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The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality explores conceptualizations of regional identity and a distinct population group known as nordestinos in northeastern Brazil during a crucial historical period. Beginning with the abolition of slavery and ending with the demise of the Estado Novo under Getœlio Vargas, Stanley E. Blake offers original perspectives on the paradoxical concept of the nordestino and the importance of these debates to the process of state and nation building. Since colonial times, the Northeast has been an agricultural region based primarily on sugar production. The area's population was composed of former slaves and free men of African descent, indigenous Indians, European wh...
This book examines the life, times, and legacy of Getúlio Vargas, Brazil's dictator and president during most of the period from 1930 to 1954. Levine's chief concern is how Vargas' legacy influenced Brazil, and to what extent his social legislation affected people's lives. Vargas ignored individual rights, working for state-regulated citizenship without disharmony, without the right to dissent. His revolution was partial; one in which new constituencies and rules were grafted onto traditional political practices. Vargas devoted as much effort to manipulating workers as he did to benefiting them. By the end of his long tenure in power, some things had hardly changed at all: the readiness of ...
"A fascinating account of the extraordinary life of W. E. B. Du Bois's widow: a complex, creative woman who lived a colorful, meaningful life." (Essence) "Horne is the first biographer to grant Shirley Graham Du Bois her due." (Boston Globe)
"This book, written in the aftermath of the 2018 election of the right-wing populist politician Jair Bolsonaro, is a historically-grounded analysis of authoritarianism in Brazil. In the tradition of Zola's J'accuse, Lilia Schwarcz takes up and debunks the popular and cherished national myth of Brazil as a tolerant, open, peaceful, and racially-harmonious society. In that country's history textbooks even Brazil's centuries of slavery have been described as an ultimately benign, paternalistic order in which the races freely mixed and the cruelty of the U.S. slave experience was absent. This, Schwarcz argues, papers over centuries of racially-motivated violence, cruelty, and exploitation. These...
Brazil's Steel City presents a social history of the National Steel Company (CSN), Brazil's foremost state-owned company and largest industrial enterprise in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the role the steelworkers played in Brazil's social and economic development under the country's import substitution policies from the early 1940s to the 1964 military coup. Counter to prevalent interpretations of industrial labor in Latin America, where workers figure above all as victims of capitalist exploitation, Dinius shows that CSN workers held strategic power and used it to reshape the company's labor regime, extracting impressive wage gains and benefits. Dinius argues that these workers, and their peers in similarly strategic industries, had the power to undermine the state capitalist development model prevalent in the large economies of postwar Latin America.
This is the first book explicitly to compare extreme right-wing organizations, ideas, and actions in different national settings in Latin America. It shows how extreme rightist class and gender composition, motives, programs, and activities varied over time and between countries. It concludes by demonstrating the importance of the analysis for understanding present conditions.
Brazil is currently in a critical phase of a decades-long transformation from a patrimonial society--based on the cultivation and export of sugar and coffee--to a modernized industrial and service economy with effective democratic governance. It is the world's fifth largest nation-state in area and population, and ranks eighth in total economic output. Since World War II, Brazil has been a leader in international trade governance and negotiation, playing an important part in development of the GATT and the WTO. Currently, the country is a major factor in negotiations toward a hemispherewide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). However, Brazil's political record in the past half century has been erratic and it has struggled with high inflation and balance-of-payment deficits. In this major new work, a former American ambassador to Brazil examines the social, political, and economic history of the country since the 1930s and discusses whether Brazil is now ready to assume a place as an important participant among First World nations.
Thomas D. Rogers's history of a modernizing Brazil tracks what happened when a key government program,created in the 1970s by the nation's military regime, aspired to harness energy produced by sugarcane agriculture to power the country's economy. The National Alcohol Program, known as Proalcool, was a deliberate economic strategy designed to incentivize ethanol production and reduce gasoline consumption. As Brazil's capacity grew and as international oil shocks continued, the regime's planners doubled down on Proalcool. Drawing financing from international lenders and curiosity from other oil-dependent countries, for a time it was the world's largest oil-substitution and renewable-energy pr...
Secret Dialogues uncovers an unexpected development in modern Latin American history: the existence of secret talks between generals and Roman Catholic bishops at the height of Brazil's military dictatorship. During the brutal term of Emilio Garrastazœ Medici, the Catholic Church became famous for its progressivism. However, new archival sources demonstrate that the church also sought to retain its privileges and influence by exploring a potential alliance with the military. From 1970 to 1974 the secret Bipartite Commission worked to resolve church-state conflict and to define the boundary between social activism and subversion. As the bishops increasingly made defense of human rights their...