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The Two, the One, the Many, the None: Rethinking the Republics of Spaniards and Indians in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Indies The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Adrian Masters
For a half-century, the historiography on Spanish Habsburg rule suggested that the crown envisioned Indies society as best divided into two segregated sociolegal groups: the republic of the Spaniards and the republic of the Indians. This model was popularized by the eminent mid twentieth century Swedish historian Magnus Mörner and has since become a foundational concept in the field. However, using
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“Looking Forward Always to Africa”: William George Emanuel and the Politics of Repatriation in Cuba, 1894–1906 The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Philip Janzen
This article examines a back-to-Africa movement from early twentieth-century Cuba. The leader, William George Emanuel, arrived in Cuba from Antigua in 1894, and over the next several years, he worked to unite the cabildos de nación and sociedades de color on the island. After independence in 1898, Emanuel and his followers rejected Cuban citizenship and began petitioning Britain, the United States
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The Argentine Allusion: On the Significance of the Southern Cone in Early Twentieth-Century São Paulo The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 James P. Woodard
This article examines a much cited but little understood aspect of the Latin American intellectual and cultural ferment of the 1910s and 1920s: the frequency with which intellectuals from the southeastern Brazilian state of São Paulo referred to developments in post Sáenz Peña Argentina, and to a lesser extent in Uruguay and Chile. In books, pamphlets, speeches, and the pages of a vibrant periodical
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The “Argentine Franco”?: The Regime of Juan Carlos Onganía and Its Ideological Dialogue with Francoist Spain (1966–1970) The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Daniel G. Kressel
The article examines the ideological character of Juan Carlos Onganía's dictatorship by exploring its ties and dialogue with Francisco Franco's Spain. Known as the “Argentine Revolution,” Onganía's regime (1966-70) was, the article shows, one of the first Cold War Latin American dictatorship to overtly use Francoist ideology as its point of reference. While building on the conventional wisdom that
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Shantytown Mexico: The Democratic Opening in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, 1969–1976 The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 David Yee
The article analyzes political conflict in Mexico through a powerful social movement that erupted in the massive shantytown of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl between 1969 and 1973. In the summer of 1969, after decades of abysmal living conditions, the residents of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl (Neza) launched a payment strike to demand the federal government expropriate the land from private land developers, with the
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Traces of Aztec Cultural Memory in Sixteenth-Century Songs and Chronicles: The Case of Tlacahuepan The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2020-10-21 Katarzyna Szoblik
This article aims to analyze traces of Aztec cultural memory recorded in sixteenth-century cultural sources of Central Mexico. It is a study of the particular case of an Aztec hero named Tlacahuepan, whose glorious death was commemorated in many songs and chronicles. The texts in question reveal highly symbolic language, as well as clearly established narrative patterns. The study of their discursive
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Caring for pobres dementes: Madness, Colonization, and the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City, 1567–1700 The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2020-10-21 Christina Ramos
This article examines the early history of the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City, which delivered charitable care and basic medical services to a vulnerable category of colonial subjects known as “pobres dementes,” or mad paupers. In spite of the vast and robust literature on the history of madness and its institutions, surprisingly little is known about this institution, which, founded in 1567
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“Vivir Mejor”: Radio Education in Rural Colombia (1960–80) The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2020-10-21 Anna Cant
Founded in 1947 by a Catholic priest, Acción Cultural Popular (ACPO) was a pioneer in radio education. Offering a radio station (Radio Sutatenza), study manuals, and a newspaper, ACPO provided basic education and encouraged campesinos to seek personal development and to “vivir mejor”--to live better. From 1947 to 1994, it attracted over four million subscribers and became a model in 13 Latin American
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¡A La Huelga! Secondary Students, School Strikes, and the Power of Educational Activism in 1970s Nicaragua The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2020-10-21 Claudia Rueda
The year 1976 was a violent one in Nicaragua. In an effort to quash the Sandinista guerrillas, the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle had declared a state of siege, suspending constitutional guarantees, muzzling the press, and unleashing the Guardia Nacional. Despite the dangers of dissent, thousands of students across the country walked off their secondary school campuses that year to protest poor
