The Prestes Column: An Interior History of Modern Brazil [Hardcover]

InThe 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.USJacob Blanc offers a new interpretation of the legendary Prestes Column rebellion, in which a band of rebel officers and soldiers marched 15,000 miles through the vast interior regions of Brazil between 1924 and 1927.Jacob Blanc is an Associate Professor of History and International Development Studies at McGill University, author ofBefore the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor ofBig Water: The Making of the Borderlands between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.“Jacob Blanc has established himself as one of the leading historians of Brazil of his generation, and inThe 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 adols—