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AbstractAn examination of the Brazilian newspaperO Combate, this article accomplishes four goals. First, it defines the politics of a periodical long cited but little understood by historians. Second, it documentsO Combate's place, alongside other 'yellow press' outlets, in the making of a 'public sphere' in São Paulo. Third, it situates the same publications' role in the bringing into being of a more commercial, publicity-driven press, which would shed the yellow press's radicalism and abet the collapse of the public sphere of its heyday. Fourth, it suggests thatO Combate's radical republicanism was one fount of the democratic radicalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as of the regionally chauvinist constitutionalism of 1932–7. In this rare application of the 'public sphere' idea to twentieth-century Brazil, readers may also detect an account closer to Jürgen Habermas' original formulation than that found in the historiography of nineteenth-century Spanish America.

The Democratic Party of São Paulo (PD) occupies a curious position in the history and historiography of 20th century Brazil. Founded amid discontent with the machine politics of the so-called "Old Republic," the party mounted an important if ultimately unsuccessful challenge to the state's ruling Republican Party (PRP) during the years 1926-1928, shrilly calling for reform and running candidates in three statewide elections. Thereafter, having failed to bring about the renovation of state politics from within, PD leaders tied their party's fortunes to dissident elites from other states, first in the failed presidential campaign of 1929-1930, in which they backed gaúcho Getúlio Vargas against PRP candidate and fellow paulista Júlio Prestes de Albuquerque, then in the successful "Revolution" of 1930, which placed Vargas in the Presidential Palace. [1] Expecting to be provided with stewardship over their home state, the democráticos were soon disappointed; as their disappointment gave way to a deep and abiding sense of betrayal, they broke with Vargas and made common cause with their former enemies in the PRP in the Constitutionalist Revolt of 1932. Following the failure of this revolt, the party limped along for a little over a year until its ultimate dissolution in February 1934.

In recent years an 'ethno-economic' interpretation of politics in the coffee state of São Paulo in the early twentieth century, associated particularly with the work of Mauricio Font, has gained widespread acceptance. Its claim that state politics in the period was increasingly shaped by a cleavage between a declining traditional coffee aristocracy on the one hand, and a rising, mostly immigrant, smallholding and industrial economy on the other, is challenged here. It is argued, in part on the basis of a re-examination of the sources used by Font, that ideological rather than economic concerns motivated the Liga Nacional, while at county level, in Araras and elsewhere, personal and clientelistic motives continued to shape political loyalties. Finally, the argument that the Partido Democrático was driven primarily by 'Big Coffee' reaction to the PRP is shown to be unfounded.

The Tribute of Blood has already earned an audience among historians of nineteenth and twentieth-century Brazil, who have found in Peter M. Beattie's analysis of military recruitment and enlisted service an innovative and often compelling exploration of a neglected facet of Brazilian history. But the book deserves a wider audience, not least because of Beattie's stated ambition of providing the first book-length study, "that explicitly focuses on impressment and conscription as transatlantic tribute labor systems intricately linked to other labor practices and relations in broader society" (14). Prospective members of such an audience not only stand to learn a great deal about Brazil (indeed, the novice might read The Tribute of Blood as an introduction to the socio-cultural history of Brazil during a "long nineteenth century" of its own). They also might be forced to rethink some of their own assumptions regarding military service in particular and institutional modernization more generally, and draw inspiration from Beattie's impressive command of a wide range of Brazilian sources and his willingness to extend comparisons to and borrow approaches from fields situated at some remove—geographic and otherwise—from his own.

Lúcia Lippi Oliveira's Americanos follows in a long tradition of Brazilian soundings of the United States, a tradition that goes back to Eduardo Prado's A ilusão americana (1893) and Vianna Moog's Bandeirantes e pioneiros (1954).Americanos brings this tradition into the present day and, as its subtitle suggests, into the fashionable, if somewhat formless, intellectual territory of "representations" and "national identity." The latter innovation notwithstanding, the book hews close to the conventions of the genre; for example, like most, but not all of its predecessors, Americanos is directed at Oliveira's countrywomen and countrymen, that is, at brasileiros. The result is an interesting, if uneven, collection of articles, essays, and assorted musings on Brazilian and North American intellectual life, on the national mythologies of Brazil and the United States, and on contemporary culture and society in each of the two countries.

Originally published in Portuguese in 1994 as Negros da Terra, this field-defining work by the late historian John M. Monteiro has been translated into English by Professors Barbara Weinstein and James Woodard. Monteiro's work established ethnohistory as a field in colonial Brazilian studies and made indigenous history a vital part of how scholars understand Brazil's colonial past. Drawing on over two dozen collections on both sides of the Atlantic, Monteiro rescued Indians from invisibility, demonstrating their role as both objects and actors in Brazil's colonial past and, most importantly, providing the first history of Indian slavery in Brazil. Monteiro demonstrates how Indian enslavement, not exploration or the search for mineral wealth, was the driving force behind expansion out of São Paulo and through the South American backcountry. This book makes a groundbreaking contribution not only to Latin American history, but to the history of indigenous slavery in the Americas generally