The Prestes Column: An Interior History of Modern Brazil
The Prestes Column: An Interior History of Modern Brazil
by Jacob Blanc
Duke University Press, 2024
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-1-4780-2582-5
Paper: 978-1-4780-3008-9
eISBN: 978-1-4780-9172-1 (OA)
eISBN: 978-1-4780-5908-0 (standard)
About the Book
In The Prestes Column, Jacob Blanc offers a new interpretation of the legendary rebellion, in which a band of rebel officers and soldiers marched fifteen thousand miles through the vast interior regions of Brazil between 1924 and 1927. Blanc’s analysis of the Prestes Column is a showcase of what he calls “interior history.” At a pivotal moment in national politics, the long march of the column came to embody the constructed duality of Brazil’s interior: a space that was seen by coastal elites as simultaneously backward—in relation to the more modern coast—and dormant, an expanse of untapped potential waiting to be brought into the nation. Drawing on a range of materials, from officers’ memoirs and local eyewitness accounts to physical memorials and government archives, Blanc’s framework of interior history helps explain the column’s initial rise to fame and also its enduring legacy across the twentieth century, offering a new approach for the study of space and nation.
About the Author
Jacob Blanc is an Associate Professor of History and International Development Studies at McGill University, author of Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.
Reviews
-- Barbara Weinstein, author of The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil
-- Marc A. Hertzman, author of Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil
-- Gavin O'Toole Latin American Review of Books
“Jacob Blanc has established himself as one of the leading historians of Brazil of his generation, and in The Prestes Column he takes a genuinely fresh and innovative look at one of the most intriguing episodes in twentieth-century Latin American history. He has identified key issues raised by the history of the Prestes Column that no previous studies have explored, and he has adopted methodologies that will allow us to appreciate the full import of this movement.”
-- Barbara Weinstein, author of The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil
“Visiting backroads long neglected by historians, and with keen attention to place and narrative, Jacob Blanc brings a much-needed critical eye to the iconic, mythologized Prestes Column. Asking hard why questions, Blanc reads Brazil from the inside out and provides a sophisticated framework for thinking about history, myth, and the many worlds that lie beyond Brazil’s coastal centers, whose own mythologies, Blanc shows, reflect and have taken shape in tandem with those of the interior.”
-- Marc A. Hertzman, author of Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil
"An invaluable contribution to both Brazilian and English scholarship on the column, national mythmaking, and the Brazilian interior. . . . Blanc has written the definitive volume on the Prestes Column and its legacies."
-- Colin Snider American Historical Review
-- Colin Snider American Historical Review
"Much of the previous work written about this column has been romanticized, a critique Blanc... levels at Neil Macaulay’s classic study, The Prestes Column (1974). By contrast, Blanc's new contribution dissects this mythology, shearing away overblown narrative with informed research. . . . Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty."
-- R. M. Delson Choice
-- R. M. Delson Choice
"Blanc’s book includes excellent maps and images to help readers follow the column’s complex trajectory and the potentially dizzying perspectives surrounding it. . . . The Prestes Column, conveniently open access via OAPEN, is a welcome addition for senior undergraduate and graduate classes about Latin America and Public History."
-- Gillian McGillivray Journal of Social History
-- Gillian McGillivray Journal of Social History
“[An] outstanding history of this formative event.”
-- Gavin O'Toole Latin American Review of Books
Tags
Caribbean & Latin American Studies, Brazil, South America, Caribbean & Latin American, World, Latin America, Politics and government, Cultural & Ethnic Studies, Political Science, Social Science, History
Open Access Information
Label: Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship no. AH/T010711/1
License: CC BY-NC 4.0
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