Brazil: A Biography

Author: Lilia M. Schwarcz
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374710708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Book Description
A sweeping and absorbing biography of Brazil, from the sixteenth century to the present For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown. In an extraordinary journey that spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling’s Brazil offers a rich, dramatic history of this complex country. The authors not only reconstruct the epic story of the nation but follow the shifting byways of food, art, and popular culture; the plights of minorities; and the ups and downs of economic cycles. Drawing on a range of original scholarship in history, anthropology, political science, and economics, Schwarcz and Starling reveal a long process of unfinished social, political, and economic progress and struggle, a story in which the troubled legacy of the mixing of races and postcolonial political dysfunction persist to this day.

Brazil

Author: Neill Lochery
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465080707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
In 1939, Brazil seemed a world away from the chaos overtaking Europe. Yet despite its bucolic reputation as a distant land of palm trees and pristine beaches, Brazil’s natural resources and proximity to the United States made it strategically invaluable to both the Allies and the Axis alike. As acclaimed historian Neill Lochery reveals in The Fortunes of War, Brazil’s wily dictator Getúlio Dornelles Vargas keenly understood his country’s importance, and played both sides of the escalating global conflict off against each other, gaining trade concessions, weapons shipments, and immense political power in the process. Vargas ultimately sided with the Allies and sent troops to the European theater, but not before his dexterous geopolitical machinations had transformed Rio de Janeiro into one of South America’s most powerful cities and solidified Brazil’s place as a major regional superpower. A fast-paced tale of diplomatic intrigue, The Fortunes of War reveals how World War II transformed Brazil from a tropical backwater into a modern, global power.

A Concise History of Brazil

Author: Boris Fausto
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107036208
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 485

Book Description
The second edition of A Concise History of Brazil features a new chapter that covers the critical time period from 1990 to the present, focusing on Brazil's increasing global economic importance as well as its continued democratic development.

Viscount Maua and the Empire of Brazil

Author: Anyda Marchant
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520363736
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
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 1965.

Lula and His Politics of Cunning

Author: John D. French
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469655772
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 521

Book Description
Known around the world simply as Lula, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva was born in 1945 to illiterate parents who migrated to industrializing Sao Paulo. He learned to read at ten years of age, left school at fourteen, became a skilled metalworker, rose to union leadership, helped end a military dictatorship—and in 2003 became the thirty-fifth president of Brazil. During his administration, Lula led his country through reforms that lifted tens of millions out of poverty. Here, John D. French, one of the foremost historians of Brazil, provides the first critical biography of the leader whom even his political opponents see as strikingly charismatic, humorous, and endearing. Interweaving an intimate and colorful story of Lula's life—his love for home, soccer, factory floor, and union hall—with an analysis of large-scale forces, French argues that Lula was uniquely equipped to influence the authoritarian structures of power in this developing nation. His cunning capacity to speak with, not at, people and to create shared political meaning was fundamental to his political triumphs. After Lula left office, his opponents convicted and incarcerated him on charges of money laundering and corruption—but his immense army of voters celebrated his recent release from jail, insisting that he is the victim of a right-wing political ambush. The story of Lula is not over.

The Formation of Souls

Author: José Murilo de Carvalho
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780268035266
Category : Brazil
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In The Formation of Souls, José Murilo de Carvalho examines the birth of the Brazilian Republic in 1889.

1808: The Flight of the Emperor

Author: Laurentino Gomes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762796669
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
In a time of terror for Europe’s monarchs—imprisoned, exiled, executed—Napoleon’s army marched toward Lisbon. Cornered, Prince Regent João had to make the most fraught decision of his life. Protected by the British Navy, he fled to Brazil with his entire family, including his deranged mother, most of the nobility, and the entire state apparatus. Until then, no European monarch had ever set foot in the Americas. Thousands made the voyage, but it was no luxury cruise. It took two months in cramped, decrepit ships. Lice infested some of the vessels, and noble women had to shave their hair and grease their bald heads with antiseptic sulfur. Vermin infested the food, and bacteria contaminated the drinking water. Sickness ran rampant. After landing in Brazil, Prince João liberated the colony from a trade monopoly with Portugal. As explorers mapped the burgeoning nation’s distant regions, the prince authorized the construction of roads, the founding of schools, and the creation of factories, raising Brazil to kingdom status in 1815. Meanwhile, Portugal was suffering the effects of abandonment, war, and famine. Never had the country lost so many people in so little time. Finally, after Napoleon’s fall and over a decade of misery, the Portuguese demanded the return of their king. João sailed back in tears in 1821, and the last chapter of colonial Brazil drew to a close, setting the stage for the strong, independent nation that we know today, changing the New World forever.

