By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Luanda and Benguela became the busiest, most profitable slaving ports in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century precisely because these two ports set up tribunals to hear tens of thousands of enslaved petitioners demand freedom. Paperwork in local tribunals set hundreds of thousands free, even at the risk of bankrupting […]
The Quilombo Activists’ Archive and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part I
By Edward Shore (This is the first of two articles on a post-custodial digital archiving project being carried out by a group of researchers and archivists from UT Austin’s LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections together with their colleagues in the Ribeira Valley in Brazil.) The author dedicates this essay to anti-dam activists on […]
A Poverty of Rights, Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro by Brodwyn Fischer (2008)
By Marcus Oliver Golding Getúlio Vargas, President of Brazil from 1930-1945, is often credited as the champion of the Brazilian working class during the twentieth century. His policies led to the progressive industrialization of Brazil and to a barrage of labor regulations that protected workers’ rights. However, not everyone benefited equally from these laws. Thousands […]
Episode 109: The Tango and Samba
Host: Marcelo Domingos, Department of History Guest: Andreia Menezes, Department of Linguistics, Literature and Humanities, Federal University of São Paulo The first notes of the samba and the tango instantly capture ones attention, transporting the listener to Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and the River Plate in Argentina. Seen as national symbols for their respective countries, […]
An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum
Introduced and compiled by Edward Shore Brazilian researchers have described the fire that consumed the National Museum of Brazil on September 2, 2018 as a “tragédia anunciada” an anticipated tragedy. This week, Not Even Past caught up with historians who have visited and conducted research there. They shared memories of their experiences and explained what […]
Cuba’s Revolutionary World
As Mao used to say, “The revolution is not a dinner party.” Fidel Castro provided the corollary. “But the counterrevolution” he said, “is always more cruel.”
Getz/Gilberto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective
Getz/Gilberto was not North America’s first encounter with bossa nova, the lyrical fusion of samba and cool jazz emanating from the smoky nightclubs, recording studios, and performance halls of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1950s. Yet the eight-track LP was by far the most successful.
The Cross-Cultural Exchange of Atlantic Slavery
The Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas connected merchants, Portuguese colonists, convicts, and slaves in cultural and economic relationships, reconfiguring the space of the southern Atlantic. The work of Mariana Candido and Roquinaldo Ferriera shows how creolization and the economic prosperity created by the slave trade was a two-way street.
Seth Garfield on the Brazilian Amazon
During World War II, the governments of Brazil and the United States made an unprecedented level of joint investment in the economy and infrastructure of the Amazon region. The dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937-45) trumpeted the colonization and development of the Amazon (christened the “March to the West”) as a nationalist imperative to defend a sparsely settled frontier covering some sixty percent of Brazilian territory.
The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)
There is a vast historiography on worker strikes and resistance to economic exploitation in Latin America and Brazil, yet most scholars disregard the environmental backdrop to struggles over land, labor, and resources.