This book traces the rise and decline of Gilberto Freyre's vision of racial and cultural mixture (mestiçagem - or race mixing) as the defining feature of Brazilian culture in the twentieth century. Eakin traces how mestiçagem moved from a conversation among a small group of intellectuals to become the dominant feature of Brazilian national identity, demonstrating how diverse Brazilians embraced mestiçagem, via popular music, film and television, literature, soccer, and protest movements. The Freyrean vision of the unity of Brazilians built on mestiçagem begins a gradual decline in the 1980s with the emergence of an identity politics stressing racial differences and multiculturalism. The book combines intellectual history, sociological and anthropological field work, political science, and cultural studies for a wide-ranging analysis of how Brazilians - across social classes - became Brazilians.

Law and justice are studied in this book from the perspective of social and global history. The main focus of Workers Before the Tribunal is to overcome traditional binary oppositions between corporativist and contratualist models of labor relations, the former representing a view in which the working class would have more autonomy in struggling for better labor conditions, the latter meaning the protagonism of the State in promoting labor rights. Teixeira da Silva presents three main arguments. First, he shows that the Brazilian labor justice system created during the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship (1930-1945), although inspired by Mussolini's legal order in Italy, is very different from the Fascist Magistratura del Lavoro. Second, in his comparative analysis with other national cases, such as the United States, France, Germany and Australia, the author argues that there was a large circulation of ideas and practices, resulting in a more complex dynamic of appropriation of international ideas on labor rights and institutions in Brazil. Third, Teixeira da Silva demonstrates that litigation in labor courts was one strategy of the working-class movement in Brazil, together with strikes and other means of confrontation. Therefore, he questions historiographical and political approaches that see labor justice as a weak substitute for class action. The "jurisdictionalization" of labor relations became a constitutive element in the making of the Brazilian working class. The book is anchored in the research of hundreds of labor litigation cases during the dramatic months preceding the 1964 civil-military coup d’état that inaugurated a quarter century of dictatorial rule in Brazil.

Vols. 17-18 cover 1775-1914.

This second edition offers an unparallelled look at Brazil in the twentieth century, including in-depth coverage of the 1930 revolution and Vargas's rise to power; the ensuing unstable democratic period and the military coups that followed; and the reemergence of democracy in 1985. It concludes with the recent presidency of Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, covering such economic successes as record-setting exports, dramatic foreign debt reduction, and improved income distribution. The second edition features numerous new images and a new bibliographic guide to recent works on Brazilian history for use by both instructors and students. Informed by the most recent scholarship available, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, Second Edition, explores the country's many blessings--ethnic diversity, racial democracy, a vibrant cultural life, and a wealth of natural resources.