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Missionaries in Bourbon Peru - In Service of Two Masters: The Missionaries of Ocopa, Indigenous Resistance, and Spanish Governance in Bourbon Peru. By Cameron D. Jones. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Pp. viii, 223. Abbreviations. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2020-04-01 Susan Elizabeth Ramirez
Many historians have chronicled the trajectory of missionaries and their activities in colonial Latin America. Jones’s book on the attempts to convert natives in the tropical lowlands on the eastern flanks of the Andes adds insights on one religious organization that was active in that under-studied frontier mission field. The missionaries of Santa Rosa de Ocopa traced their origins back to a reform
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Free Womb Law, Legal Asynchronies, and Migrations The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Magdalena Candioti
This article analyzes in depth the history of Petrona, an enslaved woman sold in Santa Fe (Argentina), sent to Buenos Aires and later possibly to Montevideo (Uruguay). By reconstructing her case, the article demonstrates how the legal status of enslaved persons was affected by the redefinitions of jurisdictions and by the forced or voluntary crossings between political units. This study also shows
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Primer for a New World The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Estefanía Yunes Vincke
The Cartilla para ensenar a leer (1569), attributed to Flemish Franciscan Pedro de Gante, was one of the most important primers from the early years of the viceroyalty of New Spain. Nevertheless, the primer's importance during the process of cultural contact has been largely ignored. As did other primers of the period, the Cartilla contained the most important prayers, but what sets the Cartilla aside
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The “Government of the Sertões and Indians” The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Rafael Chambouleyron
This article discusses the role played by the production of sugar and cane liquor (aguardente) in the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Amazon region. It shows how the development of sugar production had a double significance: sugar plantations had to produce a commodity that could be exported so as to generate revenues for the Royal Treasury, but they also had to produce aguardente for domestic
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“The Forests Cannot Be Commons” The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Christopher Woolley
This article examines the sylvan political ecology of late colonial New Spain and the colonial government's attempt to address deforestation through the Council on Forests, the first body in the kingdom's history dedicated to the conservation of natural resources. Drawing primarily from the corpus of documents produced by and remitted to the council, this article gives a trans-regional perspective
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Don Mauro's Letters: The Marquis of Villagarcía and the Imperial Networks of Patronage in Spain The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 Adolfo Polo y La Borda
In 1657, the marquis of Villagarcia was appointed as president of the Audiencia of Charcas. Although, he eventually declined the post, his nomination generated an unusual trail of private documents. Using my study of this correspondence as a base, I will discuss how the networks of patronage were built and sustained, how they operated, and how they impacted the global mobility of imperial officials
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“A Country Proud to be Democratic”: Demanding Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chile The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 Lisa M. Edwards
This article examines criminal court cases about conflicts related to the electoral process at all stages from determining how elections would be administered to disputes about results. It argues that contemporary allegations of fraud, corruption, and misconduct during elections can inform us not only of the anomalies but also of the ways in which elections worked as expected, according to the laws
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Illegal Military Recruitment and Constitutional Law: The Judicial Protection of Forced Recruits in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Timothy M. James
Juana Tapia did not know how to sign her own name. Yet, on September 12, 1900, Tapia successfully initiated a suit in federal district court for her son's release from military service. Her son, Miguel Alvarez, had been imprisoned by a local prefect during the recent municipal elections in the city of Hermosillo, Sonora, for alleged criminal activities. Instead of consigning Alvarez to a criminal judge
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Túpac Amaru and Reformist Militarism - El apóstol de los Andes: el culto a Túpac Amaru en Cusco durante la revolución velasquista (1968–1975). By Raúl H. Asensio. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2017. Pp. 347. $21.50 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Ricardo Cubas Ramaciotti
Dorr aims to make critical interventions into a number of cutting-edge academic discussions regarding race, gender, sexuality, nation, and diaspora. She does so with a remarkable cogency that demands and rewards multiple re-readings. But this very intellectual ambitiousness works against the book’s stated intention to provide “an experience with rather than an account of South American musical transits”
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Extractivism and Racialized Landscapes - Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia. By Claudia Leal. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. Pp. 336. $55.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Renzo Ramírez Bacca
