The metropolis made full and very exacting regulations for everything that referred to the obtaining and control of precious metals and stones. Even in the first days of Spanish colonial expansion in America, the regulations contained in capitulations and instructions were innumerable. Later on, laws, royal cedulas, ordinances, and other juridical norms ordained in a detailed manner the requisites to which all had to submit who proposed to exploit the deposits of precious metals or the pearl fisheries. They regulated the manner in which they were to be established, the work of the Indians in them, and, above all, the control of production and the participation of the crown in the benefit obtained.

In late 1809 and early 1810, die city of Caracas witnessed an extraordinary spectacle as over 350 men were marched into its prisons. Local provincialauthorities had apprehended these men as part of a leva de vagos, a campaign to coercively recruit vagrants into the army. Such recruitment campaigns were neither novel nor particularly controversial in the late Bourbon period. However, Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 had unhinged the Spanish world, inspiring a profound re-examination of values and traditions. In this context, this new leva generated an unexpected opposition tliat stunned the new captain general of Venezuela, field marshal Vicente Emparan y Orbe. The opposition, which was led by the Caracas audiencia—the province's highest court—ostensibly questioned the legality of die procedures being used to validate charges of vagrancy, but beneath the surface, the resistance reflected a broadbased coalition dedicated to the defense of a status quo that was unraveling under the twin forces of Napoleon and the Junta Central. In this essay, I argue that the Leva de Vagos of 1809 contributed decisively to the overthrow of Emparan, paving the way for the creation of the Junta of Caracas in April 1810.

This article will argue that a seemingly trivial dispute between the Nicaraguan government and an American lumber company operating on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast escalated to become a major source of tension between the U.S. State Department and Nicaragua, as well as a catalyst that drew U.S. banks into Nicaragua. Despite its significance, the convoluted story of this dispute has attracted little scholarly attention. The importance of the Emery claim was widely acknowledged at the time, however. Stories about it appeared in contemporary newspapers and magazines, and it became a topic worthy of discussion by a U.S. Senate hearing. The claim was also connected to José Santos Zelaya's resignation as president of Nicaragua in the autumn of 1909, a gesture that came shortly after he had agreed to settle the Emery claim.

Each nation views its own statesmen with a particular bias. This prejudiced opinion is generally more pronounced when the statesmen involved are “ founding father ” types. Other eyes, though not perhaps objective, saw prominent figures in United States history in a different light, and an alien culture elicited unique comments by one particularly literate and vocal observer.

When Harold Palmer Davis published his Black Democracy in 1928, after twelve years of study and of residence in Haiti, he wrote of Toussaint L’Ouverture that it would be impossible to form any true estimate of Toussaint’s character, because of the great mass of material that had been written about him from widely divergent and conflicting viewpoints.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's 1616 El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno stands as the author's staggering attempt to obtain by privilege that which he could not secure through justice: status as a native lord and title to lands. Indeed, the last 20 years of the native chronicler's life as we know it, roughly from 1595 to 1615, are marked by the usual milestones of an ascending clerical career in the service of provincial priests, inspectors, and administrators from the south central Andean region stretching between Jauja and Huamanga.1

Although the Franciscan Province in the West Indies was the first in the New World, it was the Province founded in Mexico shortly after its conquest by Cortés that became the parent unit of most of the other Provinces in Spanish America. By its extraordinary missionary achievements it likewise set the pace for the work of the other Provinces. It would require much more than a few pages to present a mere outline of the history of the Franciscan mother Province of Spanish America; we can call attention only to some outstanding facts.