This course is a brief survey of Brazilian history, from colonial times to the present. It will focus on some decisive events that have marked Brazil’s transformation from a colonial, agrarian, slave society to a predominantly urban, industrialized nation, and an aspiring world power. By participating in the main debates and approaches of current historiography, students will gain a better comprehension of contemporary Brazil, with its many legacies of both continuity and discontinuity aspects, as well as with its new challenges.
Learning outcomes:
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
Appreciate the richness and complexity of Brazilian history and culture
Understand the patterns that shaped Brazil’s past to envision its future
Compare the major events in Brazilian history with the history of the United States
Method of presentation:
Class discussions, film viewings, field studies, and Moodle.
Required work and form of assessment:
Class participation (20%); midterm exam (30%); oral presentation (20%); final research paper (30%).
Oral presentation: Students will be assigned to present on a film viewed before class, or to give the relevant context during a field study, based on the readings selected by the instructor.
Final paper: The topic of the paper (12 pages in length) will be discussed with the instructor during the first half of the course, and will be due on the last day of class.
content:
Week 1: Introduction.
Required reading: Adelman, Jeremy: 1-14.
Week 2: Early Colonial Brazil: From the dyewood phase to the Atlantic slave trade. The creation of a sugar planter society in the Northeast. The social fabric.
Required reading: Lockhart and Schwartz (eds.): chapter 6.
Film viewings: The African Trade; Memories of Captivity.
Week 3: Life in the Colony: The impact of gold in Minas Gerais in the late 17th century. The reorientations of the administration promoted by the 18th century Pombaline reforms.
Required reading: Lockhart and Schwartz (eds.): chapter 10.
Week 4: The era of Atlantic Revolutions: The Napoleonic invasions of the Peninsula. The search for autonomy and independence in Iberian America. The particularity of the city of Rio, turned into the seat of the Portuguese Empire.
Field study: Paço Imperial
Week 5: The struggle for political emancipation and nation-state formation: Different interests put the provinces on the move. Liberalism, romanticism and 19th-century conservative politics. Unitarian rule and restrained citizenship. Slavery as the backbone of the Brazilian Monarchical order.
Week 6: Abolitionism and the late advent of Republican rule in Brazil: the changes from 1870s onwards. Order as progress substitutes order as unity. The republican coup and oligarchic politics. The interplay between the federal government and the states’ politics (“coronelismo”, politics of governors, and federalism) until the crisis of the late 1920s.
Required readings: Cunha, Euclides da: 426-466; Pamplona, Marco: chapter 4.
Midterm exam
Week 7: The growth of industrialization, urbanization, and workers’ associations. The remodeling of Rio’s landscape and its cultural life. The continuity of old exclusions and the advent of new ones. The destiny of the freed men.
Field study: Teatro Municipal, Museu de Belas Artes e Biblioteca Nacional.
Week 8: A modernist paradigm for the reordering of state and society: The 1930 coup and the beginning of Vargas corporatist rule. Authoritarianism in the building up of the Estado Novo (1937-45). Fascist inspired labor and social legislations. Economy and cultural policies under political repression.
Week 9: The democratic experience in the aftermath of World War II. Vargas in the 1950s: the building of mass political parties and the maintenance of state-oriented syndicalism. Reinforced urbanization and industrialization. Nationalism and “developmentalism” during the Kubitchek government. Urban and rural workers mobilization in the late 50s. Tendencies inside the Church and divisions amidst the military. Cultural expressions of the 50s: architecture and paintings.
Required reading: Skidmore, Thomas: chapters 2 and 3.
Field study: Museu de Arte Moderna e Museu de Arte Contemporânea.
Film viewing: The JK Years: A Political Career.
Week 10: The 1964 coup and beginnings of military dictatorship in Brazil. The National Security principle and the Institutional Act Number 5. The Brazilian Miracle favors a short stability of authoritarian rule. The broader context of dictatorships in Latin America during the seventies. New resistances from grass-root organizations, student leagues, labor unions and progressive church movements.
