"Introduction: A Special Issue in Honor of Historian Richmond Brown (1961-2016)."

Richmond F. Brown passed away after a heroic and long battle with cancer on September 20, 2016 in Gainesville, Florida, sadly ending the life and career far too soon of one of the strongest promoters of Latin American Studies in the United States more broadly, and in the Southeast in particular. As many of the readers of this journal will know, Richmond served as Vice President and President of SECOLAS between 2001–2003 and helped transform the organization into a vibrant academic community. He applied similar intellectual energy to his role in the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association (LACS-SHA) where he also held various administrative positions, including President. Just a few weeks after Richmond passed away, several of his colleagues discussed his contributions to scholarship and academic associations dedicated to Latin American Studies at the 2016 Tampa-St. Petersburg meeting of LACS-SHA. Out of that conversation and admiration for his work, we began organizing three special panels in his honor to be presented at the 2017 SECOLAS Annual Meeting in Chapel Hill. With the assistance of editor Greg Weeks and Jurgen Buchenau, we organized three separate panels that focused on Richmond's contribution to Latin American studies: Central American History; Atlantic History; and the Southeast Borderlands. The following articles, which make up this special issue of The Latinamericanist are all written by scholars who knew Richmond personally as a scholar, colleague, teacher, mentor, and friend.

Richmond Brown was first and foremost a historian of Guatemala. It makes sense that we begin with central America and Jurgen Buchenau's analysis of Guatemala's Ten Years of Spring through the lens of Mexico and Mexican political calculations. A story that is familiar to many of us opens up with new insights when viewed from the north. And it was the north that reshaped Mexico's and its ruling party's interactions with their southern neighbor and its new reform government. While the Mexican Popular Left was interested in supporting the new government and its new policies towards US corporations, the PRI took what could be called a pragmatic approach as they followed a course of action that followed a path that conformed to US political objectives in the region–namely undermining the new government in Guatemala. This helps us to makes sense of what appeared to be contradictory actions towards the Arbenz government during the final years leading up to and immediately following the coup in 1954. Tim Hawkins takes us back to the colonial era and trans-imperial and trans-national intrigue in the era of independence struggle in New Spain. He recounts a story of intrigue through the Spanish diplomat, Luis de Onis. Loyalists were fearful of French intervention and territorial expansion through an imagined collusion between James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Napoleon. Hawkins suggests that understanding the fears and imaginings of people in power can shed light on how a nation and its agents act within the context of Atlantic World geopolitics.

Richmond Brown was someone of great intellectual curiosity which led him to explore interests in the Caribbean. Richmond understood that it was not possible to fully grasp the full story of Guatemala without understanding the larger context in which it was situated which meant looking at the Caribbean and neighboring or borderland territories and states. He understood early on that the Atlantic world was an inter-connected system and to fully understand the history of one place one needs to incorporate a recognition of the other interactions at work in the larger system. Ernesto Bassi, Casey Schmitt and Robert Taber all follow this approach in their Caribbean focused pieces. Ernesto Bassi re-examines the role of New Granada as a model of economic development for the Spanish colonies during the eighteenth century. Using the writings of Viceroy Antonio Caballero y Góngora, Bassi brings New Granada and the Spanish colonies during the era of the Bourbon Reforms into the conversation on the rise of capitalism. While New Granada never became the economic engine that Caballero y Góngora...