Foreword

2014 was marked by academic and political debates about the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 coup. The "Coups and Dictatorships" dossier contained in number 67 presents the contribution of Revista Brasileira de História to this process of reflection. Six articles contained in the dossier, five of them focusing on Brazil and Portugal, explore the dimensions of experience of suppression of democracy through force, as well as the forms in which contemporary societies face the challenges raised by historical circumstances.

In "The 'enemies of the country': State Repression and Workers' struggle in the Chemical Workers Trade Union of São Paulo (1964-1979)," larissa Rosa Corrêa details the impacts of violence on urban workers organized in class associations, taking as a case study one of the largest worker organizations in the country, in a paper which emphasizes the classist dimension of the authoritarianism established in 1964. Bryan Pitts' provocative article entitled "'The blood of the youth is flowing': the Political Class and their children take on the Military in 1968" examines the reactions of Brazilian congressmen to the repression unleashed against the student movement in 1968. Calling attention to the blood relationships between university leaders and professional politicians, Pitts offers new perspectives for the comprehension of the change of nature of the regime following the enactment of AI-5 and for the debate about the relationship between its civilian and military components. In the article "For the 'pacification of the Brazilian family': a brief comparison between the amnesties of 1945 and 1979," Carla Simone Rodeghero provides the reader with a reflection on the similarities and differences between the two periods of 'democratic transition' experienced by Brazil. examining how the concept of the meaning of amnesty was dislocated from mere 'reconciliation' to a 'tool for the winning of rights,' Rodeghero adds important elements for a debate of renewed relevance.

The cultural dimensions of the search for the construction of legitimacy of dictatorial regimes, as well as the resistance to them, are the focus of the three articles which close the dossier. In "The practice of civism in dictatorships: commemorations and actions in Conselho Federal de Cultura (1966-1975)," Tatyana de Amaral Maia examines one of the principal institutional mechanisms through which the regime exercised its cultural policy, aimed at 'valorizing the civic elements' as part of a 'regeneration' process of the social and political life of the country. Francisco Régis lopes Ramos, in "The Calendar and 1964 Military Takeover: temporality, history writing and hagiography," analyzes the Catholic tradition of association between the recording of the passage of time and the memory of sacrifice of martyrs as part of the resistance to latin American dictatorships, based on the example of how works of a hagiographic nature linked to liberation Theology dealt with the life and death of Frei Tito de Alencar lima. Finally, edward Castelo Branco reflects on the relationship between the aesthetic experimentalism and political resistance in "PO-EX: The poetic as an event under the night of the Salazarist fascism in Portugal."

The section of individual articles contains seven papers. Two of them analyze relevant characters in the history of science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their ties with Brazil. These are "Darwinian evolutionism? Contributions of Alfred Russel Wallace to the theory of evolution," by Christian Fausto and Nelson Papavero; and "Diplomacy and science in the context of the World War II: Arthur Compton's 1941 trip to Brazil," by olival Freire Junior and Indianara Silva. The cultural dimension of relations between Brazil and the rest of the world is focused on in the paper by Anaïs Fléchet and Juliette Dumont, entitled "Brazilian cultural diplomacy in the twentieth century."

The following four papers analyze various themes and objects in social history. Márcia Cury offers an important contribution for the study of social movements in the Southern Cone in "occupying spaces, constructing identities: the importance of the movement of pobladores for the political and social history of Chile (1950-1970)." In "Citizenship by a thread: the black associativism in Rio de Janeiro (1888-1930)" Petrônio Domingues brings new elements for the debate of one of the crucial aspects of the post-emancipation period in Brazil. Paulo Cesar Gonçalves offers a new approach for a classical theme in the history of work in Brazil in "Searching arms for the farming: immigrants and migrants in São Paulo coffee economy in the late nineteenth century." The final paper in this section focuses on the question of gender: "Press and women's education on a pioneer zone: the case of the northwest of São Paulo (1920-1940)," by Raquel Discini de Campos.

This issue brings back the section Memory, publishing the lecture "Historical knowledge and social dialogue," given by the former national president of Anpuh, Benito Bisso Schmidt, at the opening of the XXVII National Symposium of History (July 2013, Natal-RN).

The volume finishes with four reviews. The first of these is related to thematic dossier of this edition: Cláudia Wasserman analyzes the collection O Passado que não passa: a sombra das ditaduras na Europa do Sul e na América Latina [The past which does not pass: the shadow of dictatorships in Southern europe and latin America], organized by Francisco Palomanes Martinho and Antônio Costa Pinto. Fernando Teixeira da Silva presents Brazilian readers with Trabalhadores do mundo [Workers of the World], a translation of the Dutch historian Marcel van der linden. Finally, we present two reviews dedicated to the works about aspects of Brazilian history recently published in english. Maria Helena P. T. Machado comments on From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830, by Walter Hawthorne, and Regina Horta Duarte analyzes In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region, by Seth Garfield.

Alexandre Fortes

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 July 2014
• Date of issue
  June 2014