The presentations explore paper and print from a range of perspectives, allowing us to engage key debates about the public sphere and civil society, the relationship between paperwork and state power, and the role of these everyday materials as tools of political negotiation or dissent. Presenters consider the role of paperwork in policing in late-colonial Guatemala, efforts to create a paper industry in post-colonial Mexico, paper’s relationship to mobility and freedom in the Caribbean, reading and writing practices inside fin de siècle Bogotá’s National Library, and student’s print activism in Pinochet-era schoolhouses in Chile. This is a self-consciously expansive panel: authors explore urban, hemispheric, and comparative approaches that span empire to independence to the 20th centuries rooted in and tied together by our shared commitment to close archival research into everyday life. Placing our emphasis on these material practices, cultures, and worlds, we highlight the empirical, methodological promise of the history of politics and paper.