Claudia Leal addresses the Afro-descendant population and its communities in western Colombia, a forested area on the Pacific Ocean, the rainiest area in the Western Hemisphere and with the highest black population in Latin America. She studies its “extractivist economy” and social history based on the “racialization of the landscape,” for which she offers an environmentalist approach that deals with
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San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site. By Lisa Pinley Covert. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 324. $65.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 John A. Britton
Local history at its best usually includes more than the immediate vicinity. Lisa Pinley Covert’s study of San Miguel de Allende is a prime example. The author integrates history in three dimensions—local, national, and international—to examine the evolution of this small city in the hills of Mexico, 200 miles north of Mexico City and about 550 miles from the border with the United States. San Miguel
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The Spanish Flu and the Sanitary Dictatorship: Mexico's Response to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Ryan M. Alexander
The influenza of 1918, the disastrous global pandemic known to many as the Spanish Flu, could not have come at a worse time for Mexico. The nation was eight years into its decade-long revolutionary struggle, a conflict that claimed the lives of well over a million citizens. Of those lost, several hundred thousand perished due to the influenza alone, usually from secondary complications such as pneumonia
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Border Studies - The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern US-Mexico Border. By James David Nichols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Pp. xv, 287. $60.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Luis F. Jiménez
En conclusión, Raúl Asensio nos sumerge en un aspecto del debate cultural y periodístico cusqueño que se desarrolló en una época marcada por grandes expectativas de cambio social y, al mismo tiempo, de reivindicación y recreación de la conciencia nacional y de las identidades locales y étnicas. En este sentido, en vísperas de la conmemoración de los cincuenta años del inicio de la revolución velasquista
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Post-Disaster, Resettlement, and Community - From Strangers to Neighbors: Post-Disaster, Resettlement, and Community Building in Honduras. By Ryan Alaniz. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. 196. Graphics. Appendices. Notes. $29.95 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Dario A. Euraque
the tropics so long as they practiced “moral hygiene,”which Martin explores in chapter 4, “Wandering Foci of Infection.” Through a careful study of the UFC’s medical discourse, Martin demonstrates how the company used the technology of medicine to prescribe behaviors and habits that it deemed moral. These habits were racialized, with UFC doctors advising white employees to stay away from black and
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Haiti after the Revolution - Haitian Connections in the Atlantic Word: Recognition after Revolution. By Julia Gaffield. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 254. 3 maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 paper; $24.99 e-book. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Nathalie Dessens
The second half of the book deals more with the aesthetics of the era and also with Serra’s reception in later periods. In the first part, Clara Bargelini and Pamela Huckins look at the aesthetics of churches with which Serra would have been familiar; then they consider how he adopted and adapted that vision in the missions that he created in California. The essay by Cynthia Neri Lewis considers Serra’s
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“With colleagues like that, who needs enemies?”: Doctors and Repression under Military and Post-Authoritarian Brazil The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Eyal Weinberg
As young medical students at Guanabara State University, Luiz Roberto Tenorio and Ricardo Agnese Fayad received some of the best medical education offered in 1960s Brazil. For six years, the peers in the same entering class had studied the principles of the healing arts and practiced their application at the university's teaching hospital. They had also witnessed the Brazilian military oust a democratically
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Itza Maya - Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on the Itzas of Petén, Guatemala. Edited by Prudence M. Rice and Don S. Rice, with contributions from Mark Brenner, Leslie G. Cecil, Charles Andrew Hofling, Nathan J. Meissner, Timothy W. Pugh, and Yuko Shiratori. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2018. Pp. xxvi, 477. Appendix. References Cited. Index. $90.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-03-27 Michael Fry
A comprehensive synthesis, almost encyclopedic, of everything we know of the ItzaMaya, this volume, edited and mostly written by two archaeologists heavily engaged for decades in research in the Petén, Prudence Rice and Don Rice, scrutinizes social, political, environmental, and linguistic evidence from archaeological and historical studies on the Petén. In this truly interdisciplinary work, the focus
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Privateers in the Caribbean - No Limits to Their Sway: Cartagena's Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolution. By Edgardo Pérez Morales. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018. Pp. 248. $27.95 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-03-27 Nikolaus Böttcher