Required readings: Moreira Alves, Maria Helena: chapters 4, 6 and 8.
Film viewing: Bruno Barreto, Four Days in September.
Week 11: Re-democratization and civil society expansion. New voices and new challenges since the 1980s. Culture, politics and the hasty changes of the late 20 years in Latin America and Brazil.
Required readings: Stepan, Alfred (ed.): chapters 2 and 4; Straubhaar, Joseph: “Television and Video in the Transition from Military to Civilian Rule in Brazil”; Fontaine, Pierre-Michel (ed.): chapter 7.
Week 12: The contemporary scene and the working out of a new agenda. Final paper due.
Final exam
Required readings:
Adelman, Jeremy (ed.). Colonial Legacies.The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Barman, Roderick J. Brazil: The Forging of a Nation: 1798-1852. Stanford University Press, 1988.
Bethell, Leslie (ed.). The Cambridge History of Latin America, volumes 5 and 8. Cambridge University Press, 1986 and 1991.
Coniff, Michael L. and Frank McCann (eds.). Modern Brazil: Elites and Masses in Historical Perspective. University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
Costa, Emilia Viotti da. The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, revised ed. 2000 [1985].
Cunha, Euclides da. Backlands: The Canudos Campaign. New York: Penguin, 2010.
Fausto, Boris. A Concise History of Brazil. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Fontaine, Pierre-Michel (ed.). Race, Class, and Power in Brazil. Los Angeles: University of California / Center for Afro-American Studies, 1995.
Lockhart, James and Stuart B. Schwartz. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Marx, Anthony W. Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the U.S, South Africa and Brazil. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Moreira Alves, Maria Helena. State and Opposition in Military Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.
Needell, Jeffrey D. A Tropical Belle Époque: Elite Culture and Society in the Turn-of-the Century Rio de Janeiro. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Pamplona, Marco. Riots, Republicanism, and Citizenship: New York City and Rio de Janeiro during the Consolidation of the Republican Order. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.
Skidmore, Thomas. Politics in Brazil (1930-1964): An Experiment in Democracy. Oxford University Press, 1967.
Stepan, Alfred (ed.). Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Straubhaar, Joseph D. “Television and Video in the Transition from Military to Civilian Rule in Brazil,” in: Latin-American Research Review 32:1 (1989).
Other Resources:
FILMS:
BBC Timewatch, The African Trade (1998).
Guilherme Fernandes and Isabel Castro, Memories of Captivity (2008).
Boris Fausto, History of Brazil: The Vargas Era (2011).
Silvio Tendler, The JK Years: A Political Career (1980).
Bruno Barreto, Four Days in September [O que é isso companheiro?] (1997).
Brief Biography of Instructor:
Marco Pamplona is Chair of the History department at PUC-Rio. He holds a Ph.D from Columbia University (1991) and a Post-Doc from Yale (2001). He has been Director of the Fulbright Chair of American Studies in Brazil, and founding member of the Association for Research on Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Americas (www.cas.sc.edu/arena) and of H-Nationalism (www.h-net.org/~national/). His field of research is Latin American and U.S. 19th century history, and focuses mostly on nationalism, nation-state formation, 19th century liberalism and republicanism, urban rioting, citizenship, and racism in the Americas. Some of his main publications are: Riots, Republicanism and Citizenship (1996); Nationalism in the Americas (2006), co-edited with Don Doyle; and Estado y Nación en Chile y Brasil en el siglo XIX (2009), co-edited with Ana Maria Stuven.
History of Brazil
This course is a brief survey of Brazilian history, from colonial times to the present. It will focus on some decisive events that have marked Brazil’s transformation from a colonial, agrarian, slave society to a predominantly urban, industrialized nation, and an aspiring world power. By participating in the main debates and approaches of current historiography, students will gain a better comprehension of contemporary Brazil, with its many legacies of both continuity and discontinuity aspects, as well as with its new challenges.
