Turner's concept of the frontier as the central theme in American History has proved to be one of the most formative forces in the development of American historiography. Even the critics, whether they completely rejected or partially accepted Turner's thesis, have been forced to reappraise the basic factors in American social and political history. At least to that extent they were influenced by Turner.

In the Journal of Cycle Research (7:43–48, April, 1958) S.W. and N.E. Gray published “Evidence for a 400-Year Cycle in Human Ability”, which might have been more accurately called “Human Achievement” since ability refers to potential, but the 25,000 lives they reviewed were finished and realized. They took the names of historic personages listed in the 1935 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia and classified them, without rating or ranking, each as an equivalent unit, according to their occurrence in time; or, more exactly, counting how many individuals, eminent enough to have won inclusion in this encyclopedia, were alive in each decade between 500 B.C. and A.D. 1800. The authors recognize that essentially their data do not cover “human history”, but “the western world and its Mediterranean fringes”.

The time seemed propitious for the establishment of a government of law in Serbia at the beginning of 1830. Between the end of 1828 and the autumn of 1830 Prince Miloš of Serbia created a so-called “legislative commission” to translate the Code Napoléon into Serbian and codify the laws and customs of the country. In January 1830 he solemnly advised a great national assembly that he had obtained an imperial edict from the Sultan ending all direct obligations of Serbian peasants to their former Turkish lords, guaranteeing Ottoman recognition of Serbian autonomy in most matters of internal administration, and offering Serbia the prospect of territorial aggrandizement, as well as the express right to institute schools, courts, and a governmental administration of her own. Shortly thereafter the Serbian envoys to St. Petersburg returned to Serbia and made it known that the Tsar-Protector had supposedly expressed the view that every state should have an “organic charter”. The able and enlightened Count Paul Kiselev, Russian Governor of the Rumanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, had moreover just endowed these provinces with “Organic Statutes”

The islands of Puerto Rico and Jamaica, which lie roughly at the same latitude and less than 600 miles apart at their nearest points, share a number of remarkable similarities in general physical environment. Strikingly in contrast to the similarities in topography, climate, flora and fauna are the differences in the cultures of the two islands. One of the reasons for this cultural disparity has to do not with the cultures of the colonial powers, but with the persistence of a strong peasantry in one island (Jamaica), and a relatively weak peasantry in the other (Puerto Rico). This difference stems in large part from the individual histories of the two islands, histories predominantly determined by the colonial aims and policies of, in one case, Spain and Great Britain; in the other, Spain and the United States. The present paper purports to treat principally one brief period (1800–1850) during which a sharp divergence in the colonial objectives of the respective controlling powers affected the cultures of Jamaica and Puerto Rico accordingly. It was during this half-century that Puerto Rico repeated a historical experience which Jamaica had undergone nearly 150 years earlier: the development of a sugar plantation economy.

The West Indian area is one of the most attractive fields for comparative study. For, as Dr. Mintz has pointed out, it includes territories, generally similar in physical environment, which, nevertheless, differ in their individual histories. The marked divergence in the histories of Puerto Rico and Jamaica during the first half of the nineteenth century is only one instance among many which can be cited as worthy of attention. The interest of this particular case is that it raises the point in an acute form.

In 1950, the Venezuelan Professor Mariano Picón Salas directed a historical seminar in the College of Mexico, concentrated on one region which he called Latin America. Subsequently, in response to comments from Brazilian collaborators, the program was broadened so as to aim at a comprehensive view of the histories of all the Ibero-American nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purpose was to discover whether there were not periods with comparable characteristics in the histories of the various countries.

An Interdisciplinary Conference on International Understanding and Peaceful Co-operation, called by the social science division of UNESCO, was held in Prague, September 24–30, 1958. The approximately thirty social scientists present came from seventeen countries, including Egypt and Japan (which had not had representatives at previous meetings of the series). The Czechoslovakian National UNESCO Commission were hosts to the meeting, which was held in the Charles University.