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The Portuguese Inquisition is often portrayed as a tyrannical institution that imposed itself on an unsuspecting and impotent society. The men who ran it are depicted as unprincipled bandits and ruthless spies who gleefully dragged their neighbors away to rot in dark, pestilential prisons. In this new study, based on extensive archival research, James E. Wadsworth challenges these myths by focusing on the lay and clerical officials who staffed the Inquisition in colonial Pernambuco, one of Brazil's oldest, wealthiest, and most populated colonies. He argues that the Inquisition was an integral part of colonial society and that it reflected and reinforced deeply held social and religious value...
The massacre of Canudos In 1897 is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. Looking at the event through the eyes of the inhabitants, Levine challenges traditional interpretations and gives weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-raced descent and were thus perceived as opponents to progress and civilization. In 1897 Brazilian military forces destroyed the millenarian settlement of Canudos, murdering as many as 35,000 pious rural folk who had taken refuge in the remote northeast backlands of Brazil. Fictionalized in Mario Vargas Llosa's acclaimed novel, War at the End of the World, Canudos is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. When looked at through the...
In Feb. 1877, a letter from the county council of Telha, a town of 600 people located in the Serra da Mattos in Brazil reported that people were dying from starvation. The previous year's rainy season had been sparse, and the harvest, poor. Now, this season's rains still had not appeared. This was the Great Drought -- three years of failed rains enshrined in Brazilian memory as the worst drought ever to hit Brazil's northeast. Drought had visited the region throughout its history, with the earliest recorded occurrences dating back to the 16th century. The failure of rains in 1877 was devastating, for it caught the provinces of the north totally unprepared. The specter of periodic droughts producing dislocation and death continues to haunt the region.