In the years prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the Hamburg-American-Lines (HAPAG) steamer Ypiranga gained a special reputation in the Western hemisphere. It was known for transporting several Mexican Presidents into exile, and it became especially famous for its 26th voyage, a trip from Hamburg to Veracruz in the spring of 1914.

Its hold filled with weapons for the Mexican President Huerta, the steamer approached the entrance to the Veracruz harbor on April 21. At that time, its captain had not the slightest idea that on Woodrow Wilson's order American troops had landed to take control of the harbor in order to prevent the weapons his ship carried from reaching the Mexican President.

Hipólito da Costa would probably be quite content (perhaps even a little surprised) at being feted as the father of the Brazilian press and probably he would not demand the additional title of political philosopher. But, in the fashion of his age, he discoursed at length on politics, and the pages of the Correio Braziliense which he edited show the ideas on governmental theory of a particular, early nineteenth-century liberal, a Portuguese influenced by the English liberalism which seems so far from radical today as to be almost blatantly conservative.

Northeast Brazil had traditionally maintained two functionally separate but structurally related Catholic Churches: on the coast, usually in the state capitals, the “ official church ” has been manned and officiated by a well-trained bureaucratic hierarchy; and in the hinterlands, the backlanders have often practiced a variety of “ folk Catholicism.” In a social and economic context, the Brazilian Northeast can also be divided into the “ far Northeast” of Gilberto Freyre and Jorge Amado, the world of opulent sugar and cacao planters on the one hand, and on the other the Northeast of drought, poverty, hunger, and superstition described by Rachel de Queiroz and Graciliano Ramos. In this divergent Northeast, religion has played an important role in the lives of the backlanders, and often priests, both the practitioners of the folk Catholicism and the ordained of the official church have managed to influence the politics of the region.

Between 1791 when the Haitian revolution began, and the death of Henri Christophe in 1820, important economic changes occurred in Haiti which transformed one of the most prosperous plantation economies in the New World into a republic of peasant proprietors. While the political history of the revolution has received a moderate amount of attention, the economic and social changes which accompanied it have been poorly understood. It is the purpose of this study to focus on the internal developments which were occurring in an irresistible way to bring about a peasant economy and to delineate the responses of a variety of governments, both French and Haitian, to try to halt these changes.

After receiving official permission on September 13, 1969 “ to do research in the nunciature's archives,” I was allowed to spend about forty days during the months of May and June, 1970, in the rich collection of materials in this nunciature, situated in the Lagoinha district of Santa Teresa in Rio de Janeiro. It was a tantalizing situation for me as a historian, since the time limit and the prohibition against microfilming enabled me only to glance at much of the documentation, without being able to copy it or even to take copious notes. Perhaps as a result of my interest in these papers, it has been determined by the papal Secretary of State to send all these nunciature documents up to the reign of Pius XII to the Vatican Archive before the end of 1970. There, I was assured, all facilities would be given to scholars to work in this material. The collection when I saw it was intact, containing original materials from 1808 to the present, with apparently hardly a document missing, except for a few letters on the Religious Question of 1873-76, sent to Rome some time after these dates. Apparently very little else of the original papers had been forwarded to Rome during all those years, although copious reports in Italian were sent, of course, to Rome.

On September 11, 1875, a select group of intellectuals met in the house of Don Alejandro Arango y Escandón. They came for the purpose of organizing and constituting in Mexico the Academia Mexicana Correspondiente de la Real Española. The group was made up of Don José María Bassoco, Don Alejandro Arango y Escandón, Don Casimiro del Collado, Don Francisco Pimentel, Don José Sebastián Segura, Don Manuel Peredo, Don José María Roa Barcena, Don Manuel Orozco y Berra, and Don Rafael Angel de la Peña. Also among them was a man in the prime of life : strong of body, with a kind but penetrating gaze, totally without affectation, yet extremely persuasive; his whole manner attractive and distinguished. What was he doing among all these others whom Fame had already made her chosen favorites, since this man always modestly recalled the fact that he had never had the opportunity of attending a public school? Yet that same gentleman was to become the very soul of this scholarly body, even though he insistently declared the contrary through the succeeding years; the succeeding years in which he was to mount that height in which his name would live both within and without our country from generation to generation. This genius in the world of letters was Don Joaquín García Icazbalceta.

Following more than three decades of conservative dictatorship in Mexico Porfirio Díaz was overthrown by the idealistic Francisco Madero in 1911. Madero was impractical and disorganized and the unrest, which had characterized the last years under Díaz, continued throughout the brief presidency of his successor. In February 1913 a rising under Félix Díaz, nephew of the old dictator, led to civil war within the capital. The fall of Madero was assured when General Victoriano Huerta, who commanded the government forces, switched sides and implemented the arrest of the President. A pact between Félix Díaz and Huerta led to the provisional presidency of Huerta with Díaz lurking in the background as potential candidate for the permanent presidency.

In the Treaty of Ancón ending the War of the Pacific, the government of Peru signed away two provinces on the south coast and much of the country's future guano income. The settlement stripped Peru's treasury bare and exposed the narrow, extractive and agricultural base of the country's economy. A few years later the same Peruvian government, led by the hero of the Chilean war General Andrés Cáceres, signed the Grace Contract whereby the foreign debt was canceled and railway development for the next 66 years fell under the control of the foreign-owned W. R. Grace corporation. The economic and political consequences of these decisions were deeply felt in Peruvian society. Economically, they placed renewed emphasis on export agriculture and mining at the expense of primary industrial development and made stronger demands upon the rural labor force. Led by these sectors, modernization of the economy proceeded in a regional form, with accelerated growth in the coastal valleys and a few highland areas and stagnation elsewhere. A shift of population from the highlands to the coast accompanied this process.

Among the branches of Romance philology Hispanic philology is at the present time the most flourishing one. This is due in great measure to the fact that the seeds sown by the great master Ramón Menéndez Pidal are bringing forth remarkable fruit in Spain, Portugal and the United States. The newest feature in the picture is that Argentina, with the Instituto de Filología de Buenos Aires under the leadership of Amado Alonso, has become a center of Hispanic studies for the entire world. This seems to be one of the changes in scholarship which hint that in the future, the New World will take over, whereas Europe has to struggle desperately to hold her own. The change will appear the more considerable in the light of the endeavor since the early nineteenth century on the part of Latin America to do something in this field, although for the most part amateurish.

A patente, in the ecclesiastical sense of the term, was an official letter expedited by a prelate and addressed to his religious subjects. Both the Father Guardian of the College of San Fernando in Mexico City and the Father President of the Franciscan missions in Alta California were regarded as prelates in the canonical sense of the term. Consequently, the friars who worked in these missions were held by religious vows to obey the admonitions and instructions in such documents. Patentes sent by the guardian of the college to his missionaries in Alta California dealt with the administration of the missions and the observance of the religious life and were supposed to be transcribed or at least summarized in a book intended for that purpose and called a Libro de Patentes.