Ondina E. Gonzalez – författare

From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Spain and Portugal raised and nurtured vast American empires, both metaphorically and literally. From the very beginning, conquerors and settler elites engaged in colonial enterprises as they considered the New World through traditional Iberian ideas about childhood and as they established institutions for educating youths, sheltering infants, and extracting labor from children. Inevitably, Iberian concepts of childhood were transformed by everyday confrontations with the practices and norms of indigenous, African, and mixed-race inhabitants, and as new generations of truly colonial children were born. ""Raising an Empire"" takes readers on a journey into the world of children and childhood in early modern Ibero-America. Its contributors enter a vibrant new field of study in the region and challenge the conventional notion that children are invisible in the historical record. Employing diverse methods to decode a wide variety of sources, these essays present their small subjects - elite maidens, abandoned babies, Indian servants, slave apprentices - through their lives and times.

Spanning more than 500 years, this illustrated book covers the rich history of Christianity in Latin America. The authors use an analytical framework as they describe the institutional religious history for the period covered in that chapter, providing the context to look at other concurrent though non-institutional developments within Christianity. Each section includes sources that look at the way Christianity manifested and continues to manifest itself in the life of Latin American society, including its women, its enslaved and indigenous populations, and the modern-day marginalized sectors.