Las multitudes argentinas (1899), de José María Ramos Mejía, es un estudio de psicología colectiva influido por Psychologie des foules, de Le Bon. A partir de un sociologismo evolucionista, Ramos analiza la dimensión social y política de la inmigración masiva y la gobernabilidad de las masas, y aplica los preceptos positivistas a la historia social. "Las obras de Ramos Mejía (Argentina, 1842-1914), Juan Agustín García (Argentina, 1862-1923) y Jorge Basadre (Perú, 1903-1980) abrieron el camino hacia una nueva historia de Hispanoamérica, hacia una historia social. Tienen las virtudes y los defectos de toda obra fundacional: imprecisión terminológica, manejo de conceptos determinados por las corrientes de la época. Los historiadores que no las tuvieron en cuenta pasaron por alto una riqueza que a ellos mismos les hubiera correspondido rectificar, acrecentar y perfilar. Esa omisión es aún recuperable. Pero la recuperación solo es posible cuando se tenga una visión transparente de nuestro pasado cultural y de nuestra historia, es decir, una visión que no solo censure y que cuando lo haga no confunda la censura con la condena; una visión que no crea que la generosidad en la apreciación de una obra del pasado es necesariamente apología o ignorancia de la última moda. Las creaciones literarias y científicas son inevitablemente efímeras, pero el reconocimiento de la fugacidad no puede inducir a creer que lo que es pasado para una o dos generaciones carece de suscitaciones para las generaciones posteriores, de las que se supone que tienen una perspectiva más amplia." Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot

After a promising start as a prosperous and liberal democratic nation at the end of the nineteenth century, Argentina descended into instability and crisis. This stark reversal, in a country rich in natural resources and seemingly bursting with progress and energy, has puzzled many historians. In Civilizing Argentina, Julia Rodriguez takes a sharply contrary view, demonstrating that Argentina's turn of fortune is not a mystery but rather the ironic consequence of schemes to "civilize" the nation in the name of progressivism, health, science, and public order. With new medical and scientific information arriving from Europe at the turn of the century, a powerful alliance developed among medical, scientific, and state authorities in Argentina. These elite forces promulgated a political culture based on a medical model that defined social problems such as poverty, vagrancy, crime, and street violence as illnesses to be treated through programs of social hygiene. They instituted programs to fingerprint immigrants, measure the bodies of prisoners, place wives who disobeyed their husbands in "houses of deposit," and exclude or expel people deemed socially undesirable, including groups such as labor organizers and prostitutes. Such policies, Rodriguez argues, led to the destruction of the nation's liberal ideals and opened the way to the antidemocratic, authoritarian governments that came later in the twentieth century.

Evoking the famous watchwords of Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento (1868–74), Between Civilization and Barbarism explores the positioning of women within the Argentine nation and argues that women neither sought alliance with the “civilizing” agenda of leading statesmen nor found identity in the extreme poses of “barbarism,” to which some intellectuals had condemned them. Instead, women used literary and political texts to surpass the tightly outlined roles assigned to them. Beginning with literary and journalistic texts written by and about women from the time of Sarmiento, Francine Masiello traces strategic shifts in the discourse on gender at moments of national crisis. She considers not only novels and guides to female behavior written by and for privileged women but also newspapers and political tracts produced by women of the working class. Extending her study into the urban expansion and modernization of the 1920s, Masiello explores the nature of gender relations posited in treatises on crime and public disorder and in the texts of avant-garde and social-realist writers. In addressing such representations of women, as well as the effects of ideology and history on writing, Masiello offers bold new insights into the development of Latin American women’s literature and illuminates the role of women in forming the culture of present-day Argentina.

This volume examines the changing role of Marian devotion in politics, public life, and popular culture in Western Europe and America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book brings together, for the first time, studies on Marian devotions across the Atlantic, tracing their role as a rallying point to fight secularization, adversarial ideologies, and rival religions. This transnational approach illuminates the deep transformations of devotional cultures across the world. Catholics adopted modern means and new types of religious expression to foster mass devotions that epitomized the catholic essence of the “nation.” In many ways, the development of Marian devotions across the world is also a response to the questioning of Pope Sovereignty. These devotional transformations followed an Ultramontane pattern inspired not only by Rome but also by other successful models approved by the Vatican such as Lourdes. Collectively, they shed new light on the process of globalization and centralization of Catholicism.