Books in the New Approaches to the Americas series

This book examines how Gilberto Freyre's notion of mesticagem (race mixing) became the overwhelmingly dominant narrative of national identity in twentieth-century Brazil. It will be of interest to scholars and students interested in Brazil, Latin America, race, nationalism, national identity, and popular culture.

Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present examines the immigration to Brazil of millions of Europeans, Asians and Middle Easterners beginning in the nineteenth century. Jeffrey Lesser analyzes how these newcomers and their descendants adapted to their new country and how national identity was formed as they became Brazilians.

This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries.

In Search of an Inca examines how people in the Andean region have invoked the Incas to question and rethink colonialism and injustice, from the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century until the late twentieth century. It offers important reflections on memory, utopianism, and resistance.

This survey is a synthesis of the economic, social, cultural, and political history of the Atlantic slave trade, providing the general reader with a basic understanding of the current state of scholarly knowledge of forced African migration and compares this knowledge to popular beliefs.

This 2007 book is an introductory history of racial slavery in the Americas. It is the first work that systemically surveys slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States from comparative perspectives. Chapters focus on slave narratives, demography, economy, culture, resistance and rebellion, and the causes of abolition.

A narration of the mutually mortal historical contest between humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a period beginning with Amerindian civilizations and concluding with the region's present urban agglomerations, the work argues that tropical nature played a central role in shaping the region's historical development.

This book explores the history of material culture and consumption in Latin America over the past 500 years in the categories of food, clothing, shelter, and public or private space. Consumption is related to the importance of ritual and identity within the ethnic and class arrangements imposed by colonial and post-colonial societies.

A comprehensive overview of Brazilian history during the Vargas dictatorship.

This 2002 book presents the true and dramatic accounts of two nineteenth-century Brazilian women - one young and born a slave, the other old and from an illustrious planter family - and how each sought to retain control of their lives: the slave woman struggling to avoid an unwanted husband; the woman of privilege assuming a patriarch's role to endow a family of her former slaves with the means for a free life. But these women's stories cannot be told without also recalling how their decisions drew them ever more firmly into the orbits of the worldly and influential men who exercised power in their lives. These are stories with a twist: in this society of radically skewed power, Lauderdale Graham reveals that more choices existed for all sides than we first imagine. Through these small histories she casts new light on larger meanings of slave and free, female and male.

This volume elucidates Bourbon colonial policy with emphasis on Madrid's efforts to reform and modernize its American holdings. Set in an Atlantic world context, the book highlights the interplay between Spain and America as the Spanish empire struggled for survival amid the fierce international competition that dominated the eighteenth century. The authors use extensive research in the repositories of Spain and America, as well as innovative consultation of the French Foreign Affairs archive, to bring into focus the poorly understood reformist efforts of the early Bourbons, which laid the foundation for the better-known agenda of Charles III. As the book unfolds, the narrative puts flesh on the men and women who, for better or worse, influenced colonial governance. It is the story of power, ambition and idealism at the highest levels.

Born in La Paz in 1792, Andres de Santa Cruz lived through the turbulent times that led to independence across Latin America. He fought to shape the newly established republics, and between 1836 and 1839 he created the Peru-Bolivia Confederation. The epitome of an Andean caudillo, with armed forces at the center of his ideas of governance, he was a state builder whose ambition ensured a strong and well-administered country. But the ultimate failure of the Confederation had long-reaching consequences that still have an impact today. The story of his life introduces students to broader questions of nationality and identity during this turbulent transition from Spanish colonial rule to the founding of Peru and Bolivia.

Junia Ferreira Furtado offers a fascinating study of the world of a freed woman of color in a small Brazilian town where itinerant merchants, former slaves, Portuguese administrators and concubines interact across social and cultural lines. The child of an African slave and a Brazilian military nobleman of Portuguese descent, Chica da Silva won her freedom using social and matrimonial strategies. But her story is not merely the personal history of a woman, or the social history of a colonial Brazilian town. Rather, it provides a historical perspective on the cultural universe she inhabited, and the myths that were created around her in subsequent centuries, as Chica de Silva came to symbolize both an example of racial democracy and the stereotype of licentiousness and sensuality always attributed to the black or mulatta female in the Brazilian popular imagination.

This is the first critical edition of the original 1625 travel account by Anthony Knivet, an Englishman who spent nine years in Brazil in the last decade of the sixteenth century. His is the oldest extensive account of Brazil written by an Englishman, but despite its historical, geographical, and ethnographic relevance it has never merited an annotated (or even a separate) edition in English. This edition, which includes a detailed introduction and extensive notes, allows the English-speaking public to follow Knivet's compelling tale. The account describes Knivet's incredible adventures, experienced roughly between 1592 and 1601, which include working as a drudge for the governor of Rio de Janeiro, escaping into the hinterland to live with native tribes and joining in expeditions of conquest and gold-seeking. The story provides a unique insight into early colonial Brazil and the myriad of people occupying its territory: Portuguese settlers, mixed-race servants, Indians, slaves, and European travellers.

Since its original publication in Portuguese in 2008, this first English translation of Divining Slavery has been extensively revised and updated, complete with new primary sources and a new bibliography. It tells the story of Domingos Sodre, an African-born priest who was enslaved in Bahia, Brazil in the nineteenth century. After obtaining his freedom, Sodre became a slave owner himself, and in 1862 was arrested on suspicion of receiving stolen goods from slaves in exchange for supposed 'witchcraft'. Using this incident as a catalyst, the book discusses African religion and its place in a slave society, analyzing its double role as a refuge for blacks as well as a bridge between classes and ethnic groups (such as whites who attended African rituals and sought help from African diviners and medicine men). Ultimately, Divining Slavery explores the fluidity and relativity of conditions such as slavery and freedom, African and local religions, personal and collective experience and identities in the lives of Africans in the Brazilian diaspora.

In this second edition of her acclaimed volume, The Women of Colonial Latin America, Susan Migden Socolow has revised substantial portions of the book - incorporating new topics and illustrative cases that significantly expand topics addressed in the first edition; updating historiography; and adding new material on poor, rural, indigenous and slave women.

Despite several studies on the social, cultural, and political histories of medicine and of public health in different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, local and national focuses still predominate, and there are few panoramic studies that analyze the overarching tendencies in the development of health in the region. This comprehensive book summarizes the social history of medicine, medical education, and public health in Latin America and places it in dialogue with the international historiographical currents in medicine and health. Ultimately, this text provides a clear, broad, and provocative synthesis of the history of Latin American medical developments while illuminating the recent challenges of global health in the region and other developing countries.

Noble David Cook explains, in vivid detail and sweeping scope, how the conquest of the New World was achieved by a handful of Europeans - not by the sword, but by deadly disease. From 1492 to 1650, from Hudson's Bay in the north to southernmost Tierra del Fuego, disease weakened Amerindian resistance to outside domination.