“Not a pastor, but a wolf who gains sustenance from the blood of his sheep” is the way in which a parish priest was described in a petition written on behalf of the town council of Jonacatepec, an important indigenous community in what is now the state of Morelos. Addressing the ecclesiastical authorities in 1818, the petitioners sought to discredit the priest who like a wolf, they claimed, “gains sustenance from the blood of his sheep” by charging too much for his services, for refusing to perform those services in the first place if it was inconvenient, and by keeping a mistress.

Those who defend America's entry into the First World War often call attention to the ultimate German threat to the security of the Western Hemisphere. Through his political and economic activities in the years before the War, Kaiser Wilhelm II allegedly endangered the independence of Latin American states, and especially, the dominant position America enjoyed in the Caribbean. Hard evidence to support this position, however, is rarely presented, and with good reason, for after the celebrated Venezuelan incident of 1902-03, German-American relations in Latin America decline in saliency. Yet, during the crucial decade before the onset of World War One, Germans and Americans met one another in the hemisphere in a variety of places and under a variety of circumstances. An analysis of these relatively obscure contacts will help answer two questions: Did Germany menace American interests in the area, and, more importantly, did Americans believe that she did?

In 1570, the Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Mendieta bestowed a rare gift on Juan de Ovando, then president of the Council of Indies. Mendieta placed in Ovando's hands a small manuscript volume in superb Gothic script with illuminated initials and color illustrations, one of several important manuscripts he had brought to Spain for various prominent recipients. Were it not for its contents, one could have thought it a meticulous version of a breviary or a book of hours, but its contents were unprecedented. This tome contained a scholarly Nahuatl translation of the most popular devotional work in Western Europe in the previous century. It was Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, which caught Iberian Christians under its spell between the 1460s and the early sixteenth century by means of multiple Latin editions and translations into Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish, including a version in aljamiado (Spanish in Arabic characters). Indeed, a decisive turning point in the Iberian reception of this work had taken place three decades earlier, through the 1536 publication of Juan de Ávila's influential Spanish-language adaptation.

Vincent Ogé jeune (the younger) was one of the wealthiest free men of color in Saint-Domingue, but his behavior in the year before the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) was a puzzling anomaly. Returning to the colony from Paris in October 1790, Ogé quickly emerged at the head of a group of free colored militiamen demanding voting rights. Colonists labeled this a “revolt” and four months later they executed Ogé and three of his colleagues, breaking their bodies bone by bone in a public square and mounting their severed heads on posts.

On 18 May 1911, the indigenous Mixtec peasants of Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca, rose up against the local cacique and ranchers who had dispossessed them of their ancient communal lands. Thus began not only the lone agrarian rebellion in the state of Oaxaca but also the only attempt to revive a pre-Columbian indigenous empire during the Mexican Revolution. The study of this remarkable episode situates Oaxaca, a state previously thought to be peripheral to this major social upheaval, within the main currents of revolutionary activity.

As in the case of other revolutionary movements, the arrival of Maderista revolutionaries from a neighboring state, in this case Guerrero, triggered the peasant mobilization in Pinotepa Nacional, unleashing social tensions in the area. Although an overwhelmingly rural state in 1910, the Revolution in Oaxaca has generally been characterized by the absence of agrarian protest. Recent studies have found the precursor and Maderista movements in Oaxaca to be predominantly middle class, either urban or rural, seeking social mobility, wider political participation, and greater local autonomy. Nevertheless, the study of the events of May 1911 on the Oaxacan coast reveals a struggle that pitted an agrarian, indigenous movement against a middle class, rancher-style revolution.

The purpose of this article is to examine some aspects of the evangelization of New Spain in the sixteenth century and the natives’ responses to it. This is a subject of tortuous complexity and one that cannot be adequately treated in a brief essay. Rather, this will be an attempt to highlight some of the more important and interesting aspects of this phenomenon. In doing so I will use some of my own researches into the Virgin of Guadalupe of Mexico to illustrate it and to show some of the pitfalls inherent in the topic.

