Product Description: Bridging print culture and performance, Spectacular Wealth draws on eighteenth-century festival accounts to explore how colonial residents of the silver-mining town of Potosí, in the viceroyalty of Peru, and the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, created rich festive cultures that refuted European allegations of barbarism and greed...read more

Product Description: Before Brasília offers an in-depth exploration of life in the captaincy of Goiás during the late colonial and early national period of Brazilian history. Karasch effectively counters the “decadence” narrative that has dominated the historiography of Goiás...read more

Celebrated as a major work since its original publication, The Sanitation of Brazil traces how rural health and sanitation policies influenced the formation of Brazil's national public health system. Gilberto Hochman's pioneering study examines the ideological, social and political forces that approached questions of health and government action. The era from 1910 to 1930 offered unique opportunities for public health reform, and Hochman examines its successes and failures. He looks at how health became a state concern, tying the emergence of public health policies to a nationalistic movement and to a convergence of the elites' social consciousness with their political and material interests. Politicians weighed the costs and benefits of state-run public health versus the burdens imposed by disease. Physicians and intellectuals, meanwhile, swayed them with warnings that endemic disease and official neglect might affect everyone--rich and poor, rural and urban, interior and coastal--if left unchecked. The book shows how disease and health were and are associated with nation-state building in Brazil.

At the turn of the 20th century, Jews from North Africa and the Middle East were called Turcos ("Turks"), and they were seen as distinct from Ashkenazim, not even identified as Jews. Adriana M. Brodsky follows the history of Sephardim as they arrived in Argentina, created immigrant organizations, founded synagogues and cemeteries, and built strong ties with coreligionists around the country. She theorizes that fragmentation based on areas of origin gave way to the gradual construction of a single Sephardi identity, predicated both on Zionist identification (with the State of Israel) and "national" feelings (for Argentina), and that Sephardi Jews assumed leadership roles in national Jewish organizations once they integrated into the much larger Askenazi community. Rather than assume that Sephardi identity was fixed and unchanging, Brodsky highlights the strategic nature of this identity, constructed both from within the various Sephardi groups and from the outside, and reveals that Jewish identity must be understood as part of the process of becoming Argentine.