When I began this extended period of research into the history of nineteenth-century Peru, I was burdened with the ideas drawn from the writings of Bernard Moses and Desdedives du Dezert. In the main, they seem to think that by the end of the 18th century, the Church in Peru had grown stagnant and formalistic, forgetful of the heritage of Santo Toribio, San Martín, San Solano, or Santa Rosa.

Although virtually unstudied, the introduction of the philosophy of positivism into Chile acted as a catalyst upon the development of that country during the decade before the War of the Pacific. Scholars have given appropriate attention to the influence of positivism as it became significant in other Latin American countries during the eighteen-seventies, and Leopold Zea has discussed the importance of that philosophic system in Chile during the years which followed the west coast conflict of 1879-1883. However, despite the ever increasing number of articles and monographs dealing with positivism, the historians of Latin America have ignored the philosophy's growth in the Republic of Chile before the war and the effect of that growth upon the ideologies already extant in the Pacific coast nation.

No Revolution worthy of the name has stopped at its national borders. For good and for evil revolution is exportable. Numerous studies have been made of the international and even the global results of such modern upheavals as the English, American, French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Although several treatises have been published on the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, and its creation of the first Negro republic and second independent nation in the New World, there has appeared no full-scale survey of its foreign significance. Inescapably, many histories of the Dominican Republic indicate the pervasive postrevolutionary relations of Haiti and her eastern neighbor on Hispaniola. Dominican life has been moulded in every sense by reactions to Haitian events, particularly the Haitian attempt to assimilate that republic and several eastward migrations of Haitian people. Otherwise, studies of the Haitian uprising have been limited to internal changes or the extensive diplomatic relations of the Black Republic.

The Mexica people, nomads forced southward by the bellicose Chichimecas of the north in the early fourteenth century, received revelation from their principal deity, Huitzilopochtli, which would terminate their wanderings. Appearing in dreams to the priest Cuauhtloquetzqui, Huitzilopochtli stated that on the spot where the heart of his slain nephew, Copil, was thrown, there would grow a great nopal cactus where an eagle would make his nest and dry his wings in the morning sun. This site he further stated would be named Tenochtitlan, place of the nopal, and there the people were to build a great city from which they would become the masters of the surrounding regions. The announcement of this revelation was made by Cuauhtloquetzqui, and, locating the great nopal on an island in the center of the Lake of Texcoco, a temple to Huitzilopochtli was constructed on the site in the year 1325.

The relatively small degree of racial discrimination against the Negro in Latin America generally has been traced by North American historians to Spanish acceptance of the African Negro as a human being, not perpetually destined for slavery nor inferior to other races. In contrast to the status of the Negro slave in colonial North America, Spanish laws and attitudes are thought to have provided in colonial Spanish America a climate of opinion which promoted miscegenation and afforded the slave a variety of legal avenues to freedom. In support of this explanation of reduced racial discimination, notarial records of manumission from the colonial period and the thirteenth-century legal code, Las siete partidas , are prominently displayed as evidence of the Spaniards' belief in “equality among men” and the transformation of the principle of equality into practice.