Over time, Brazil has evolved into a well-defined nation with a strong sense of identity. From the natural beauty of the Amazon River to the exciting resort city of Rio de Janeiro, from soccer champion Pele to classical musician Villa Lobos, Brazil is known as a distinctive, diverse country. It is recognized worldwide for its World Cup soccer team, samba music, dancing, and celebrations of Carnival. This book provides a well-rounded, brief history of Brazil that uniquely focuses on both the politics and culture of the republic. Colin MacLachlan uses a political narrative to frame the evolution of national culture and the formation of national identity. He evaluates Brazilian myths, stereotypes, and icons such as soccer and dancing as part of the historical analysis. Brazil's history is presented from its colonial roots to the present, showing how the country developed its economic and social base, then struggled to modernize and secure a respected world role. Key issues are examined: immigration, slavery and race, territorial expansion, the military, and technology and industrialization. The integration of cultural material enriches the text. It provides handy points for classroom discussion and will help students remember particular aspects Brazil's history. The book includes fascinating side-bars on various aspects of Brazilian culture, including Copacabana Beach and the rain forests. A History of Modern Brazil will inform and entertain students in courses on Brazil and modern Latin America.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

In Chapters in Brazil's Colonial History, Capistrano de Abreu created an integrated history of Brazil in a landmark work of scholarship that is also a literary masterpiece. Abreu offers a startlingly modern analysis of the past, based on the role of the economy, settlement, and the occupation of the interior. In these pages, he combines sharp portraits of dramatic events--close fought battles against Dutch occupation in the 1650s, Indian resistance to often brutal internal expansion--with insightful social history. A master of Brazil's ethnographic landscape, he provides detailed sketches of daily life for Brazilians of all stripes. Superbly translated by Arthur A. Brakel and edited by Stuart Schwartz and Fernando Novais, this Brazilian classic has never before available in English. Chapters in Brazil's Colonial History opens Brazil's rich, fascinating past to the general reader, and offers scholars access to a great turning point in historical scholarship.

“Hello, hello Brazil” was the standard greeting Brazilian radio announcers of the 1930s used to welcome their audience into an expanding cultural marketplace. New genres like samba and repackaged older ones like choro served as the currency in this marketplace, minted in the capital in Rio de Janeiro and circulated nationally by the burgeoning recording and broadcasting industries. Bryan McCann chronicles the flourishing of Brazilian popular music between the 1920s and the 1950s. Through analysis of the competing projects of composers, producers, bureaucrats, and fans, he shows that Brazilians alternately envisioned popular music as the foundation for a unified national culture and used it as a tool to probe racial and regional divisions. McCann explores the links between the growth of the culture industry, rapid industrialization, and the rise and fall of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo dictatorship. He argues that these processes opened a window of opportunity for the creation of enduring cultural patterns and demonstrates that the understandings of popular music cemented in the mid–twentieth century continue to structure Brazilian cultural life in the early twenty-first.

A history, examining the events that have led to Brazil's ascendancy, looking at the indigenous peoples who populated the territory until its discovery in 1500 AD and chronicling the tempestuous centuries since, leading to the recent economic miracle. It covers the three centuries of Portuguese colonial rule when sugar became the main export, produced by millions of African slaves. Brazil declared independence from Portugal as a monarchy in 1822, subsequently replaced by a republic in 1889. The book details the pattern of boom and bust in the Brazil economy since then.