By the end of the nineteenth century the American public, if it had cared to enlarge upon its knowledge of the Empire of Brazil, could easily have done so without even the necessity of learning a foreign language. From 1822 to 1888, beginning with the independence of Brazil from Portugal and ending with the abolition of slavery— a period corresponding almost exactly with the life span of the Brazilian Empire—about twenty books on Brazil were published by Americans. These were obviously not the only books on the subject in the English language because Britishers wrote about Brazil too (indeed they wrote more about it than we did) and these books on Brazil were also available on this side of the Atlantic. The combined output of the two nations was, therefore, considerable, and the curiosity of the Anglo-Saxon mind which it for the most part reflected presented Brazil to the American reader under a great variety of aspects. There were the solid three volumes on the colonial period of Brazilian history by Robert Southey, the poet laureate of England who was much better as a historian, and the two-volume sequel by John Armitage, who was neither a historian nor a poet but a lover of liberty.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Inter-American Studies. The most controversial newspaper in Brazil last year was not the Tribuna da Imprensa, the mouthpiece of Carlos Lacerda, the governor of Guanabara who was so closely identified with the revolution of March 31, 1964, but the now-defunct Brasil Urgente, a weekly tabloid published in Sao Paulo with the approval of the Cardinal Archbishop by the Dominican Carlos Josaphat and a militant group of laymen determined to give Brazilians a Catholic Left beyond the promises of Christian Democracy and virtually as radical as the Communist Party. Although the revolution has put a stop to the politics of the Left, and movements of leftist tinge are momentarily as defunct as Brasil Urgente, it is still important for the background of the revolution to know what the Catholic Left was doing, and to realize once more that in a country like Brazil, where Christian Democracy was never a force, as in Chile and Venezuela, and where political nuances, until a few months ago, were not considered important, a Catholic Left, of the kind envisaged by the editors of Brasil Urgente, was not beyond the realm of possibility.Brasil Urgente was a newspaper in name only. It subscribed to no news service, published no news stories as such. It called itself a newspaper, but it was basically a journal of opinion, of sensational, virulent, and inflammatory opinion. The editors were not really restrained by moral qualms but stooped as low as they pleased, so long as Brazilians were made aware of social, economic, and political problems.An organ of the negative Left, to use an expression that is commonly heard in Brazil today, Brasil Urgente, except for a column by Father Carlos Josaphat himself, aped the vocabulary and followed, in so far as it could, the ideology of Communism. East Germany was customarily referred to as the German Democratic Republic. Communism became Socialism. Fidel Castro was looked up to as a teacher. Agrarian reform was preached loudly. The under-developed countries were the
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