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A scholar's task is to make sense out of historical periods that often appear chaotic and inexplicable. In Latin American studies, the decades of the late colonial and early republican periods (1820–1870) produced events that struck both contemporaries and later observers as bewildering, turbulent, and difficult to explain. Having spent a lifetime studying this period, the Argentine professor Hilda Sabato bravely challenges older interpretations of these decades by noting a significant and praiseworthy emergence of new patterns of governance. She suggests that historians have ignored the unique accomplishments of the emerging Spanish-speaking countries in launching one of the greatest political experiments of the day—namely, the creation of new republican governments. From Buenos Aires to Mexico City Sabato tracks the labor of politically active groups that rejected the monarchical trappings of the past. Independence leaders advocated numerous versions of popular sovereignty, elections, and the necessity of an armed militia. Examining dozens of national constitutions and newspapers of the day, Sabato finds hemispheric agreement that rulers could govern only with permission from their constituents. While constitutions varied in defining which citizens had the right to give consent, every foundation document granted the franchise to a much broader segment of the population than that exercising suffrage in the United States. Voters expressed consent only through some type of scheduled elections. In unique situations, many constitutions made local militias responsible for defending popular sovereignty. While militias had a positive role to play, the new republics viewed a professional military as a threat to republican values.
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