and Fortaleza. In writing “Páginas,” then, two years after the Opúsculo, Floresta not only carried forward her literary dialogue with Stowe, but also posed the work as a challenge to the status quo. “Páginas” was necessary, she explained, because “slavery is not an issue of concern in the press.” If overstated, given that the topic of slavery was quite prevalent in public discourse, Floresta's assertion nonetheless signals an opportunity for scholars to probe further into the relationship between slavery and the public sphere in the mid nineteenth century. More specifically, it suggests connections to be explored between the press and the early reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Brazil, and, more broadly, connections between the representations of slavery in the press, and the institution's enduring legitimacy.

It was in January 1950 that Guatemalan Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, a rather unfamiliar figure at the time, headed for El Salvador, giving no sign that he would eventually become one of the most notorious antagonists in the destruction of the 1944-54 Guatemalan Revolution. Late in 1950, he and some 70 compatriots attacked Guatemala City's Base Militar, hoping to overthrow Juan José Arévalo's government and prevent Jacobo Arbenz from assuming the presidency. Though the assault failed and its participants were imprisoned, the dissident bribed his way out of jail and took into exile a newfound reputation as an influential conspirator.

In late September 2016, the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) hosted a symposium on regionalism in Brazilian history to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Professor Joseph L. Love's arrival at Illinois. Organized by the Institute's director, Professor Jerry Dávila, the symposium brought together historians from the United States and Brazil for a day-long discussion of an issue that continues to attract scholarly attention in both countries. Love himself contributed to the study of Brazilian regionalism with two landmark studies: Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882–1930 (1971) and São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 1889–1937 (1980). The latter was produced alongside John Wirth's Minas Gerais in the Brazilian Federation, 1889–1937 (1977) and Robert Levine's Pernambuco in the Brazilian Federation, 1889–1937 (1978) as part of a larger project conceived and carried out through a decade's worth of unprecedentedly close collaboration. At Illinois, Love inspired hundreds of undergraduates with his award-winning teaching and trained a bi-national cohort of graduate students who have gone on to careers of great distinction in Brazil and in the United States.