Prestes Column

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.

• Note on Terminology and Orthography  viiAcknowledgments  ixIntroduction  11. Rebellion and the Backlands  212. The Accidental March  323. Bandeirantes of Freedom  514. Competing Visions of the SertÃo  705. Bandeirantes in Bahia  906. Mapping a Myth  1147. Constructing the Knight of Hope  1308. Political Conflict and the Spatial Legacies of Tenentismo  1609. Visions of the Future: Culture and Commemoration  18510. Memory Battles at the Turn of the Century  216Epilogue: Memory Sites in the Interior  233Notes  249Bibliography  275Index  289

“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] outstanding history of this formative event.” - Gavin O'Toole (Latin American Review of Books) "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)