Durante la eṕoca colonial, Cartagena de Indias era el puerto principal en la Carrera de Indias y servía de entrada para esclavos y mercancías en su camino hacia el interior del Nuevo Reino de Granada y hacia el Perú vía Panama.́ Por consiguiente la ciudad se convirtio ́ en una plataforma para comerciantes, pero tambień para contrabandistas y corsarios. Todavía a principios del siglo XIX estos diferentes
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Manifest Destiny in Central America - Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America. By Michel Gobat. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp 384. $39.95 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-03-27 Carmen Kordick
Michel Gobat’s extensively researched and well-argued interrogation of William Walker’s failed imperial venture in Nicaragua, seeks to place this often overlooked historical episode into the broader narrative of US imperial expansion. Gobat examines a myriad of primary sources, most importantly the pro-Walker newspaper El Nicaragüense, which allows him to reconsider slavery’s role in defining Walker’s
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Cultivators, domestics, and Slaves: Slavery in Santo Domingo under Louverture and Napoleon, 1801–1803 The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-03-27 Maria Cecilia Ulrickson
OnJanuary 13, 1803, the French notaryDerieux visited the first of several estates owned by Domingo Rodríguez, recently deceased. Rodríguez’s property lay in the environs of Santiago de los Caballeros, a town in the north-central valley of Santo Domingo on eastern Hispaniola (today, the Dominican Republic). Over a three-week period, Derieux traveled with a team of witnesses and assessors to properties
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Horror on the Periphery of Modernity: The Invention of the Baixada Fluminense and the Legendary Tenório Cavalcanti The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-03-27 Tyler Ralston
The 1950s stand out as the “Golden Years” in the collective memory of many Brazilians. Sandwiched between the authoritarian periods of the Estado Novo dictatorship led by Getúlio Vargas (1937–45) and a military dictatorship (1964–85), the decade was a time of great optimism for the country’s future. Many hoped that the country would enjoy a lasting democratic system accompanied by the ever-increasing
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The Workings of Calidad: Honor, Governance, and Social Hierarchies in the Corporations of the Spanish Empire The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-03-27 Jorge E. Delgadillo Núñez
In her study on the configuration of difference in colonial New Granada, Joanne Rappaport contends that many studies “tend to ignore how different practices of distinguishing one individual from another came into play in concrete situations,” and as a result they “end up labeling as ‘race’ something that was much more multifaceted.” Subsequently, she urges scholars to interpret colonial subjects and
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Memory and Truth - Memory, Truth, and Justice in Contemporary Latin America. Edited by Roberta Villalón. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Pp. 274. $85.00 cloth. $37.00 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-03-27 J. Patrice McSherry
The chapters vary in their levels of clarity, accessibility, and theoretical contribution. Some offer sharp and clearly written essays with new evidence and analytical insights; in others, high levels of abstraction render the theoretical points rather opaque. Several authors acknowledge the complexity and ambiguity of such concepts as “collective memory” itself (190), while others use that term and
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Mexico - Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico. By Mikael D. Wolfe. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. 336. $94.95 cloth; $26.95 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Michael K. Bess
Who controls access to water remains a deeply contentious issue across the world. From legal questions originating in the mid to late nineteenth century to the political impact of the Mexican Revolution and postrevolutionary period, Mikael D. Wolfe examines the historical context of this subject in Mexico. Wolfe focuses on how the Mexican state made sense of water rights and regulated access, particularly
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The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. By Macarena Gómez-Barris. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. 208. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $84.95 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Joe Bryan
The renewed interest in extractivism in Latin America has opened up an intriguing set of possibilities, moving beyond its initial concern with the political economy of mining, oil, and gas to consider activities like soy agriculture, dams, and oil palm plantations. These issues are often grasped socially in terms of opposition and defense of land and livelihood. The text offers a welcome focus on creation
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Chile - The Pinochet Generation: The Chilean Military in the Twentieth Century. By John R. Bawden. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. Pp. 304. $49.95 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 J. Patrice McSherry
John Bawden investigates the entrenched military culture andmindset that marked Chile’s “Pinochet generation” of officers, the cohort that carried out the 1973 coup against socialist president Salvador Allende. Augusto Pinochet and his allies instituted a 17-year dictatorship that used state violence and terror, combined with neoliberal restructuring, to “change the mentality” and destiny of Chileans
