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In the first half of the twentieth century, the increasing use of documents to record everyday interactions generated information that became the basis of official identification practices. Based on this change, this article makes two arguments: (1) the increased use of documents in identification redefined identity in terms of procedure (systematic recordkeeping), and (2) it made concrete a relatively new conception of information as a “substance” that had presence in the world and was objective. Thus, the objectivity that became central to identification was tied to an object, to paper, that facilitated an understanding that these documents “contained” objective information.

Among the signifiers that codified 1960s counterculture, the psychedelic drug experience opened possibilities for social and literary experimentation. Mexican Onda writers imported the international counterculture into their writing, as a counter-hegemonic strategy—an attempt to question conventional paradigms of self, representation, and language. Through altered states of consciousness, these writers construct a subjectivity rooted outside national boundaries and projected onto an alternate reality. The drug experience in these works constitutes an aesthetic device that questions the 1960s Mexican polity. In this paper, I present four processes connected to the psychedelic drug experience—“initiations,” “intoxications,” “translations,” and “reproductions”—that culturally and aesthetically frame a selected corpus of Onda texts.

In the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, music emerged as an essential form of social and political engagement in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. However, in spite of the similar historical context, the musica popular brasileira (MPB) of this period is rarely considered in connection with the nueva cancion latinoamericana. This paper analyzes how these distinct and parallel movements responded to social and political needs in the years prior to and during the military dictatorships in Brazil and the Southern Cone. Exploring the qualities typical of the nueva cancion found in the MPB songs of Geraldo Vandre, Chico Buarque, and Milton Nascimento underscores the similarities between the two categories. Through a comparative study, I argue that these musical forms responded to parallel social and political needs in distinct ways in order to reinforce specific discursive constructions of national identity and popular culture, as well as to confirm existing understandings of politically committed...

Workers in information-intensive professions live in an information ecosystem in which they create, analyze, store, and communicate information as their core activities. This article illustrates how that happens through the historical case study of Spanish diplomats over the course of more than a century. Their information ecosystem proved extensive, encompassing institutions, bodies of tacit and explicit knowledge, and routine and ad hoc collections of information. This essay offers a model of how to explore the history of a profession’s information ecosystem, relying on administrative histories, memoirs, and an analysis of the extant paper trail left by these diplomats.

Preserved in the papers of the Essex Records Office and related by Joel Samaha is the account of a dispute between Lord Morley and Mr. Leventhorpe over the parents of an illegitimate child. Backed by their liveried retainers, the two justices met on a moat side of Morley' s Essex estate in 1578. Young and inexperienced in the law, Morley was descended from a long line of aristocrats and would soon assume his place as head of one of the most prominent Catholic families in the county. Leventhorpe, on the other hand, was a seasoned justice and a puritanical Protestant. Born with neither money nor title, he had achieved success by determination and hard work. Morley's tenant, a man named Smith, had fathered the child by his maidservant and sent the woman to Ashwell, a parish in Leventhorpe' s jurisdiction. Knowing that, under the poor laws, they might be forced to support the child if the parents did not, the townspeople quickly sent the woman back. Smith appealed to Morley for help, and the justice granted him a warrant to send the woman to Ashwell again. However, Mr. Leventhorpe refused to honor the warrant. He also rejected a private agreement Smith had made to support the child because the promise of payment had not been written, "as the statute doth appoint." Morley was angry that spring morning. "Why what will you make of it since it was but between a single man and a single woman?" "Sin and wickedness . . . deserve punishment and chastisement," Leventhorpe answered, "and according to law the offenders should be whipped." Morley then demanded to know by what law such cruelty should be exercised against two young people who had harmed no one. In answer, Leventhorpe revealed his convictions about respecting "the law of the prince and God's law upon which the prince's law is grounded. We also have the laws of the realm whereby to punish them, which refers it to the discretion of the judges and we think it good to whip them." Infuriated, Morley argued that such righteousness masked a policy of economic inequality espoused by judicial hypocrites: "Yeah, with like discretion you take up poor traveling men by reason that they be far from their county and friends are not able to bring back testimonial of their credit and behavior and therefore do send them back to the