In the winter of 1791-1792, meetings were being held in all of the principal towns of the Mexican province of Tlaxcala. Decisions had been reached that something had to be done about the recurring flooding of the Zahuapa river in central Tlaxcala and, independently, about the lack of an adequate water supply for the southeastern provincial town of Huamantla. As a result of these meetings, two independent projects began both of which were locally conceived and, more importantly, locally funded. In a burst of civic pride groups of Spanish vecinos (landowners and merchants who claimed Tlaxcala as their home) and Indian communities collaborated in constructing and financing these improvements. The work on the Zahuapa lasted until 1802, and the work to supply water in Huamantla was ongoing in 1810 when the Hidalgo revolt interrupted it. What is interesting about these decisions is not the success of the projects themselves—the first failed badly and the second was foundering when aborted—but rather what they highlight about the way Spanish and Indian leadership in local communities interacted politically in the late Bourbon period, both with each other and with Bourbon officialdom.

In 1964, U.S. civilian teenagers managed a rare feat by sparking a major foreign policy crisis. Even more remarkable, they were abroad when they did it, and they caused the crisis out of what many considered too much patriotism. The riots that rocked Panama beginning on 9 January of that year started as a scuffle between Panamanian and U.S. high school students in front of Balboa High School (BHS), a “Zonian” institution mostly for U.S. citizens. The immediate circumstances were complicated: teenagers from Panama City marched into the town of Balboa in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone to protest the fact that BHS was not flying the Panamanian flag. Balboa High students, in turn, were already demanding that their flag continue to fly. President John Kennedy had ordered that both nations' flags be hoisted in the Zone, but implementation was slow. Then, local administrators decreed that neither flag would fly at BHS. The flag dispute seemed trivial, but its resolution could change which nation enjoyed sovereignty over the Zone. On 9 January, in the scuffle between Panamanian and U.S. students, the Panamanians' flag was torn. Then came the crisis. Within hours of the altercation, thousands of adults unleashed a bloody violence that lasted four days and killed twenty-one Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers. The U.S. Army took control of the Zone and Panama suspended diplomatic relations with the U.S. government. Panamanians further insisted on the scrapping of the 1903 Treaty that had established U.S. control over the Canal Zone. After years of negotiations, these riots led to the Panama Canal treaties in the 1970s and to the transfer of the Canal from U.S. to Panamanian hands in 1999.

In 1886 the Argentine Congress adopted a new penal code for the country which replaced the existing, and often contradictory, maze of colonial laws and local bandos—ad hoc decrees—that had hitherto regulated criminal procedure. Although it is worth examining the provisions of the Código Penal as a fruitful indication of nineteenth-century legal development that witnessed an increasing centralization of power by the Argentine state, scholars have completely ignored one momentous omission in the code. As it quickly becomes apparent after perusing its pages, the new penal code had no provision regulating consensual sodomy, a practice that until then had been severely punished and was considered second in gravity only to heresy and treason. Indeed, the utter silence concerning consensual sodomy in the code effectively decriminalized it. Sodomy shifted from a crime punishable by death to a lawful activity between consenting adults in private. This sudden legal change raises a variety of questions that bear on the process of Argentine state formation and illuminate the connection between sexuality and nation building.

On December 13, 1845 the recently founded Santiago newspaper El Artesano Opositor (The Opposition Artisan) published a letter submitted by “twenty artisan friends of Cerda.” The letter related the tragic case of José Agustin Cerda, a young tailor, soldier in the civic militia, and member of an electoral association called the Sociedad de Artesanos de Caupolicán (Caupolicán Artisans Society), who had been arrested on November 12 by the city's military prosecutor on the charge that he was involved in an anti-government “conspiracy.” Claiming innocence, Cerda, according to his companions, denied his involvement in the alleged conspiracy “with noble arrogance.” As a result he was locked in iron shackles in a military prison, causing his legs to swell up and his illness-weakened lungs to struggle for air. A follow-up article in the newspaper announced that Cerda was still being held in that “unjust and inhumane” condition two months later, along with several other city residents who were linked to the electoral associations of the liberal opposition in Santiago. While the outraged authors of the letter to El Artesano Opositor singled out the Cerda case for its malicious effects on their friend, they clearly saw the incident as part of a larger problem: the routine and systematic mistreatment of all artisan militiamen by the conservative governing regime. Not content simply to demand the release of their colleague, the “friends of Cerda” demanded the complete reform of a political system that denigrated the honor, dignity, and patriotism of all the city's artisans. “Understand,” continued the letter in a provocative flourish, “that by attacking the innocent life of Cerda you attack the lives of all the artisans of the Republic.” “We should expect more,” it concluded solemnly, “from the men we elevate with our votes, defend with our blood, and maintain with our sweat and labor.”