Chinese Communist Espionage

Author: Peter Mattis
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 168247304X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
This is the first book of its kind to employ hundreds of Chinese sources to explain the history and current state of Chinese Communist intelligence operations. It profiles the leaders, top spies, and important operations in the history of China's espionage organs, and links to an extensive online glossary of Chinese language intelligence and security terms. Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil present an unprecedented look into the murky world of Chinese espionage both past and present, enabling a better understanding of how pervasive and important its influence is, both in China and abroad.

Vargas of Brazil

Author: John W. F. Dulles
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292740786
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : pt
Pages : 450

Book Description
The dominant public figure in Brazil from 1930 until 1954 was a highly contradictory and controversial personality. Getúlio Vargas, from the pampas of the southern frontier state of Rio Grande do Sul, became the dictator who ruled without ever forgetting the lower classes. Vargas was a consummate artist at politics. He climbed the political ladder through seats in the state and national legislatures to the post of federal Finance Minister and to the governorship of Rio Grande do Sul. His career then took him to the National Palace as Provisional President and as Constitutional President, and later as the dictator of his "New State." After his deposition in 1945 and a period of semiretirement, his continuing widespread popularity resulted in his successful come-back campaign in 1950 for the Presidency on the Labor Party ticket. Vargas' contributions to Brazilian political and economic life were many and important. Taking advantage of the power which his political magic provided him, he brought Brazil from a loose confederacy of semifeudal states to a strongly centralized nation. He was a great eclectic, welding into his social, political, and economic policies what he found good in various programs. He was also a great opportunist in the sense that he adroitly took advantage of conditions and circumstances to effect his ends. He was intimately related to the revolutionary changes in Brazilian life after 1930. Vargas, "Father of the Brazilians," attributed achievements such as these to power in his own hands. His foes, however, still feared the political wizard, and they cheered the military when it deposed him. After his return, "on the arms of the people," Vargas saw that the armed forces were determined to repeat history, and in 1954 he chose another path—suicide. All of these exciting events are related in John W. F. Dulles's Vargas of Brazil: A Political Biography. Despite its emphasis on Vargas the politician and statesman, the reader comes to know Vargas the man. For this portrait of Vargas and of Brazil the author has drawn much material from State Department papers in the National Archives and from other public sources, and from interviews with numerous persons who were participants in the events he describes or observers of them. The result is an interesting, revealing, valid account of an important people. Many illustrations supplement the text.

Napalm

Author: Robert M. Neer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674075471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
Napalm, incendiary gel that sticks to skin and burns to the bone, came into the world on Valentine’s Day 1942 at a secret Harvard war research laboratory. On March 9, 1945, it created an inferno that killed over 87,500 people in Tokyo—more than died in the atomic explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It went on to incinerate sixty-four of Japan’s largest cities. The Bomb got the press, but napalm did the work. After World War II, the incendiary held the line against communism in Greece and Korea—Napalm Day led the 1950 counter-attack from Inchon—and fought elsewhere under many flags. Americans generally applauded, until the Vietnam War. Today, napalm lives on as a pariah: a symbol of American cruelty and the misguided use of power, according to anti-war protesters in the 1960s and popular culture from Apocalypse Now to the punk band Napalm Death and British street artist Banksy. Its use by Serbia in 1994 and by the United States in Iraq in 2003 drew condemnation. United Nations delegates judged deployment against concentrations of civilians a war crime in 1980. After thirty-one years, America joined the global consensus, in 2011. Robert Neer has written the first history of napalm, from its inaugural test on the Harvard College soccer field, to a Marine Corps plan to attack Japan with millions of bats armed with tiny napalm time bombs, to the reflections of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a girl who knew firsthand about its power and its morality.