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
Class discussions, film viewings, field studies, and Moodle.
Class participation (20%); midterm exam (30%); oral presentation (20%); final research paper (30%).
Oral presentation: Students will be assigned to present on a film viewed before class, or to give the relevant context during a field study, based on the readings selected by the instructor.
Final paper: The topic of the paper (12 pages in length) will be discussed with the instructor during the first half of the course, and will be due on the last day of class.
Week 1: Introduction.
Week 2: Early Colonial Brazil: From the dyewood phase to the Atlantic slave trade. The creation of a sugar planter society in the Northeast. The social fabric.
Week 3: Life in the Colony: The impact of gold in Minas Gerais in the late 17th century. The reorientations of the administration promoted by the 18th century Pombaline reforms.
Week 4: The era of Atlantic Revolutions: The Napoleonic invasions of the Peninsula. The search for autonomy and independence in Iberian America. The particularity of the city of Rio, turned into the seat of the Portuguese Empire.
Week 5: The struggle for political emancipation and nation-state formation: Different interests put the provinces on the move. Liberalism, romanticism and 19th-century conservative politics. Unitarian rule and restrained citizenship. Slavery as the backbone of the Brazilian Monarchical order.
Week 6: Abolitionism and the late advent of Republican rule in Brazil: the changes from 1870s onwards. Order as progress substitutes order as unity. The republican coup and oligarchic politics. The interplay between the federal government and the states’ politics (“coronelismo”, politics of governors, and federalism) until the crisis of the late 1920s.
Midterm exam
Week 7: The growth of industrialization, urbanization, and workers’ associations. The remodeling of Rio’s landscape and its cultural life. The continuity of old exclusions and the advent of new ones. The destiny of the freed men.
Week 8: A modernist paradigm for the reordering of state and society: The 1930 coup and the beginning of Vargas corporatist rule. Authoritarianism in the building up of the Estado Novo (1937-45). Fascist inspired labor and social legislations. Economy and cultural policies under political repression.
Week 9: The democratic experience in the aftermath of World War II. Vargas in the 1950s: the building of mass political parties and the maintenance of state-oriented syndicalism. Reinforced urbanization and industrialization. Nationalism and “developmentalism” during the Kubitchek government. Urban and rural workers mobilization in the late 50s. Tendencies inside the Church and divisions amidst the military. Cultural expressions of the 50s: architecture and paintings.
Week 10: The 1964 coup and beginnings of military dictatorship in Brazil. The National Security principle and the Institutional Act Number 5. The Brazilian Miracle favors a short stability of authoritarian rule. The broader context of dictatorships in Latin America during the seventies. New resistances from grass-root organizations, student leagues, labor unions and progressive church movements.
Week 11: Re-democratization and civil society expansion. New voices and new challenges since the 1980s. Culture, politics and the hasty changes of the late 20 years in Latin America and Brazil.
Week 12: The contemporary scene and the working out of a new agenda. Final paper due.
Final exam
FILMS:
Marco Pamplona is Chair of the History department at PUC-Rio. He holds a Ph.D from Columbia University (1991) and a Post-Doc from Yale (2001). He has been Director of the Fulbright Chair of American Studies in Brazil, and founding member of the Association for Research on Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Americas (www.cas.sc.edu/arena) and of H-Nationalism (www.h-net.org/~national/). His field of research is Latin American and U.S. 19th century history, and focuses mostly on nationalism, nation-state formation, 19th century liberalism and republicanism, urban rioting, citizenship, and racism in the Americas. Some of his main publications are: Riots, Republicanism and Citizenship (1996); Nationalism in the Americas (2006), co-edited with Don Doyle; and Estado y Nación en Chile y Brasil en el siglo XIX (2009), co-edited with Ana Maria Stuven.