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Peru - Most Scandalous Woman: Magda Portal and the Dream of Revolution in Peru. By Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2017. Pp. 376. $34.95 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Jaymie Heilman
Born in 1900 to a lower middle-class Lima family, Magda Portal sneaked into university classes as a youngwoman. She soonwon critical praise for poetry that scandalizedmany of her contemporaries, with its considerations of female sexuality and agency. Her personal choices were no less shocking. Portal’s daughter Gloria was born eight months before Portal married the child’s father, Federico Bolaños
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French Caribbean - Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean. By Christopher M. Church. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. 308. $65.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Terry Rey
Christopher Church’s well-researched and innovative book is based on extensive archival sleuthing and covers a period of Caribbean history that has received relatively scant attention from scholars: the late nineteenth century through to the outbreak of World War I. With its principal geographic foci being Guadeloupe and Martinique, the study seeks to answer “two central questions: How did modern France
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Colonial New Spain - The Directory for Confessors, 1585: Implementing the Catholic Reformation in New Spain. Edited and translated by Stafford Poole. Contributions by John Frederick Schwaller. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 368. $65.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Jonathan Truitt
La última parte del libro se ocupa del declive y de la paulatina crisis hegemonial de España. Para Cuba fue de suma importancia, ya que esta crisis se agudizó con la pérdida de la flota entera cerca de Matanzas en 1628 después del ataque del holandés Piet Heyn. En la Paz de Westfalia de 1640 España tuvo que reconocer finalmente la independencia de Holanda y en 1659 la supremacía de Francia en la Paz
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Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire. By Sarah E Owens. Albuquerque: New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. 208. $95.00 cloth; $29.95 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Julia McClure
Las Casas wanted the act of absolution to be a healing activity in which penitents expressed real contrition and sought pardon of the indigenous people they had injured. This permitted the reconciliation of the aggrieved parties. The penitents had to confess all of their sins to the priest and then restore what had been lost. Las Casas understood that restitution (that is, making whole again) was not
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The Latina/o Midwest Reader. Edited by Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, and Claire F. Fox. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. 352. 36 photographs. $95.00 cloth; $28.00 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Jennifer Rudolph
One element of García’s book that needs further clarification is his references to an “ideal reader” (27). Though he admits that no ideal reader exists (38), García frames discussion around the bodies of knowledge that an ideal reader would have to be familiar with in order to understand the complexities of the works that he analyses. The diversity and longevity of this particular comic universe, however
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Mexican Heartland - The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000. By John Tutino. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 512. $39.50 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Peter Guardino
John Tutino has long been one of the premier historians of Mexico’s agrarian past, and in this sweeping book he continues to explicate that past through deep research in primary sources, theoretical thinking, and historical synthesis. Focusing on areas of Mexico’s core that are now located in the Federal District and the states of Hidalgo, Mexico, and Morelos, Tutino shows how Mexico’s rural population
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Early Colonial Cuba - Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba. By Luis Martínez-Fernández. Gainesville: University of Florida Press2018. Pp. 220. $74.95 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Nikolaus Bӧttcher
dedicated to his memory. Interestingly, Flinter’s own writings portray Simón Bolívar’s actions with a very gothic tone. Continuing in the study of fascinating brokers across imperial divides, Cameron B. Strang’s essay discusses George J. F. Clarke, an elite Florida patriot who was strongly loyal to Spanish understandings of race and miscegenation. Although Clarke probably did not marry their freedwoman
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Resistance in Mexico - In the Lands of Fire and Sun: Resistance and Accommodation in the Huichol Sierra, 1723–1930. By Michele McArdle Stephens. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Pp. 222. $50.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Beatriz Marín-Aguilera
pharmacists’ reluctance to incorporate local materia medica and how the state and Catholic Church curbed scientific innovation in Peru. This rich social history promises to make Spanish colonial pharmacies both comprehensible and engaging. Students of history, science, technology, and medicine will appreciate its premodern perspective and the complex layers connecting religion, society, and medical
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Region, Nation, and Social Science: An Interview with Joseph L. Love on 50 Years of Studying Brazil The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Zephyr Frank, Glen Goodman, James Woodard
