It is curious to observe how local historians generally lack historical perspective. The local historian or chronicler of a city is usually a man who in most cases has lived in the city itself, knows its little hidden corners, its narrow streets and small plazas, its characters, such as Don Francisco, Doña Agata, Jovita, etc., as Azorín would say, but, absorbed by the minutiae, the legacy of an era of leadership in government, he lives estranged from the outside world, as though the happenings in it did not affect his own city.

On April 28, 1822, His Britannic Majesty's ship Doris, outward bound from Portsmouth, by way of Rio de Janeiro, entered the bay of Valparaíso in Chile with her flag halfmast. Aboard was the body of her captain, Thomas Graham, who had died as the vessel rounded Cape Horn. His widow Maria, looking out at the town that Sunday night, wrote in her journal:

An adventuresome human experience unfolds in telling the life story of Granville Stuart, a genuine pioneer of the American West and United States minister to Uruguay and Paraguay from 1894 to 1898. Three years after his birth in Virginia in 1834, Stuart's parents moved to Iowa where he grew up in a frontier community. His father went to California in the first year of the Gold Rush, returned to Iowa in 1851 and the next spring the senior Stuart and two of his sons, Granville and James, crossed the continent to the Pacific gold fields where they mined with indifferent luck until 1857 when Stuart's sons decided to return to Iowa. The “ Mormon War ” diverted then? progress across the Great Basin, causing them to detour north into Southeastern Montana where they mined for a while and became part of that wave of settlers that pushed back the frontier in the Rocky Mountains. Stuart's first wife, an Indian woman he had married in 1862, died in 1887, leaving him with several grown children. Three years later he married Mrs. Allis Brown Fairfield, a Montana school teacher, nearly thirty years his junior, and who, like himself, had been born in Virginia and reared in Iowa. Miss Brown's parents had moved to Montana in 1879 after she had attended Sioux City (Iowa) public schools; she later studied at Vassar College and Northern Indiana Normal School, and before her marriage to Granville Stuart she taught in several one-room rural Montana schools.

Since Mexico now seems to be the key nation in Latin America in the implementation of President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, it becomes even more pressing that we in the United States understand the nature of the Mexican social order. As a point of departure for this effort, one might well begin by considering the basis for contemporary industrial and political development of Mexico as formulated in the years 1934-1940 under Mexico's New Deal of Lázaro Cárdenas. Sanford Mosk noted, “… what went on during the time of Cárdenas has had an indirect effect on the subsequent industrial development.” Or, as the United States Tariff Commission claimed, the reorientation of Mexico's economic and social policy has been an important part of her political life since 1910. The new program was given impetus by the Constitution of 1917, which contained important provisions for agrarian reform and for the protection of labor. Yet, aggressive implementation of the new policy began under president Lazaro Cardenas with the inauguration of the Six-Year Plan in 1934.

The recent discovery of an unknown document in the Archivo General de la Nación, Caracas, Venezuela, revealed a new detail concerning the life of Simón Bolívar. This document shows the effort exerted by the Spanish colonial government in Venezuela to extradite Bolívar from Haiti in 1816.

Bolívar was forced to seek refuge abroad following a cycle of military defeats. In early 1815, Bolívar found himself outside the walls of Cartagena in need of supplies from the revolutionary forces holding that city. General Manuel del Castillo, military commander of Cartagena and an enemy and rival of Bolívar, refused to furnish the supplies or to permit Bolívar's entrance into the city. While the two rivals glared at each other in costly stalemate, Spanish troops marched victoriously toward Cartagena, pinching Bolívar between them and the hostile Castillo forces. Under these circumstances, Bolívar concluded that it would be better to leave the scene of battle and, thus, to avoid dividing the patriot army in the presence of a strong Spanish force. Bolívar resigned his commission, and on May 9, 1815, he sailed for Jamaica aboard a British vessel.