[1] He belongs to the generation of Mexican liberals of La Reforma; which includes other intellectuals such as Ponciano Arriaga, Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Melchor Ocampo, and Guillermo Prieto.

[4] Ramírez's thesis at the Academy of San Juan de Letrán in Mexico City consisted of defending the proposition that "there is no God; natural beings sustain themselves".

[7] The paper was shut down in 1846 under the conservative government of Mariano Paredes, and Ramírez found himself arrested along with fellow contributors Guillermo Prieto and Manuel Payno.

After a series of military failures, the Mariano Paredes administration would fall later in the year and meanwhile the liberal Francisco Modesto de Olaguíbel Martinón had become governor of the State of Mexico.

[11] Ramírez then joined a more radical faction of liberals including his old colleague Guillermo Prieto, Melchor Ocampo, and future president Benito Juárez.

[13] The promulgation of the Constitution of 1857 in September of that year produced enormous controversy, and ultimately the moderate Comonfort joined a self coup instigated by the conservative general Felix Zuloaga triggering the Reform War.

Throughout the war Ramírez found himself imprisoned multiple times, but he was freed after the moderate conservative Manuel Robles Pezuela overthrow Zuloaga and declared a prisoner amnestry.

With Guillermo Prieto, Ignacio Altamirano, and Jose Iglesias, Ramírez then founded another newspaper called La Chinaca which was intended to lift the national spirit in the face of the impending foreign invasion.

Ramírez left the capital and headed towards Sinaloa where he continued to publish progressive periodicals attacking the Second French intervention in Mexico and the establishment of the Second Mexican Empire.