In late September 2016, the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) hosted a symposium on regionalism in Brazilian history to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Professor Joseph L. Love's arrival at Illinois. Organized by the Institute's director, Professor Jerry Davila, the symposium brought together historians from the United States and Brazil
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Colonial Evangelization - To Heaven or to Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario. Edited and translated by David Thomas Orique. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018. Pp 152. $24.95 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 James Wadsworth
Bartolomé de las Casas’s famous 1552 Confesionario sought to employ the power of the Church and the confessional to wrest some small measure of justice for the native peoples who suffered from the Spaniards’ rapacious greed. In doing so, Las Casas articulated an innovative theology that declared that all Spaniards who had participated in, or benefited from, the conquest and exploitation of native peoples
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Maya - Before Kukulkán: Bioarcheology of Maya Life, Death, and Identity at Classic Period Yaxuná. By Viera Tiesler, Andrea Cucina, Travis W. Stanton, and David A. Freidel. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017. Pp. 305. $80.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Markus Eberl
In the 1840s, John L. Stephens traveled through northern Yucatan. While staying at the hacienda of San Francisco, he had locals dig into a square building at the ruins nearby. After six hours, a burial appeared below a flat stone. Everybody wondered whose bones these were. Stephens collected the skeletal remains and brought them back to the States where he carried them one night to the then-famous
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Mujeres: en el cambio social en el siglo xx mexicano. By María Teresa Fernández Aceves. Mexico City: CIESAS, 2014. Pp. 348. $13.70 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Nichole Sanders
The history of water has long been a subject of interest for scholars ofMexico.Wolfe builds on pioneering studies by Luis Aboites and engages more recent histories by Christopher Boyer and EmilyWakild, among others. One of the chief contributions of his book to this broader historiography is its diverse use of sources from national, state, and local archives in Mexico alongside foreign collections
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Frontiers of Evangelization: Indians in the Sierra Gorda and Chiquitos Missions. By Robert H. Jackson. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2017. Pp. 208. 34 Illustrations. Two appendixes. Notes. Index. $36.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Beatriz Marín-Aguilera
Taking off from this stance, this is a book of scholarly erudition that draws on more than 30 years of research on missions across Spanish America. The author convincingly argues that successful evangelizing strategies were due to a combination of the natives’ pre-existing social organization and the ability of missionaries to adapt their organizational structures to that social environment. Jackson
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Aztecs - The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs. Edited by Deborah L Nichols and Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 748. $150.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 John F. Schwaller
As one of many handbooks published by Oxford University Press to provide valuable reference material for scholars and libraries, this volume is an impressive undertaking. It consists of 49 articles that cover the breadth of Aztec culture from a variety of perspectives. Overwhelmingly, the authors of these articles are archeologists and anthropologists. But experts from related fields, such as Anthony
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The Press and Brazilian Narratives of Uncle Tom's Cabin: Slavery and the Public Sphere in Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1855 The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Celso Thomas Castilho
In March 1855, a literary newspaper in Rio de Janeiro printed the first installment of Nisia Floresta's “Paginas de uma vida obscura,” a serialized short story inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Seven more chapters followed, keeping “Paginas” in the public eye for months. The Jornal do Commercio , arguably the national paper of record, mentioned the story in its announcements
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Nineteenth-Century Slavery - Slavery and Historical Capitalism during the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Dale Tomich. New York: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xiii, 202. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $100 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Alex Borucki
The histories of state formation and capitalism in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil are interwoven into the meteoric rise and fall of slavery in these countries after 1780. Very early in the history of the professionalization of the historian’s craft, locally based scholars of the US South, Brazil, and Cuba had to explain slavery to provide a national narrative. Thus, the largest and oldest cumulative
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Counterrevolutionary Friends: Caribbean Basin Dictators and Guatemalan Exiles against the Guatemalan Revolution, 1945–50 The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Aaron Coy Moulton
It was in January 1950 that Guatemalan Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, a rather unfamiliar figure at the time, headed for El Salvador, giving no sign that he would eventually become one of the most notorious antagonists in the destruction of the 1944-54 Guatemalan Revolution. Late in 1950, he and some 70 compatriots attacked Guatemala City’s Base Militar, hoping to overthrow Juan José Arévalo’s government
