The highly visible change which took place in Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fascinated contemporary observers of the republic. The millions of immigrants, the formation of a large urban middle class, and the growth of the great metropolis of Buenos Aires all seemed to indicate that Argentina rapidly was emerging as a modern, developed nation. Equally impressive to foreign observers was Argentina's apparently booming economy, which was based on a flourishing export trade. With only brief interruptions, exports, nearly entirely composed of agricultural and cattle products, had risen from 22 million gold pesos in 1862 to 519 million in 1913. To produce the exports, total area under cultivation rose from 580,000 hectares in 1872 to 24.1 million in 1913.

A History of Catholicism in Brazil could well be divided into the pre- and post-Jacksonian eras. Jackson de Figueiredo, fiery Catholic journalist of the 1920's who serves as the point of reference, performed the feat of almost single-handedly wrenching the Brazilian Church from the position of static equilibrium in which it long lay suspended. This statis had its roots in the restrictive regalism of the Portuguese and Brazilian Empires and in the Republican disestablishment which followed in 1890.

Caught up since 1890 with organizational and financial problems of survival, the Brazilian Church had drawn ever closer to Rome. Under the auspices of the papacy, the hierarchy recruited foreign clergy to staff its underorganized church and encouraged new orders to set up branches in Brazil. In 1905 Pope Leo XIII appointed Archbishop Joaquim Arcoverde of Rio the first Cardinal of Brazil and of Latin America. He created new dioceses in Brazil and appointed Rome-trained bishops to fill them. The utilization of Rome's financial and personnel resources in the postdisestablishment period considerably shored up the Church qua organization in Brazil.

The historian often confronts contradictory sources. The inconsistencies are frequently synthesized into an account satisfying the historian's world view. Sometimes the points of agreement and disagreement are systematically examined. The chronicles of the conquest of New Spain provide the opportunity to engage in this latter process of collation. The sources under consideration in this essay are the chronicles of Francisco López de Gómara, Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Francisco de Aguilar, and Andrés de Tapia. The first three men write for specific objectives; the latter two do not.

Cortés addressed his letters to the king of Spain seeking to legitimize his precarious position vis-à-vis the governor of Cuba, from whom he was seeking autonomy. For this reason, the captain's actions appear in the most favorable light.

The re-election of Gerardo Machado in 1928 promised to augur the continuity of the political quiescence that had characterized the President's first administration (1925-1928). By 1927, the Cuban chief executive had forged a coalition among the national political sectors, binding the Liberal, Conservative, and Popular parties to his candidacy for re-election. Through the appropriate application of patronage and coercion, the President had imposed a political consensus dissolving partisan autonomy, traditionally the source of anti-re-electionist violence. Cooperativismo, as the arrangement became known, conferred on parties outside the circumference of power the prerogatives, perquisites, and government posts inherent in the past only during national incumbency.

The first years of independence in Bolivia, as in all of the nations born of the Latin American wars of independence, were times of significant and often accelerated political, social and economic change. The republic created in 1825 in what was known in colonial times as Upper Peru participated fully in this important transformation. During the administration of Bolivia's first president, Antonio José de Sucre, (1825-1828) a program of ecclesiastical reform, educational and social innovation, and economic reorganization of far-reaching implications was undertaken. Upper Peru's chronic poverty, the concentration on silver mining and subsistence agriculture, excessive military expenses, hostility from neighboring countries, and the unbridled political ambitions of the military and civilians resulted in the failure of most of the reforms which might have radically altered the course of Bolivian history.