Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernst Mach, and Pierre Duhem are among the most prominent critics of atomism in the late 19th century. We review and analyze the arguments that these authors adduce to oppose the atomistic conception of matter. We show how these arguments arise from fundamental philosophical positions on the foundation of nature, the object of science and the role of metaphysics. We compare these philosophical positions. And we frame the critique of atomism in the more general epistemological problem of explanation to show the tension between explanation and experience, and its relation to metaphysics.

In 1952, the Chilean First Lady Rosa Markmann received as a donation from two international laboratories, a significant quantity of drugs to treat tuberculosis, being Ditubin (hydrazide of isonicotinic acid or isoniazid) a drug of recent manufacture and tests, a light of hope for Chilean patients, so much so that the patients requested it calling it a “miracle drug”. In this study it is argued that this consort carried out an efficient task based on the distribution of these drugs throughout the country, with such positive results that, together with the rest of the political and social activities that it promoted, it helped to institutionalize a new role of the President's wife. The work has been carried out mainly based on the consultation of the letters that the Chileans sent to that First Lady, present in the National Archive, Gabriel González Videla fund and in the personal archive of the González Markmann family. Methodologically, a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of the correspondence has been carried out.

This is a review of the book: La puerta del desierto: Estado y región en Atacama. Taltal, 1850-1900, by author Milton Godoy Orellana, framed in the Fondecyt project, "Construction of the national state and region in the mining north: Taltal 1860-1910", focused on the process of expansion and state consolidation on the northern chilean border between 1860 and 1910, critically analyzing the daily relationships that arose between individuals, state agencies and their policies in the Taltal region, thus blurring the traditional historiographic view of this process.

This article analyzes the role played by the Investigations Service (Part of the General Directorate of Investigations, Identification and Passports) as political police, from the arrival of the Popular Front to the government until the enactment of the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy. Special attention will be paid to the units within this police force that were in charge of monitoring and neutralizing critical situations for internal security. The priorities and developments given by each government to improve this function will be recognized, as well as the conflicts behind these modifications. We suggest that, although these years are considered for their progress in social reforms, they also witnessed important advances for the political police, which continued to shape a repressive apparatus that was key to the existence and integrity of the State and internal order.

The purpose of this article is to examine the tensions and conflicts in the Chilean Identification Bureau around the identification of newborns. This conflict had two sides: the dactyloscopists and the papiloscopists; the former were defenders of dactyloscopy, originated in La Plata, Argentina, and the latter, papiloscopy, created by Humberto Orrego Gauthier, a new system that would guarantee an integral solution to the issue of human identification. Through Institutional Magazines, specialized books, and previously unseen documents, we will show that the idea of identification, as an institutional practice, brought tensions and rivalries among their technical staff.

The article presents the voices of different officials of the chilean police regarding their relations with the people, in a context of exacerbation of the social question. The main sources are the Boletín de la Policía de Santiago that circulated between 1901 and 1924 and the magazine Ilustración Policial published between 1921 and 1924. We suggest that the police developed a powerful reflection in order to strengthen its relations with the working class and reverse the so called “ancestral hatred” that characterized their interaction with the urban population.

Reseña bibliográfica

The article proposes a dialogue between the world of work and crime based on two historical experiences in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. First, the adoption of criminological premises associated with labor discipline and, second, the (re)production of wage-earning habits in prison worshops. Through the review of press and the police publication, it suggests that the actions of the occasional thief were expressive of the fragility of the labor structure, a situation that allowed him to move between formal occupations and practices that border on illegality or were openly criminal.

Book review. Book title:  Los futuros del pasado. Marxismo, peronismo y revolución: una historia de las FAR. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2021

The present work is committed to overcoming that formalist view of international historiography that closes the history of the port of Cobija (former Bolivian port) in the triennium of 1877 and 1879. We present the background to affirm that the port was not completely erased in that triennium, especially marked by earthquake, tidal wave and war. It is shown that the definitive decline of Cobija has to do with the emergence of the Gatico mineral (10 kilometers north of Cobija), a mineral that was industrialized in 1905, generating a territorial transformation in economic, demographic and political terms. The other process that we want to analyze refers to the coup de grace that Cobija received in 1913 through a nationalist community agency in Tocopilla that prevented the resurgence of the port through a project related to Chuquicamata and the Guggenheim family of New York, which sought revitalize the deteriorating port. In addition, we are committed to understanding the territory of Cobija and its adjacency zone as a territory defined by open traffic and population mobility, which in practice meant a demographic dispersion in very close mines, which also leads us to reconsider and reflect on the ways of accounting for the population in what was the commune of Cobija.