Bibliographic outline of the following book:APPELBAUM, Nancy P., Anne S. Macpherson and Karin A. Rosemblatt (Eds.) (2003). Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 329 pp.

This article examines how Colombian doctors and public health officials during the last decades of the nineteenth century produced a body of knowledge about the health of the nation's citizens, using the language and authority of science to speak about a society in need of redemption and medical intervention. In these cases, gender became an essential component of elite and medical discourses. Medical doctors and hygienists described female identities either as potentially threatening and therefore degenerative to the nation's moral and economic fabric or as a 'civilizing force' through the mobilization of motherhood and the reification of the Colombian family as a regenerative site. The doctors and government officials here examined expected women to preserve the family as a unit and inculcate the values of order, hygiene and efficiency in the private sphere. If elite constructions of 'ideal' female identities mobilized women in their primary function as mothers, preoccupations with the control of 'public women' that upset public order or threatened the family unit rhetorically emphasized their deviance. In direct contrast to the feminine ideal, the construction of the feminine other emphasized moral transgression and sexual promiscuity.

This review essay visualizes eighteenth-century popular insurrections not as casual or isolatedepisodes, but rather as symptomatic expressions of social tensions and heightened conflict;feelings that increased in intensity during the latter half of the century and culminated inthe Great Rebellion of 1780-1783 in the Southern Andes, the 1765 Quito uprising andthe 1781 Comunero Revolt in Nueva Granada. The article examines journal articles andmonographs that address these revolts, acknowledging that academic production on lateeighteenth-century insurrections in the Spanish colonies is itself suspended within largerscholarly debates that address insurrections outside the Andean context and incorporatequestions raised by scholars of peasant revolts and agrarian conflict in other fields andtime periods.