In June 1787, Lieutenant Colonel Gabriel de Hervías, on behalf of the Spanish crown, took possession from Major James Lawrie of the small British settlement of Black River (Río Tinto), marking the formal end of three decades of diplomatic wrangling over the existence of the British Superintendency over the Mosquito Shore (1748 to 1787). Within three years of Lawrie's departure, along with that of 537 British settlers and 1,677 slaves, the narrow stretch of territory extending along the Atlantic coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua and known to the Spanish as costa de mosquitos was engulfed in violent conflicts between leaders of the Miskitu peoples and their followers. The first outbreak of intra-Miskitu hostilities pitted the Indian governor Colville Briton against other prominent chiefs, including his nephew Admiral Alparis Dilson; a second pitted Admiral Dilson and his brother Major Hewlett against the Afro-Indian or “Zambo” King George II. By the time the conflicts had come to an end, both Briton and Dilson had been executed, Hewlett had escaped the region for the safety of the Panamanian coast, and George had asserted his ascendancy over rival chiefs and their people.

In 1920, Chile entered a transitional period during which political issues sparked intense social tensions. A fundamental reform of the Alianza Liberal coalition was to open the political system to fuller citizen participation, a prospect which threatened the Chilean elite. To thwart reform and change, an oligarchy, closely united by kinship ties and mutual interest, pursued a policy of obstructionism in the Senate which effectively paralyzed government. The four years 1920-1924 during which Arturo Alessandri occupied the presidency were so turbulent and frustrating that the military alone seemed capable of reestablishing order.

Few epochs in the history of the Portuguese colonial empire have received less attention from historians than the sixty years from 1580–1640 when Portugal and Spain were jointly ruled by the Spanish Hapsburgs, Philip II, III, IV (or I, II, III by Portuguese reckoning). The union of the crowns in 1580 brought together the two greatest maritime empires of the sixteenth century, yet, curiously, this phenomenon has remained relatively unstudied. Portuguese neglect is based on the premise that the union with Spain was a “Babylonian Captivity“ during which the Spanish rulers and their policies destroyed in a half century what had taken the Portuguese two hundred years to build. Nationalism has prompted Portuguese scholars to concentrate on the loss of independence in 1580 or its triumphant restitution in 1640, but although this motivation is still present, a new generation of Portuguese historians has begun to turn from the shibboleths of their nineteenth-century predecessors. Spanish historiography, on the other hand, disdains the topic; hardly surprising since even today to many Spaniards “a Portuguese is a Galician who speaks poorly.” Moreover, there is the embarrassing fact that the Portuguese were able to wrest their independence from Spanish rule.

This article investigates the use of coca by the Bolivian Army during the Chaco War of 1932–35. I present research that reveals the surprising extent to which the Bolivian Army provisioned coca to its soldiers as a substitute for adequate nutrition; as a morale booster; as a stimulant; and as a medicine. The article explores the social and cultural implications of mass coca consumption by Bolivian soldiers, many of whom were mestizos who had never before chewed the leaf. Ultimately, I argue that the pervasiveness of coca within the traumatic popular experience of the Chaco War sowed the seeds of a historic transformation of the politics of coca in Bolivia. The Chaco War initiated a process by which coca in Bolivia was transformed from a neo-colonial marker of the Indian caste to a material and symbolic element of an emergent interethnic working class. Through a comparative analysis of the Bolivian army's use of coca in the Chaco War with the German army's use of methamphetamine during World War II, this article concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the present case study expands our understanding of the crucial but under-studied historical relationship between drugs and warfare.

