Participation of women in the Cristero rebellion, the Catholic uprising against the anti-clerical revolutionary government of Mexico, has largely been ignored by historians. A fresh reading of the documents, and more important, conversations with the principal women in the movement, reveal that the traditional role of women in the church gave way to changed behavior in the 1920s. Not only were Catholic women of a traditionally oriented society capable of assuming leadership in a violent enterprise, but they were equally capable of falling back into their conservative patterns once the crisis had ended. Nevertheless, the vital role women played in the church-state conflict prepared them for the emerging role of women in the twentieth century.

Although the Albuquerque Coelhos, lords-proprietor of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Pernambuco, have been carefully studied, there has been relatively little archival research on other principal families in that captaincy during this period. This paper presents an account of the Pais Barreto family, especially of the father, João Pais, and to a lesser extent, his son, João Pais Barreto, who were respective heads of the family from its founding in Pernambuco until about 1657. Because the Pais Barretos were not closely tied to the family of the lords-proprietor and at the same time were, by most reports, the richest senhores de engenhos in Brazil, their concerns and activities may be taken as archetypical of the affairs and aspirations of a rising colonial planter elite.

Conventional wisdom holds that two sharp breaks occurred historically in Mexican church-state relations: the first during the Reforma (1857-1861), and the second during the Revolution (1910-1920). These breaks reflected growing estrangement and hostility between secular and ecclesiastical authorities, culminating finally, with the Constitution of 1917, in the most anti-clerical and even anti-religious legislation ever enacted in the hemisphere. This paper has no quarrel with the above interpretation as far as it goes. What I will argue here is that, despite these very real changes, certain basic continuities have persisted in the conceptualization of the relationship between Church and State. Moreover, a number of specific quarrels and modes of government response have roots that extend well into the colonial period. Anti-monasticism has some precedent in the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, and the nationalization of Church property in 1859 and again in 1917, in the royal Consolidation of 1804.

Simón Bolívar has sometimes been called “The George Washington of South America.” Certainly his achievements are so well known as to deserve the apt appelation “El Libertador” by which he is known by many of the neighbors of the United States of America south of the border.

One of the most important propaganda influences in Bolívar's success was the achievement of a good press in nations sympathetic to his cause. He was quite reticent to see the United States in a dominant role in the future regarding the areas he was trying to free from Spanish rule. Because he believed that Britain was “ruler of the world” during this period of world history, he was particularly interested that favorable images of him should appear in the British press.