Cruzeiro do Sul, A History of Brazil's Half-Millennium

INTRODUCTION

This is a connected history of numerous momentous events and people’s everyday lives through memorable and trying times. Brazil, the earth’s fifth-largest country and one of a handful – and perhaps the least-known – of the world’s modern mega-countries, already had a heroic and rich history prior to its formal independence from the empire of Portugal in 1822. (See Cruzeiro do Sul, A History of Brazil’s Half-Millennium, Volume I – New World Epic). The present volume brings the full story essentially up-to-date, to a point just prior to the coming to power of a government that validates its conclusion that Brazil will now guard its finally fully-realizable democracy against both outside and internal hegemonic direction.

This volume follows the story, from the standpoint of people at every level and in every conceivable circumstance, through Brazil’s declaration and wars of independence, the formation of the civil government, interior exploration by expeditions, tortuous applied Indian policy, the triumphs and shortcomings of a hereditary royal family (in the only country in the Americas to be so endowed), a long spate of regional civil wars, economic upheavals, a defining 19^th-century foreign war, the abolition of slavery followed by the military coup that launched the republic, immigration from a variety of source countries, massive internal migration and explosive urban growth, cutthroat political maneuvering and recriminations, dramatic and raucous successions of presidencies, rapid industrial growth, dictatorships, 20^th-century pioneering, the advent of all-inclusive democracy, and cultural changes apace.

As anthropologist Daniel Touro Linger elegantly spells out, “What Brazil was, it is not; what it is, who knows, except that it is careening into the future – some future – with barely a look back.”1 But, even if Brazil is, by virture of its energetic personality, absolutely unique in this regard, that it bounds on and on without looking back, even such a trait as that (and there’s certainly some truth to it) cries out for an explanation, an understanding. It didn’t just happen to be so. Even if Brazilians don’t look back (and I believe that they do, as much as we Americans do, at least), we must, seeking successive past Brazils inside today’s, if we wish to know, beyond the summarizations, the stereotypes and the clichés, this special and paradoxical forward-looking mega-reality, the superlative, exceptional country of countries, that is… Brazil.