How did Latin Americans represent their own countries as modern? Through a comparative analysis of Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, the book investigates four themes that were central to definitions of Latin American modernity at the turn of the twentieth century: race, the autochthonous, education, and aesthetics.

The duel, and the codes of honour that governed duelling, functioned for decades in many European and Latin American countries as a shadow legal system, regulating in practice what legislators felt free to say and what journalists felt free to write. Yet the duel was also an act of potentially deadly violence and a challenge to the authority of statutory law. When duelling became widespread in early twentieth-century Uruguay, legislators facing this dilemma chose the unique and radical path of legalization. The Pen, the Sword, and the Law explores how the only country in the world to decriminalize duelling managed the tension between these informal but widely accepted “gentlemanly laws” and its own criminal code. The duel, which remained legal until 1992, was meant to ensure civility in politics and decorum in the press, but it often failed to achieve either. Drawing on rich and detailed newspaper reports of duels and challenges, parliamentary debates, legal records, private papers, and interviews, David Parker examines the role of pistols and sabres in shaping the everyday workings of a raucous public sphere. Demonstrating that the duel was no simple throwback to archaic conceptions of masculine honour and chivalry, The Pen, the Sword, and the Law illustrates how duelling went hand in hand with democracy and freedom of the press in one of South America’s most progressive nations.

Latin America is a region made up of multiple states with a diversity of races, ethnicities, and cultures. In 'Transnational Perspectives on Latin America', Luis Roniger argues that a regional perspective is significant for understanding this part of the Western hemisphere. He claims that geopolitical, sociological, and cultural trends molded a contiguity of influences, shaping a transnational arena of connected histories, cross-border interactions, and shared visions, complementing the process of separate nation-state formation.--

This open access book consists of 39 short essays that exemplify how interactions between inter- and trans-national interdependencies and domestic factors have shaped the dynamics of social policy in various parts of the world at different points in time. Each chapter highlights a specific type of interdependence which has been identified to provide us with a nuanced understanding of specific social policy developments at discrete points in history. The volume is divided into four parts that are concerned with a particular type of cross-border interrelation. The four parts examine the impact on social policy of trade relations and economic crises, violence, international organisations and cross-border communication and migration. This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the field of social policy, global history and welfare state research from diverse disciplines: sociology, political science, history, law and economics. .

This monograph revisits Uruguay's remarkable transformation from a notorious nineteenth-century trouble spot into Latin America's first welfare state democracy, associated with President Jose Batlle y Ordonez (1903-7, 1911-15) and his Krausist leanings. Central to Uruguay's belated polity formation and nation-building, and the focus of this study, was its school reform, destined to erase frontier backwardness. It had its origin in the foundation of the Society of the Friends of Popular Education in 1868, culminated in Jose Pedro and Jacobo Varela's transformation of primary and normal schooling in the 1870s and 1880s, and was driven by a mixture of North American liberal pedagogy and Spencerian positivism. Batllistas distanced themselves from the Varelas and their ideology since they had lent their services to military dictators. Yet, as Hentschke argues, continuity in change prevailed over the alleged rupture of 1903, with positivism and neo-Idealism co-existing and interacting in the continuation of the education reform. Moreover, by placing Uruguay into the broader context of what, in 1998, a network of scholars has called the Southern Cone's "Corridor of Ideas" from Santiago de Chile through Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Porto Alegre in Brazil, Hentschke shows how the country acted as a crossroads of intellectuals and a laboratory for the contestation, assimilation, and merger of competing global and autochthonous political and pedagogical philosophies.

Provides a comprehensive survey of the key events and personalities of this period.