The initial thrust of Spanish conquest and colonization in Northwest Mexico, as throughout the great Chichimec frontier, was centered in the mission. Under the terms of the patronato real, the mission served as an instrument of Spanish imperial policy, aimed to accomplish the pacification and acculturation to Christian and Hispanic norms of society, of the semi-nomadic peoples who occupied the vast regions of mountain barrancas, mesas and valleys, coastal plains and desert lands to the north of the Mesoamerican civilizations.

The mission communities were designed to place the Indians in fixed settlements, thereby preparing the way for civil colonization and further exploitation of the potential riches of these remote dominions of the Kingdom of Castile. The Indians gathered into the missions represented to the Crown a force for productivity as field and mine laborers. Although mission Indians were exempt from tribute, in the Northwest, the surplus produce from mission lands contributed to the economy of the region; and, as early as the seventeenth century, mission Indians appeared in the mines of Sonora and Chihuahua.

Interpretations of Juan Domingo Perón and his movement have been and will continue to be a recurring and highly controversial theme in Argentine history. Studies of the nature of Peronism indicate that there is a wide diversity of viewpoints regarding its origin, its structure, its grassroots appeal and its mode of recruiting. Peronism has been analyzed within the framework of Argentine national developments, and it has been compared with foreign models—Fascism, Bonapartism, Nasserism—with which it shares some important characteristics. An analysis of Peronism and the reality of Argentina under Perón from a comparative viewpoint, is useful. But the search for the causes that brought Perón and Peronism to power in 1946 and shaped them until 1955, should be focused primarily on Argentina's own historical experience. Eldon Kenworthy has aptly questioned the approach followed by some American scholars in explaining Peronism, because in general, Kenworthy notes, they “have tended to interpret Peronism in terms of global trends salient to the United States rather than as a stage in Argentina's historical evolution.”

In 1534 Ulrich Schmidl set sail for South America where he participated in the Spanish conquest of the River Plate region. He remained there twenty years, after which he returned to his native town Straubing and wrote a diary of his adventures. This account represents one of the oldest and most important sources of information about the Spanish conquest of the River Plate region and the first settlements in Argentina. Although it is often difficult to identify tribes and villages due to his distorted spellings of the Indian names, historians regard the account as generally reliable. The text is preserved in three manuscripts in Stuttgart, Munich, and Hamburg. The Stuttgart manuscripts stems from Ulrich Schmidl himself. It is located in the Hautstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, where it is identified as Cod. hist. 4° 153. It was edited in 1893 by Johannes Mondschein, who, in the preface to his edition, characterized the manuscript as “die erste Niederschrift von der ungeübten Hand des eben von einem langen und wilden Kriegsund Abenteuerleben heimgekehrten Kriegsmannes.” The two other manuscripts are later copies, although the Munich manuscript does contain Schmidl's signature in his own hand.

A study of the capitation tax of 1735 in Minas Gerais is interesting since it illustrates the way in which the Crown of Portugal succeeded in enforcing its will through the machinery of colonial administration in a newly incorporated, frontier society. It also tells something about the men of that administration and the political process in which they were involved.

The collection of the tax on mineral wealth known as the quinto was one of the most enduring problems confronting Crown officials in Brazil during the eighteenth century. The king permitted his subjects to mine precious metals in his dominions in return for the payment of one fifth of the annual production. Rich alluvial gold deposits discovered in the closing years of the seventeenth century, lay beyond the territory effectively controlled by the governors of the littoral captaincies. Hidden in the shadows of Sabarabuçú, the shining mountain of Indian legends, the isolation of the mines and the tenuous control of the region by the royal administration made collection of the tax haphazard. As the eighteenth century progressed, the production of the gold mines increased, however the king's share failed to grow accordingly. The need for added revenue and the realization that the full amount due the Crown was not arriving at the customs house in Lisbon convinced the king that payment of the quinto should be rigorously enforced.

Students of late nineteenth century history have long dismissed the world industrial expositions as glittering, but not highly significant reflections of the gilded age. What emerges from the literature of the period, however, is a sense of the overriding commercial importance of these exhibitions. Nineteenth-century observers consistently linked the fairs to the general growth of world trade and to the expanding commercial hegemony of the United States. More specifically, contemporaries agreed that the expositions served to develop trade and investment ties with Latin America. Among the Latin American countries represented in the expositions, Mexico was the most important and consistent participant.

The well-known ethnologist and investigator, Fernando Ortiz, has recognized that “without the black, Cuba would not be Cuba,” a statement that makes clear the tremendous importance of the African contribution to present-day Cuban culture.

It is a known fact that the aboriginal base of Cuban society was quickly destroyed by the first Spaniards to reach the island, thereby creating the necessity for a new slave population, a new race: that of the blacks of Africa. They came from various regions but primarily from near the mouth of the Niger River.

The cultures which they brought were varied: some elementary and others sufficiently developed, like the Dahomeyan and Yoruba, which manifested a degree of complexity that made them comparable in many aspects to European culture of the Middle Ages. They had agriculture, trade, centralized government, mutual protection social organizations, highly developed oral folkloristic literature (they lacked writing), and a degree of development in certain branches of art—such as music.

Conflict between revolution and academia, between the activist and the scholar, is probably inevitable. At times when urgent demands for radical change threaten the very fabric of a society, when popular violence and ideological bitterness question all traditions, a university becomes especially vulnerable. As an institution dedicated to preserving the cultural inheritance of the past, a haven for the calm, deliberate pursuit of truth, the university in the midst of revolution must choose whether to adhere to its traditional role, or to become an active partner of social change, promulgating new ideologies and providing practical training for revolutionary leaders. During the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the popular image of a university as a refuge for the privileged and wealthy added to a long history of the conscious use of education to promote a prescribed set of values to make the National University particularly controversial. Dedicated only two months before the Revolution erupted, the new institution found itself under immediate pressure to become “revolutionary” in a society that had little patience for scholarly aloofness.