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In this paper we inquire about the role that the Buenos Aires Police Department, created in 1821, and its agents had in the War with Brazil that involved the territories on both sides of the Río de la Plata between 1825 and 1828. We explore three modes of intervention of the Department: the tutelary function, associated with the control of loyalties of Portuguese and Brazilians in Buenos Aires before and during the conflict; the political and institutional function, linked to the activity of the Department to organize police stations in the Banda Oriental; and the penal function, which was deployed by various commissioners around Buenos Aires in the regulation and control of the forced labor of Portuguese prisoners. In order to examine these problems, we use unpublished documentation preserved in the police collection of the General Archive of the Nation of Argentina. We complement our analysis with published sources from the Banda Oriental, such as regulations, legislative collections, press and session diaries. Contributions of global history, as well as social history of the police and justice, and social labour history are paramount to review a problem that has not been considered part of the war conflict.

This paper studies the characteristics of the context in which Joaquin V. Gonzalez electoral reform was passed, in 1902. The paper analyzes, in particular, political opposition, press campaigns and street demonstrations in the city of Buenos Aires, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The purpose is to show some of the challenges and protests that threatened the prevailing political order and contributed to undermine its legitimacy. More generally, the intention is to stimulate debate on the relationship between the transformation of so-called regimen conservador and popular political participation.

In this article we study, from a historical and sociocultural perspective, a set of suicide cases that occurred in the city of Buenos Aires between 1859 and 1888 to analyze the letters left by those who committed suicide. We understand these writings as communicative actions that had different meanings, and transmitted messages to the members of the deceased's social network. Also, one of our specific objectives is to explore the circumstances, concerns and conflicts that were part of the context in which these texts were produced. In other words, we seek to answer the following question: in which situations did suicide notes appear more frequently? Based on the evidence from the the judicial summaries, in this paper we show that letters appeared more frequently in files that narrated a series of particular events. Likewise, we argue that these plausible explanations of suicidal acts, and the notes associated with them, were stated based on the expectations of men and women from Buenos Aires during the last third of the 19th century.

The objective of this study is to describe the use of the notion of low-life in the Archives of Psychiatry, Criminology, Legal Medicine and Related Sciences, a scientific review published in Buenos Aires during the early twentieth century. In this paper, we consider the notion of “low-life” as a category that may refer to a series of border behaviors as the crime and the insanity. In order to accomplish this research we analyses the role of Higienism and the discourses produced by the Buenos Aires Police through your Alienated Department Observation Service.

This article analyzes cultural change and domestic life in Buenos Aires middle-class apartments during the 1950s. My hypothesis relies on the belief that a closer look at living spaces in the home during this decade allow us to illuminate, from their starting point, some social and cultural tendencies that only came into light during the 1960s. The paper shows some new - and even disruptive - social and cultural practices that emerged during the 1950s, and besides, it analyzes the invention of an entirely new real estate market, born when the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal was passed in 1948. The article focuses on the apartments built for the higher strata of the middle classes in the wealthiest neighborhoods. This point of view pays special attention to home life, the uses of domestic space, and to a new sensibility related to living spaces that characterized modern apartments for the affluent in this decade.

This paper, « in memoriam » to Sandra Pesavento, deals with jokes, which are a special kind of « sensibility ». Examples of items producing laughter are taken from comics and broadcasting in Buenos Aires, from the beginning of radio up till the end of Sixties. Those « Radio days » were basic in performing the assimilation of the immigrants through the language, whose correctness made fun of the slangs of Italians, Spaniards, Arabs and Jews. Broadcasting was also responsible for the making up of new social and political words still used to-day.

This paper aims to understand the photographs produced by Augusto Malta (1864-1957) and Harry Grant Olds (1869-1943) during the urban renewal of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, respectively, during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It is observed that the subjects portrayed by the two photographers are related to the ideas of back-wardness, modernization, progress and exoticism, characteristic of Latin American cities in the process of metropolianization. Their photographs show both barbarism (slums, conventillos and landfills), as the images of civilization (boulevards, parks and theatres). Thus, we analyze how their photographs participated in the process of eliminating the old and building the new, while both recorded what stood on what is destroyed in the urban scene, building a great album of images intended to document the history of those cities.