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Panama - Mobility and Modernity: Panama in the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Imagination. By Robert D. Aguirre. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Pp. 232. $67.95 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Michael E. Neagle
Robert D. Aguirre, a professor of English at Wayne State University, has written an incisive cultural history of US and British perceptions of nineteenth-century Panama. Drawing principally on close readings of travel writers, poets, and photographers, he examines how Anglo-American assumptions about the isthmus permeated popular discourse. Such assumptions supported US and British neocolonial policies
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The Neglected Narratives of Cuba's Partido Independiente de Color: Civil Rights, Popular Politics, and Emancipatory Reading Practices The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Alexander Sotelo Eastman
On March 10, 1910, Pío Coronel informed his readers that he was abandoning his home in the western province of Pinar del Río and saddling up his horse to set out on an important journalistic and political assignment. The black press journalist noted that once he got wind of Cuban president José Miguel Gómez’s plans to set off from the presidential palace on a political campaign across the island, he
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Mexican-American War - Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies: Women and the Mexican-American War. By John M. Belohlavek. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. 320. $45.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Gregory Weeks
John Belohlavek offers an engaging study of women in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. His goal is “to explore and recognize the courage, spirit, and influence of women heralded and unheralded” (2). The book’s core is a series of narratives detailing the activities of individual women. He introduces women whose collective participation in the war does not typically receive as much attention as do
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Latinx studies - The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics. By Enrique García. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Pp. 192. $26.95 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 James Scorer
Enrique García’s study of the long-running comic book worlds created by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez is an eminently digestible introduction to a body of work that continues to be hugely influential within both Latino cultural production and the world of comics. García states that his book is targeted at both non-readers of comics and staunch fans, and there is more than enough material to satisfy both
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Americas Since Columbus - Exploitation, Inequality, and Resistance: A History of Latin America Since Columbus. Edited by Mark A. Burkholder, Monica Rankin, and Lyman L. Johnson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 480. $29.95 paper. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Julia McClure
The three editors of this work have created an essential textbook for students and teachers of the history of Latin America. The book is arranged chronologically in 26 chapters, each containing an introductory timeline, an exemplary primary source, and up-to-date suggestions for further reading. It includes an epilogue, glossary, and engaging maps and images to help students. As the preface explains
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Ancient Americas - Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas. Edited by Joanne Pillsbury, Timothy Potts, and Kim N. Richter. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute, 2017. Pp. 311. 428 color illustrations. 4 maps. $59.95 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Stefan Hanß
Golden Kingdoms is the catalogue of a joint exhibition of the J. Paul Getty Museum (September 2017 to January 2018) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (February to May, 2018). The book discusses the role and legacy of luxury items in the ancient Americas from a wide range of perspectives, addressing regions from Mexico to Peru and a chronology from 2000 BC to the Spanish colonial period. Despite this
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Pious Funds across the Pacific (1668–1823): Charitable Bequests or Credit Source? The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Juan O. Mesquida
“Mercy,” preached Fray Casimiro Díaz, “is the legitimate daughter of compassion. And the indigent exclaims, the widows, orphans, and destitute women broadcast, even the religious communities acclaim, that mercy is the distinctive virtue of this Holy Board, for your pious gifts reach all of them.” The Augustinian friar was addressing the guardians and members of Manila’s Hermandad de la Misericordia
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Haitian Revolution - The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World. By Terry Rey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 330. Illustrations. Bibliography. Notes. Index. $75.00 cloth. The Americas (IF 0.711) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 David Geggus
Alas, two fundamental claims of the text are problematic. The author asserts that his exploration of the major theme, surviving slavery, is disconnected from “the enslaved people’s efforts to rebel, resist and wrest some measure of autonomy from their enslavers” (4). Yet he repeatedly underscores that they were frequently compelled to disobey and run away to lodge complaints because their masters “did
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