Brazil for Beginners

In this introductory lecture I provide an overview of the lectures in the course, and then briefly sketch a series of reasons explaining "why Brazil matters".  As I emphasize, Brazil has emerged as a power in the early twentieth-first century as the largest country in the world in land mass and population, the third largest democracy, and the sixth economy on the planet.

Key Terms:

Antonio Carlos Jobim

Modernism

Getúlio Vargas

Fernando Henrique Cardoso

Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva

Suggested Reading:

Marshall C. Eakin, Brazil:  The Once and Future Country (New York:  St. Martin's Press, 1997)

Riordan Roett, The New Brazil (Washington, DC:  The Brookings Institution Press, 2010)

This lecture surveys the five major regions of Brazil and provides an introduction to the major features of Brazilian culture.

Key Terms:

Salvador da Bahia (baiano)

Rio de Janeiro (carioca)

Minas Gerais (mineiro)

São Paulo (paulista)

Belo Horizonte

Paraná

Santa Catarina

Rio Grande do Sul (gaúcho)

Amazonia

Euclides da Cunha

Belém

Manaus

Brasília

Goiás

Mato Grosso

Suggested Reading:

Eakin, Brazil:  The Once and Future Country, Chapter 2, "The Brazilian Archipelago"

A look at the native peoples of eastern South America, the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, and the implantation of the first permanent Portuguese settlements.

The construction of the first great plantation complex in the Americas on the Northeastern coast of Brazil built on cane sugar and African slave labor.

The first great gold rush in the Americas took shape in Brazil in the eighteenth century. This lecture discusses the "Golden Age of Brazil," the acceleration of the Brazilian slave trade, and the creation of a new heartland in the southeast of Brazil.

Key Terms:

Minas Gerais

bandeirantes

Jesuits

War of the Emboabas

Vila Rica de Ouro Preto

Chica da Silva

João V

Suggested Reading:

Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2009)

This lecture examines the late eighteenth century in the Portuguese empire, the failed uprising in Minas Gerais, the transfer of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil and the process of independence in the early nineteenth century.

Key Terms:

Charles III (1759-88) of Spain

Marquis of Pombal (1750-77)

Inconfidência Mineira (1789)

Tiradentes

Napoleon Bonaparte

João VI

Pedro I

fico - "I am staying."

Suggested Reading:

Kenneth Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies:  Brazil and Portugal, 1750-1808 (New York:  Routledge, 2004)

Neill Macaulay, Dom Pedro:  The Struggle for Liberty in Brazil and Portual, 1798-1834 (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1986)

This lecture is an overview of the largest slave society in the Americas and it decline from the abolition of the slave trade in 1850 to the abolition of slavery in 1888.

Key Terms:

Bight of Benin

Congo

Angola

macumba

candomblé

orixá

quilombo

Palmares

St. Domingue

Golden Law (13 May 1888)

Suggested Readings:

Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1992)

Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White:  Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)

Katia M. de Queiros Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550-1888, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1986)

Overview of political history of the last years of the Brazilian Empire, its overthrow in 1889, and the creation of a Brazilian republic.

Key Terms:

Princess Isabel

positivism

Deodoro da Fonseca

Floriano Peixoto

Pedro II

Suggested Reading:

Roderick Barman, Citizen Emperor:  Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825-1891 (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2002)

In the early twentieth century a series of political, economic, social, and cultural movements converge to produce the beginnings of a modern nation constructed around an identity built on racial and cultural mixture.

Key Terms:

Romanticism

Realism

Naturalism

Luso-tropical civilization

José de Alencar (1829-77)

Aluísio de Azevedo (1857-1913)

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908)

Modern Art Week (1922)

Mário de Andrade (1893-1945)

Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954)

Cannibalist Manifesto

Gilberto Freyre (1900-87)

Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909)

Suggested Reading:

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro, trans. Helen Caldwell (New York:  Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009)

Euclides da Cunha, Backlands:  The Canudos Campaign, trans. Elizabeth Lowe (New York:  Penguin, 2010)

Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, trans. Samuel Putnam (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1987)

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Spectacle of Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930, trans. Lilia Guyer (New York:  Hill and Wang, 1999)

From the 1930s to the 1950s the dominant political figure in Brazil, Getulio Vargas, played the principal role in the emergence of a country in the early stages of industrialization, urbanization, social reorganization, and the consolidation of a national community.  This lecture looks at the collapse of the First Republic (1889-1930), the rise of Vargas and the imposition his dictatorship (1937-45).

Key Terms:

Washington Luís (1926-30)

Getúlio Vargas (1883-1954)

João Pessoa

corporatism

fascism

Import Substititution Industrialization (ISI)

Suggested Reading:

Robert M. Levine, Father of the Poor?:  Vargas and His Era (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Thomas E. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 1930-64:  An Experiment in Democracy (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1967)

From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s Brazil, for the first time, experimented with mass democratic politics and political mobilization, a period that ended with a military coup in 1964.  In this lecture, we look at the fall of Vargas, and the emergence of mass politics up through the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61).

Key Terms: 

Getúlio Vargas

Eurico Dutra (1946-51)

populism

Petrobras

Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61)

João Goulart

Brasília

Suggested Reading:

Thomas E. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 1930-64:  An Experiment in Democracy (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1967)

From 1964 to 1985, the armed forces imposed a dictatorship with the twin goals of eliminating what they saw as the threat of leftist revolutionaries and rapidly modernizing the economy through state-directed industrialization.

Key Terms:

Jânio Quadros

João Goulart

National Security Doctrine

General Humberto Castelo Branco (1964-67)

General Artur Costa e Silva (1967-69)

General Emílio Médici (1969-74)

"ano de chumbo" (years of lead)

Suggested Reading:

Thomas E. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964-85 (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1988)

Torture in Brazil: A Shocking Report on the Pervasive Use of Torture by Brazilian Military Governments, 1964-1979.  translated by Jaime Wright. Edited with a new preface by Joan Dassin  (Austin:  Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas, 1998)

In the 1980s the military gradually stepped back from power and Brazil entered into the most democratic and open politics in its history as the third largest democracy in the world.

Key Terms:

The principal architects of the new Brazil have been two presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) and Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva (2003-2011).

Key Terms:

Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI)

neo-liberalism

Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003)

Luís Inácio "Lula" da Silva (2003-11)

Bolsa Família (Family Stipend)

Dilma Rousseff (2011- )

Suggested Reading:

Albert Fishlow, Starting Over:  Brazil Since 1985 (Washington, DC:  Brookings Institution Press, 2011)

Over the last decade, Brazil has become the world's sixth largest economy, third largest democracy, and one of the key players on the global stage.  This lecture summarizes the course and looks to the future.

Key Terms:

Getúlio Vargas

growth and development

income inequality

Suggested Reading:

Marshall C. Eakin, Brazil:  The Once and Future Country (New York:  St. Martin's Press, 1997)