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

In my opinion, history is actually threatened by two apposite dangers in its effort to make clear and to defi ne its epistemological status. On the one hand, the danger of being absorbed by the social sciences–in particular, sociology- which claim for themselves any analysis of the existential condition of mankind. On the other hand, to be limited to a mere factual description, as a result of the return of “positivism” in all its forms, has reducing historical knowledge to a mere “chronology” of events and processes developer by man, under the false premise that “historical facts” exist by themselves, without any intervention of the historian. This last one would only assume a passive part in the writing of the “discourse” of “historical account”. This is an attempt at ignoring what has been called by Marrou the Basic “data” of any critical study of historical knowledge (using Dilthey’ s terminology). This is simple that “history is inseparable from the historian”: a Basic principle, without which there is no historical understanding. In order to surmount this crisis it seems essential a return to the epistemology of history.

This study aims to assess the importance of copper during the eighteenth and the policy of the Spanish crown for their production and improve the quality of metal reaching up the Peninsula. Copper in New Spain came mostly from mines in Inguarán Michoacán, where he continued to work the mines mostly Hispanic. This production, now in the hands of Spaniards with indigenous technology still will be of interest to obtain more and higher quality copper. This commissioned an expert on German metalworkers who came to America in the late eighteenth pre-hispánica. Analyze the goals and outcomes of a project to renovate the mill technology and improve the quality of copper.

In the last years we assist a progressive revision of the historiographic topics of the political history, feed by the changes operated in the way of studying nationalities. This revision has insisted in the political and cultural nature of the independence revolutions, in the structural confl ict between fragmentary sovereignty and necessarily rivals since the empire crisis and in the determination of the national identities all along the processes of state organization. This article goes deep in the why and how the independence movements of the first years of the 19th century, told of the recomposition of the sovereignty sense, witch turned from a monist conception of power to an American political imaginary, putting as central theme the argumentative exercise of sovereignty in the rising states of the Mexican central occidental region (mainly Jalisco y Zacatecas) during the First Republic in Mexico.

Lom Ediciones, Santiago, 2008, 417 páginas, ISBN: 978-956-00-0029-3

The following pages presents an exploration of some speeches, attitudes and expectations about how common people in Cartagena understood and defi ned national sovereignty, its process of convergence, during fi rst decades of the XX century, with the bitter experience of imperialism and the perspectives from which they were defined. Our central hypothesis is that the anti-imperialist attitudes which are organized and articulated from the Panama events (1903) are based on political traditions and the national sovereignty that began to be constructed with the independence and soon they were fed by the international, national and local context of the XIX century.

This article explores the cultural production of social movements in Chile at the beginning of the twentieth century. Questioning the belief that the Estado docente was the sole mechanism of social democratization, it explores the pedagogic proposals developed by workers and their associations during what is referred to as the period of the ‘Social Question’. The article concludes by analyzing the factors which led to the demise of these alternative pedagogic experiments.

Interest to study “lesa majestad” transgressions emerged from reading the distinct narratives that mention the amount of indians executed for being involved in riots and rebellions that were repressed by the visitor José de Gálvez in the northwest of the viceroyalty of New Spain; we describe in some detail the events that took place in the Río Fuerte villages. This work is developed from the descriptions made by Juan de Viniegra and Eusebio Bentura Beleña.

Ril Editores, Santiago de Chile, 2008, 334 páginas. ISBN 978-956-284-632-5

Editorial Sudamericana, Santiago, 2009, 794 páginas, ISBN 978-956-262-330-8

In the time of the beginnings of the Republic are numerous English-speaking travelers that give their testimonies of these lands and people. The great majority of them have been translated to Spanish. However, one of the most important and signifi cant, John Miers, has not achieved such transcription. Diego Barros Arana and José Toribio Medina discarded it referring to be not very impartial in their narrations–that is exactly in certain measure– and to highlight, with rage and fury, the defects of the customs of the Chileans; connotation that other British travelers translated partially, also, made. We give a translation, with the due notes, of the XIX Chapter of the Volume II, which it is where we found the more acidity and exaggerated meticulousness, this important author gives about us.