Between the 1760s and the 1820s, the Atlantic world became a theater of political upheaval. People, information, and commerce crossed oceans in service of empires, linking Spain and Spanish America to wars and revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on the exceptional holdings of the Doris Z. Stone Latin American Library and Research Center at Tulane University, this exhibition brings that era to life through rare books, newspapers, manuscripts, broadsides, maps, and early constitutions. With particular emphasis on Mexico, Central America, and northern South America—areas of longstanding strength within the collection—it presents independence as a prolonged often bloody process of political experimentation and conflict, not a single event or the result of any one cause.