From the Early Days of the conquest of the River Plate up to our times, there have been numerous religious of the Order of St. Francis who have occupied episcopal sees in what is today the Argentine Republic, but not one of them has filled such glorious pages of the history of this country as Fray Fernando Trejo y Sanabria. Only one has come close to imitating his intense and extraordinary labors, and that was Fray Martín Ignacio de Loyola, Bishop of Asunción del Paraguay between 1602 and 1606, an epoch when all the Argentine coastland belonged to the Asunción Diocese.

Latin americanists have in recent years become increasingly concerned with constructing the basis for a unified history of Latin America. Frequently this enterprise leads them to contemplate the even larger design of a history of the Americas. While the New World may still be, in Hegel’s words, “a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe,” it is now recognized as having an independent heritage; its history is no longer experienced as “only an echo of the Old World.”

Despite its vital role in Latin America's ongoing struggle for economic development, Latin-American scientific and technical education remains a neglected topic among historians. Authors also tend to view it in simplistic terms. While some have seen scientific and technical institutes as agents of Latin America's “dependency” on the North Atlantic world, others have seen them as vehicles of Progress, or have stressed the way in which graduates (scientists and technical professionals) have acted as “anti-dependency guerillas.” Evidence from Colombia, however, confounds any simple view. The founding of the country's first program for geological and petroleum engineers at the National School of Mines in Medellín reflected nationalistic desires to increase Colombian control over the oil industry and subsoil resources in general. Yet, Colombia's national energy policies have not led to state control of the industry as in the case of other major oil-producing countries, i.e., Mexico. What explains this apparent gap between desires and deeds? The following essay seeks an answer by tracing the origins of the geological and petroleum engineering program as well as the ideas and activities of graduates who have been directly involved in developing their country's oil and other resources. Above all, it highlights Colombians' pragmatic approach to development concerns.

Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) is known to most students of Brazilian history as an abolitionist, a member of the Second Reign's Liberal opposition and, perhaps, as the first Brazilian ambassador to the United States. Some of us, however, note that Nabuco was also an important spokesman for the monarchist reaction against the early Republic and an outstanding historian and apologist for the Monarchy. He thus suggests something of both the range, contradictions, and limits of elite political thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

This presentation will attempt to go beyond the commonplace solution to the apparent contradiction in Nabuco—his liberal monarchism—to suggest the nature of his socio-political assumptions as they evolved from his more radical youth to his rather conservative maturity. It will also attempt, as an integral part of this, to identify Nabuco's role in clarifying and promoting elite conservative social thought through the use and interpretation of Brazil's national history.

I SHOULD like to ask you gentlemen to allow me, in the very beginning, to set limits to my task. The most imposing of these limitations are my own. It would be unbecoming of me to make a tacit profession of authority on the Enlightenment in English America by discoursing on the subject. I have, moreover, never made a frontal assault on the broad field of theology in the Latin world, for I regard the subject as universal, well-known to historical theologists, and when known for Europe generally predictable for America. There is also a relation between the Enlightenment in Spain and the Enlightenment in America, but what happens in America cannot be absolutely foretold by what happens in Spain. I shall therefore treat Spain, when I treat it at all, as only a back-drop for the American scene.

The cutting and shipment of wood is one of the oldest and most important aspects of Brazilian trade with Portugal. The rich red dye produced from the tree called pau brasil or Brazil wood was esteemed so highly that at first it outweighed in importance all other products of the colony. Most historians agree that the very name of Brazil is derived from this wood. Guarded as a royal monopoly throughout the colonial period, the wood trade ranked with the sugar, tobacco and gold of Brazil as one of the principal sources of revenue of the Portuguese crown. When woods for building were added to the exportation of pau brasil, the trade assumed a new importance, for these woods furnished the mother country with the sinews both of war and commerce, providing the hulls and masts of countless vessels that defended and brought together the distant domains of the Portuguese empire.

