Leaders of the american independence movements thought in concepts of natural law and natural rights. They assumed that a society not only should but could be based upon reason and liberty rather than authority or tradition. Even those who took the more dismal Hobbsian view believed that there was a large measure of rational consent to the laws which necessity forced upon men who were dominated by passion rather than by reason. In any case, Nature was believed to have a universal character, and differences in geographical background were thought to have relatively little importance in shaping society and civilization. Nor did they think in terms of the historical determinism, whether idealistic or materialistic, which dominated nineteenth-century thought. The New World was held to be the seat of liberty and equality, not because American soil necessarily produced freedom, but because in America man had freedom to reach his fullest development. The New World thus differed from the Old chiefly in the institutions and civilization which man had created here. Incidentally, this rationalist view had much in common with the older Utopian concept of America, from which, in no small measure, it was derived. Moreover, the very idea of Utopia was partly American in origin. Thomas More, for example, based his Utopia upon what he knew of Inca civilization. For a long time, therefore, Europeans had thought of America as a Utopia in which liberty, equality and opportunity for the immigrant were natural products of man’s freedom to live a life more in accord with Nature than Europe permitted.

In the Treaty of Ancón ending the War of the Pacific, the government of Peru signed away two provinces on the south coast and much of the country's future guano income. The settlement stripped Peru's treasury bare and exposed the narrow, extractive and agricultural base of the country's economy. A few years later the same Peruvian government, led by the hero of the Chilean war General Andrés Cáceres, signed the Grace Contract whereby the foreign debt was canceled and railway development for the next 66 years fell under the control of the foreign-owned W. R. Grace corporation. The economic and political consequences of these decisions were deeply felt in Peruvian society. Economically, they placed renewed emphasis on export agriculture and mining at the expense of primary industrial development and made stronger demands upon the rural labor force. Led by these sectors, modernization of the economy proceeded in a regional form, with accelerated growth in the coastal valleys and a few highland areas and stagnation elsewhere. A shift of population from the highlands to the coast accompanied this process.

A watershed in Peru's development, and perhaps its most traumatic experience as an independent republic, was its humiliating defeat at the hands of Chile during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). The impact of the war was profound. Virtually every aspect of Peruvian political, economic, and social life was affected. The army was defeated, the country invaded, and Lima occupied. By the peace treaty, Peru's nitrate-bearing southern provinces were handed over to Chile, depriving it of its most important source of income. The economy of the country was further undermined by the war-time destruction of many coastal sugar and cotton plantations. Economic collapse was accompanied by political chaos. Fighting continued after the end of the war as forces loyal to General Andrés A. Cáceres, who had carried out an effective guerrilla campaign against the Chileans in the sierra, now aimed their guns at the Chilean-imposed government of General Miguel Iglesias. In December 1885 they captured Lima, paving the way for Cáceres' election as president.

When Harold Palmer Davis published his Black Democracy in 1928, after twelve years of study and of residence in Haiti, he wrote of Toussaint L’Ouverture that it would be impossible to form any true estimate of Toussaint’s character, because of the great mass of material that had been written about him from widely divergent and conflicting viewpoints.

On February 25, 1937, Mexico's ruling political party, then called the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), announced that for the first time it would permit “organized” women to vote in internal party elections. “Organized” was code for members of labor unions, agrarian leagues, or other groups supportive of the government. The decision reveals that the PNR, under the leadership of revolutionary general and president Lázaro Cárdenas, had found itself in a situation similar to that of other progressive parties throughout the hemisphere. Although many PNR leaders, including the president, had come to support women's suffrage in principle, their shared conviction regarding the essential conservatism of most Mexican women put them in a tight spot. If universally enfranchised, women might thank the party by voting them right out of office, or force them to employ unmanageable levels of electoral fraud to prevent such an outcome. The 1937 ruling conveniently allowed them to be for and against women's suffrage at the same time. Suffragists, however, were not satisfied.