The Student Movement of 1968 and the Mexican Press: The Cases of Excélsior and Siempre!

The Student Movement of 1968 was a watershed in Mexican political history. This article explores how it was reported in the daily newspaper Excélsior and the weekly magazine Siempre! from August to October 1968. It analyses the work of specific journalists to reveal the extent to which criticism of the government was voiced in a climate of apprehension and oppression. In doing so the important role played by Carlos Monsiváis in promoting and sustaining the students' cause, and the commitment to impartial news coverage of editors Julio Scherer García and José Pagés Llergo, become evident.     

‘There Can Be No Revolution without Culture’: Reading and Writing in the Bolivarian Revolution

Under Hugo Chávez's ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, the government made itself present in all stages of literary production, applying the official idea of reading and writing as ‘socialist practices’. The Bolivarian government envisaged a popular counter‐hegemony, courting popular support while delegitimising cultural elites and reinforcing class tensions. Bolivarian cultural policy is anachronistic in an age of global literary markets, while the emphasis on a national collective of writers over internationally promoted representative writers of the revolution is particularly radical.     

Ignorance and ‘Habitus’: Blinkered and Enlightened Approaches Towards the History of Science in Latin America

In broad terms, European students of the history of Latin America have concentrated their researches upon colonial policies, interactions between Europeans (and their American‐born descendants) and indigenous peoples, economic and commercial structures, and political life (whether of elites or, more recently, of subaltern groups). The last two decades have witnessed a significant expansion in Britain and elsewhere of research into gender studies and cultural studies. Although the latter discipline embraces an awareness of the importance of the history of science, this has tended to be rather narrowly focussed upon travel writing, and the extent to which there were links between the promotion of scientific travel and both imperial and national projects, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, like the great British scientific travellers of the nineteenth century in Latin America, the works of cultural studies specialists tend to reveal more about European attitudes and misconceptions than Latin American reality.     

The Campaign for Japanese‐Australian Children to enter Australia, 1957–1968: A History of Post‐War Humanitarianism

Between 1957 and 1968, the Prime Minister Robert Menzies and several of his ministers, including Alexander Downer, the Minister for Immigration from 1958 to 1963, were inundated with hundreds of letters of protest demanding that action be taken to assist Japanese children fathered by Australian soldiers who had been stationed in Japan during the Allied occupation and beyond it between 1946 and 1956. The response from the Australian public forms the basis of this article to consider how attempts for the transnational movement of children in the postwar period point to understandings of humanitarianism at this time. The response to the predicament of the Japanese‐Australian children offers, I argue, an intriguing narrative of postwar humanitarianism that articulates the beginning of several historic shifts. The incident points to the growing challenge to the White Australia Policy, paradoxically on racialised and paternalistic grounds to bring white Australian children to Australia. The government shifted the discussion from one of immigration to foreign aid as a way of diffusing the public response and in doing so positioned itself in the new narrative about supporting rehabilitation and development. The media was crucial in evoking a response that depoliticized the issue of responsibility by reducing it to an emotional reaction.     

Winning Friends,Influencing People: Soviet Cultural Diplomacy in Australia, 1928–1968

This article draws on largely unpublished archive materials to examine the strategies employed by the USSR to manage its cultural relations with Australia as a means of extending its influence beyond its traditional supporters in trade union and socialist movements. The activities of key players like the All‐Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies (SSOD) and the International Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers and their interaction with Australian organizations and individuals identified and cultivated as contacts of influence are reviewed in the context of the changing international situation and an often problematic bilateral political relationship.     

‘A Sick,Weak, and Ignorant People’: Public Health Education and Prevention in Rural Colombia, 1930–1940

This article analyses Salud y Sanidad (Health and Sanitation), a government journal edited in 1930s Colombia. It examines the state's model of public health, which proposed education and prevention as strategies to guarantee the success of its programmes. It argues that despite the journal's more progressive approaches, editors and contributors reproduced stereotypes about Colombia's rural inhabitants that contradicted state rhetoric and showed the limits of public health models that do not address the underlying social inequities that drive the propagation of poverty and disease in rural areas, and that ultimately continued to blame victims for their illness and misfortune