There could scarcely be an event of the magnitude of the Spanish discovery and conquest of a brand new world without its giving rise to a whole inundation of literature about the New World. For one thing, it really was a new world. Every detail reported about America had the same exotic appeal for the Spaniard of the day that an eye-witness account of life on another planet would have for us. Another reason for the great interest of the Spaniard in the happenings in America was his taste for greatness, for heroic deeds, a taste which he had developed and nurtured through the novels of chivalry so popular with all classes in Spain. It would be interesting to know to what extent the novels of chivalry influenced the psychology of the Spanish explorers and conquerors. Many of the feats accomplished in the New World bear comparison with feats described in the novels, and many of the chronicles and documents describing the conquest reveal attitudes and even turns of expression such as were often found in the novels of chivalry.

In 1850, after four terms in the United States Congress as a Whig from the Dayton, Ohio district, Robert Cumming Schenck decided not to run for reelection. Despondent over the recent death of his wife, Schenck yearned for a restful stay in a warmer clime. Consequently, he applied for a diplomatic post, the customary reward for loyal party service. President Millard Fillmore, a fellow Whig, obliged Schenck with an appointment as Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to Brazil. A railroad promoter, land speculator and politician, Schenck had few formal qualifications for diplomatic service other than the confidence of Secretary of State Daniel Webster and a fluent command of the French language. These were, however, more substantial assets than most nineteenth century American diplomats could boast, and to them Schenck added a brisk, businesslike manner, immense energy and a certain gruff charm.

Twentieth-Century historians accept the fact that history can no longer be viewed merely as past politics; it must now embrace all aspects of national life and thought—total history. In the study of a colonial empire, the social scientist must seek his sources not only in the colony but also in the mother country. The enumeration and analysis of American themes in the literature of imagination of eighteenth-century Spain can open new panoramas to the student of history since these themes reflect the ideas of the peninsular Spaniard and might help explain the reactions which they caused in the colonies.

The Subject which has been assigned to me by the Academy of American Franciscan History as my contribution to the homage being rendered to this illustrious son of Mallorca, would require a very lengthy paper if it were to be treated with the amplitude which it deserves. But the restricted limits of a conference such as this, as well as the multiple pastoral duties of my episcopal office, impose upon me a brevity which will reduce this study to a few brush-strokes which, though modest, indicate the relation between Fray Junípero Serra and his fatherland.

In the history of Spain's spiritual conquest of the New World, a definite cycle of enthusiasm may be observed. In the seventeenth century, for example, there was a noticeable falling off of Spanish missionary effort in the direction of the tribes yet to be converted. It is interesting to speculate on the causes of this phenomenon. An obvious cause, and certainly a contributing one, lies in the very nature of man. Human endeavor in the temporal order tends now to wax, now to wane in enthusiasm, and since the mission effort in question was human as well as divine, this cycle would tend to appear here as well. Around midcentury this problem of lessening enthusiasm became acute.

In recent years, most historians have abandoned the idea that the revolutions that shook the Atlantic world between 1776 and 1848 were the work of a single social class. A number of studies on the social composition of the groups that ignited and propelled the different revolutionary processes demonstrate the diversity of conditions and social backgrounds of the revolutionaries. However, this revisionism is posing new questions as to why these contingencies in Europe and the Americas decided to mobilize, to construct new liberal national states, and how they carried it out.

Spain is a good sample case for this historiographical inquiry. At present, few historians accept the idea that the series of upheavals that brought about a new liberal state during the 19th century resulted from the exclusive pressure of a national bourgeoisie. Recent scholarship has revisited the classic bourgeois revolution paradigm by presenting liberalism as an ideology that captivated the imagination of Spaniards of a variety of social ranks, with special impact among urban middle and popular groups. But if Spanish scholars are providing better explanations regarding who embraced liberal ideas and facilitated their spread, the answers for the “why” and “how” this process occurred are, in my opinion, less convincing.