In order to have avoided the criticism of most writers priding themselves on their progressive and modern spirit, the Catholic Church in the nineteenth-century Hispanic world would have had to accept religious toleration, would have had to surrender much of its material goods, and would have had to reconcile itself to secularism by relinquishing influence in the temporal order. Various circumstances, many of them arising as much from social conditions as from theological viewpoints, caused the Church first in nineteenth-century Spain and somewhat later in Spanish America to set itself resolutely and militantly against these three desiderata of its liberal critics.

Francisco de Paula Santander was Simón Bolívar's right arm in the formation of the state of Gran Colombia by the Liberator's own acknowledgement. While Bolívar, the President, was directing the winning of the last battles of the war Santander, the Vice President, was directing the government from Bogotá from 1821 until Bolivar returned from the wars in 1827. Although the control of the government was out of Santander's hands during Bolívar's dictatorship (1827-1830) and the turbulency following Bolívar's death in 1830, Santander took the helm again in October, 1832, as President. If one considers his three-year activity in Congress after his term as President ended in 1837, then, in a sense, Santander's influence in Colombia lasted for almost two decades when he died in 1840. Although much of his public life was concerned with other aspects of the nation, Santander gave considerable attention to the fiscal matters of the country. It was his guidance which helped Colombia through two decades of difficult economic experimentation.

It is necessary to study the political status of Latin American merchants because we have so long heard that they were largely without franchise during the colonial period. We have been told that the creoles were the landowners, that the peninsulares were the merchants, and that the creoles generally controlled the cabildos. Though several writers have been investigating the merchants for some time now there are still historians who do not recognize the presence of a dynamic, influential group of creole merchants at the end of the colonial period. The Conceptión merchants (those who maintained residence in the town of Concepción) have been singled out for case study, but I am fully convinced that the patterns we see among them will apply also for the Santiago and far-northern merchants. By 1790 the town of Concepción was the capital of Chile's southern intendency, it was as it would demonstrate time and again in later years the capital of the south; and the south was the keystone of early nineteenth-century Chilean political life.

Perhaps no event affected the lives of so many people and the history of so many nations as the French Revolution and subsequent roles played by Napoleon Bonapart. There was the Louisiana Purchase and the preliminaries to the War of 1812 in North America. In the Caribbean the Haitian independence movement which was precipitated by events in France set off a chain of events of farreaching consequence. For Spanish America the Napoleonic invasion and occupation of Spain had a catalytic affect for the independence-minded patriots who declared themselves independent “in the name of Spanish Prince Ferdinand.” The invasion of Portugal and the flight of the Court to Brazil set that country reeling on its course toward nationhood. This study begins with the earliest actions in the French colony of Saint Dominigue after the outbreak of the French Revolution.

On May 24, 1965, nearly a month after the first U. S. Marines landed in Santo Domingo, an inter-American military force under the command of a Brazilian general took over peacekeeping activities in the Dominican Republic. Although the first Brazilian contingent to arrive comprised only 300 troops, it later reached a total of 1,250, the largest contribution by a single Latin American nation. While Brazil's participation in the Dominican crisis was a clear indication that the independent foreign policy of Quadros and Goulart had been discarded in favor of a realignment once again with the United States, it also signified an abrupt departure from one of the basic tenets of Brazilian foreign policy—nonintervention. The case study of Brazil's role in the Dominican Republic in 1965 which follows provides a unique opportunity to examine the impact of traditional forces and contemporary events on Brazilian foreign policy at a critical juncture in that nation's history.

This unpublished document gives a revealing look at the situation of the Franciscan Order in southern Brazil in the early nineteenth century. It was written in 1833 at the request of Msgr. Scipione Domenico Fabbrini, Chargé of the Papal Nunciature of Rio de Janeiro, by Frei Francisco de Monte Alverne, O.F.M., one of the better-known friars of the nineteenth century, and considered by many to be the greatest preacher in the Portuguese language since António Vieira, S. J.

To understand the deep pessimism and melancholy evident in his Plan of Reform, one has to understand some of the background on the Franciscan Order in Brazil, and to know a little of the life of Frei Francisco himself.