John A. Britton

Showdown in South America: James Scrymser, John Pender, and United States–British Cable Competition

The British dominated the worlds submarine cable business over the second half of the nineteenth century, but they encountered significant challenges in the 1880s and 1890s—especially from James Scrymser, an upstart entrepreneur from New York. Scrymser exploited a strategic gap in the cable system in the Western Hemisphere and became locked in a confrontation along the west coast of South America with John Pender, the leading British cable magnate. Scrymser gained the upper hand in Chile by outmaneuvering Pender and used this victory to expand his operations with the telegraph network that linked South America, North America, and Europe.

Indian Education, Nationalism, and Federalism in Mexico, 1910-1921

The years of violence in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1924) have been viewed as a period of upheaval and disruption in which governments toppled, politicians were killed or banished, and the caudillo held sway. However, in such times ideas and institutions often continue to evolve in spite of revolutionary chaos. Mexican education in the second decade of the twentieth century revealed at least two important trends of a peaceful nature: the growth of socially cohesive nationalism and the triumph of the principle of federalism in public education.

Ambivalent Journey: U.S. Migration and Economic Mobility in North-Central Mexico.

The changing political and economic relationships between Mexico and the United States, and the concurrent U.S. debate over immigration policy and practice, demand new data on migration and its economic effects. In this innovative study, Richard C. Jones analyzes migration patterns from two subregions of north-central Mexico, Coahuila and Zacatecas, to the United States. He analyzes and contrasts the characteristics of the two migrant populations and interprets the economic impacts of migration upon both home of migration upon both home areas. Joness findings refute some common assumptions about Mexican migration while providing a strong model for further research. Joness study focuses on the ways in which U.S. migration affects the lives of families in these two subregions. Migrants from Zacatecas have traditionally come from rural areas and have gone to California and Illinois. Migrants from Coahuila, on the other hand, usually come from urban areas and have almost exclusively preferred locations in nearby Texas. The different motivations of both groups for migrating, and the different economic and social effects upon their home areas realized by migrating, form the core of this book. The comparison also lends the book its uniqueness, since no other study has made such an in-depth comparison of two areas. Jones addresses the basic dichotomy of structuralists (who maintain that dependency and disinvestment are the rule for families and communities in sending areas) and functionalists (who believe that autonomy and reinvestment are the case of migrants and their families in home regions). Jones finds that much of the primary literature is based on uneven and largely outdated data that leans heavily on two sending states, Jalisco and Michoacan. His fresh analysis shows that communities and regions of Mexico, rather than families only, account for differing migration patterns and differing social and economic results of these patterns. Joness study will be of value not only to scholars and practitioners working in the field of Mexican migration, but also, for its innovative methodology, to anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians whose interests include human migration patterns in any part of the world

The Crisis of Mexican Labor.

Foreword by Picardo Pascoe The System in Crisis The Origins of the Mexican Labor Unions Containing and Crushing Dissent The Limits of Corruption and the Crisis of Capitalism The Forms of Dissent When the System is Shaken

Carleton Beals and Central America after Sandino: Struggle to Publish.

p Carleton Beals died on June 26, 1979, only three weeks before the Sandinista rebels avenged the murder of their namesake by toppling the corrupt dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Deboyle. The deposed dictator was the son of Anastasio Somoza Garcia, founder of the 45-year family political dynasty and architect of Sandino’s assassination in 1933. Beals would have written with enthusiasm about the victory of the independent leftists in Nicaragua in spite of the fact that he and other reporters were able to publish very little on Nicaragua and its Central American neighbors from the 1940s to the 1970s. The meteoric Cuban, Fidel Castro, was the only Latin American able to break through the limitations of international journalism to gain public prominence in the United States. Fear of the extreme left-not indignation against right-wing dictators-aroused the U.S. public, press, and government; a typical pattern that disheartened but never fully silenced Beah throughout his half-century of freelance reporting. Carleton Beals was born in Kansas in 1893, grew up in southern California, and was graduated from the University a t Ber-