Revista de Historia

Research on childhood, adolescence, and family in Latin America has a longstanding tradition and, at the same time, an arduous task that lies ahead. The book under review is the result of a collaborative project that studies 20th-century social hierarchies in Argentina from the perspective of childhood and the family. Its authors are researchers with a solid background in history. These researchers conduct their work within the framework of the Historical Research Group on Families and Childhood in Contemporary Argentina, based at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Gender Studies within the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires.

This paper focuses on the main aspects to consider in the historical research on pre-Hispanic Childhood based on colonial documents. I analyze the mentality of the chroniclers, the different ideologies they had, the life cycles, and the models they followed to write their works, in which they described the Indigenous childhood using their own parameters. Also, I include some examples that show how Indigenous people incorporated Western models in the descriptions of their own past. Finally, I analyze the words that the Europeans used to define children, some of which have different meanings nowadays.

This interview with Dr. Susana Sosenski presents the reflections, challenges, and obstacles encountered by a researcher studying childhood in Latin America. The questions she has raised from her own experiences have guided her historiographic work, which contributes to the scholarship of historians in Latin America and around the world. Dr. Sosenski, founder of the Red de Estudios de Historia de las Infancias en América Latina (REHIAL) [Network for the Study of the History of Childhoods in Latin America], shares the origins of REHIAL and its objectives since its inception.

In this article I intend to study the relationship between a sector of the Montevideo Press and the Capital’s Police Headquarters during the 1910s and the early 1920s of the twentieth century, from a quantitative approach, through the analysis of news related to the crime. A moment that stood out because of the tension between newspapers and authorities of the time. For this, I focused on La Tribuna Popular, an organ that closely followed the police chronicles and reports , supporting the idea of the growth in the crime rate in the city. Traditionally , its argument was based on questioning criminal law, the administration of justice and especially the functioning of the Montevideo Police force itself. My proposal aims to analyze the relationship of the evening newspaper with two of the most censored chiefs of the period (Juan Antonio Pintos and Virgilio Sampognaro) until the change of course which was produced by the assumption of Gómez Folle in the year 1923. The present work confirms the impact that the permanent preaching through editorials and articles dedicated to tracking and monitoring criminal information had. That impact eroded the prestige of an institution systematically presented under the qualifier label of madness or insanity.