On the 17th of August 1671, Manuel de Morales, a 49-year-old Angolan slave employed on a Dominican-owned sugar plantation in the Pacific coastal hotlands of what is now the republic of Guatemala, came before a priest and declared his intention to marry. Accompanying Morales was his proposed spouse, Inés Hernández, an Indian widow from the nearby town of Escuintla, capital of the colonial Guatemalan corregimiento of Escuintepeque in which the Dominican ingenio lay. Four male witnesses testified to the soundness of the proposed marriage between Morales and Hernández, two on behalf of each contrayente, or prospective spouse. Three of the witnesses were slaves: Silvestre Ramírez, defined as mulatto, and Jacinto Pereira and Miguel de la Cruz, both identified as black. The fourth was Diego de Arriasa, mulatto and free.

By the 1960s many biologists affiliated with North American institutions were intent upon establishing a new kind of field station within tropical America. Conditions at such new stations contrasted with those at tropical medicine research centers, commodity-oriented agricultural research stations like those run by the United Fruit Company, or established botanical centers such as the Atkins Garden and Research Laboratory in Cuba. Absent were the arboreta, the crop demonstration plots, full-scale expatriate residences and most home comforts. Absent too were the nearby plantations served by the economic botany practiced at the agricultural stations.

In September of 1907, the residents of a large conventillo, or tenement house, in Buenos Aires protested a 47 percent rent increase by striking against their landlord and refusing to pay. The strikers called on the residents of other rental buildings to join with them and organized a central committee. The strike spread quickly. By October 1 tenants from more than 750 buildings had joined in the strike. That number increased to nearly 2,000 buildings before the end of 1907. Neighborhood and building committees arose throughout the city as nearly one tenth of the total population of Buenos Aires, and tenants in several other major cities as well, joined the strike in one of the largest and most unusual forms of working-class collective action in early twentieth-century Argentina.

Let us keep a place where real research men can find quiet, keen intellectual stimulation, freedom from any outside distraction." This was the response of a prominent North American naturalist opposed to a 1924 proposal to build facilities for women at the Barro Colorado Island Biological Laboratory in Panama. In the first decades of the twentieth-century, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and as the United States built the Panama Canal, the American tropics became a major focus for North American politics and natural history, with government funding and logistical support from the military for scientific expeditions. As the North American western frontier closed, the New World tropics—or Neotropics—assumed the role that the West had played for an earlier generation of nineteenth-century explorers. In a post-Darwinian world, a field trip to the tropics with its rich biodiversity had become a rite of passage and a route to fame for young North American naturalists. And in the decades during and after the successful campaign for women's suffrage in the United States, tensions between men and women ran high, in the home, at the ballot box, and at the field station.

On 16 April 1938, the school teacher of the Mixtec village of San Andrés Dinicuiti reported that the Easter week procession had taken place, despite government regulations prohibiting public displays of worship. During the event, the faithful had marched through the streets shouting “Long live religion, death to bad government, death to the state governor, death to the president of the republic.” When they arrived at the local school, they yelled “Death to the masons, long live religion” before denigrating the teacher's parentage. During the 1920s and 1930s, devout Catholic peasants throughout Mexico repeatedly denounced the presumed link between government, school teachers, anticlericalism, and the masons. The popular condemnation obviously emanated in part from the ecclesiastical hierarchy's frequent anti-masonic pronouncements. The Apostolic Delegate's charge that masons were “the cause of our persecution and almost all our national misfortunes” was reiterated in countless bulletins, manifestos, and pastoral letters throughout the country. In 1934, the Bishop of Huajuapam de León, which controlled the parish of San Andrés Dinicuiti, reminded local priests that they were to refuse to accept masons and members of the government party as godparents for baptisms, confirmations, or marriages. A year later, Mexican Catholic Action argued that government policies of socialist education and agrarismo were the “impious work of anti-Christian masons.” However, despite this popular cross-class conviction, there is little historical work on the actual role of the masons in modern Mexico. By examining the archives of the Grand Lodge of Oaxaca, this article posits that Masonic lodges were key to the process of post-revolutionary state formation. As the state sought to assert control over a divided country, freemasonry's anticlericalism not only offered a model for cultural practice, masons also formed a vanguard of willing political emissaries. However, the institution's influence should not be overstressed. It was often curtailed by internecine disputes, political infighting, and an essentially conservative leadership.

Long associated with the context of territorial disputes on the definition of the Amazon frontiers of the Iberian empires in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the map of the Amazon River designed by Jesuit Samuel Fritz is as famous as it is misunderstood. The map is, in fact, quite poorly understood, in both the field of cartographic history, where it would certainly occupy a place of importance, and the nascent field of Amazon social history, where it often serves as a supporting illustration. In fact, even the context in which this map was produced raises disputes that require further study, distinct from those undertaken by nationalist historiographies of the countries that share borders in Amazonia. For example, few studies have been carried out regarding the means of territorial occupation and their inherent conflicts during the first centuries of European colonization of this region. It is precisely for such analysis that the map of Samuel Fritz stands as an important document for historians: more than simply rendering the course of the Amazon River it transmits a political discourse, as does any map, intrinsic to the context in which it was produced.

The urban orientation of Spanish immigrants into the New World has been a well-argued thesis among historians of colonial Latin America. Reinforcing the settlers’ proclivities toward urban life was a concerted policy of the Spanish crown which encouraged the founding of towns and cities as part of the conquest and subsequent settlement. For the conquerors of the fifteenth century and for the settlers who followed them throughout the era of Spanish imperial domination, the cosmopolitan qualities of the Renaissance instilled the attitude that urbanidad (city life) meant organized living under established political, social and religious institutions. Towns and cities were centers of order and direction for civilized life in contrast to the presumed disorder and lack of style offered by rural life.

People use domestic material culture to create an image of themselves that they project to others who live in, or visit, their homes. This was as true in the Spanish colonial city as it is in any city today. If, therefore, we wish to investigate status and ethnicity in the Spanish colonies, domestic material culture is an excellent source of information on how people imagined their own place, and that of others, in society. The first step toward this is the reconstruction of the material culture of urban colonial houses. There are two main bodies of evidence available to accomplish this. The first is descriptions of household goods in the notarial archives of the colonies, and the second is the physical remains of household refuse found in archaeological contexts in cities. Each body of evidence can make unique contributions to our understanding of social relations in the colonial city, but each also has unique limitations. I use the interplay between colonial notarial documents and archaeological remains to help define the role of material culture in the study of caste relations in Cuenca, Ecuador. The Spanish colonial régimen de castas was a system that categorized people by caste, using a complex mixture of legal status, ethnicity, racial (or physical) categorization, and economic roles.

The Requerimiento was one of the most striking legal documents of the entire age of European overseas expansion. A long line of publicists and scholars from Bartholomew de Las Casas to Lewis Hanke have discussed, praised and condemned it. The Requerimiento appears to illustrate more clearly than any other single document the combination of high-sounding motives, legal chicanery and brute force that made the Spanish conquest of the Americas possible. In recent years, there has been increasing emphasis upon examining the conquest in terms of the brute force involved and a decreasing emphasis upon the motives and the legalisms which the Spanish employed. As one scholar has said, the Requerimiento was but a “useless legalism,” and, presumably, no longer worthy of serious attention. In addition, scholars have generally agreed that the Requerimiento is thoroughly understood. Following Las Casas, they have asserted that it contained the legal opinion of the thirteenth century canon lawyer known as Hostiensis that infidels had no right to property or political jurisdiction. In medieval terms, that infidels, such as the inhabitants of the Americas, did not possess dominium. In recent years, scholars have asserted that those who defended the Indians against the conquerors, such as Las Casas himself and Francisco Vitoria, drew upon the opinion of Hostiensis' teacher, the canonist-Pope Innocent IV. In this way, the Requerimiento and the related debate about the rights of the Indians has been placed within its proper position within the late medieval canonistic tradition.