Current Issue

KOZÁK, Valentina Marguerite. La condesa de Berlepsch. Entre Düsseldorf, Madrid y Viena: agencia femenina y poder informal (1654-1723). Madrid: Sanz y Torres, 2025. 404 p.

This article examines the trajectory of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from 1964 to 2024, analyzing its role as a political space for Global South participation in international development. The research adopts a multidisciplinary approach grounded in historical institutionalism. Methodologically, it emphasizes qualitative analysis of diverse primary and secondary sources: national diplomatic documents, speeches,conference declarations, and UNCTAD documents. The article illustrates how specific Global South actors shaped the institutional agenda, their perceptions across different historical contexts, and the concrete effects of their initiatives. The research contributes to the historiography of international relations, offering a perspective centered on developing countries’ agency in shaping the world economic order.

The article analyzes François Levaillant’s travel narratives from the Cape of Good Hope in the 1780s and 1790s, highlighting the entanglement of scientific interest and sensibilities in his experiences. The article focuses specifically on Voyage de M. Le Vaillant dans l’Intérieur de l’Afrique (1790), using theoretical and methodological perspectives from Global History that consider global connections and colonial contexts. Thus, the article discusses the circulation of merchants, travelers, and naturalists in Southern Africa, with an emphasis on Levaillant’s self-representation strategies and the novel sensibilities associated with journeys to distant territories.

This article focuses on the censorship of Rita Lee’s music during the 1980s, a period when, despite the process of political opening, the Public Entertainment Censorship Service (SCDP) remained active. A highly prolific figure in Brazilian Popular Music (MPB), Lee had twenty-one songs banned during this time. This article analyzes censorship reports, SCDP reports, music criticism published in the newspapers Jornal do Brasil and Revista Manchete, and Lee’s autobiography. These documents reveal the censorship process, as well as the strategies used to circumvent restrictions, such as appeals filed by record labels, and the “negotiations” between the musician and the director of the SCDP. The article thus contributes to the history of contemporary Brazil and the tensions between cultural production and the censorship apparatus at the end of the military dictatorship.

Shortly after the Brazilian Revolution of 1930, federal intervention in São Paulo created a wide network of political prisons in the capital and on the coast, which was public knowledge at the time and mentioned in specialized literature. However, this article reveals, for the first time, the use of Bom Abrigo Island, in Cananéia, on the southern coast of São Paulo, as a clandestine detention center, at least between 1931 and 1933. This conclusion is based on the triangulation of different sources, such as official letters and records from the Santos Regional Police Station, an appeal submitted to the National Security Court, and documents from the Anchieta Island Political Prison. Contributing to scholarship on the Vargas dictatorship, this article reveals the existence of a parallel repressive apparatus through its discussion of the actions of the Santos police and three individuals who passed through Bom Abrigo Island.

This article examines the circulation of Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Mello’s Independência ou morte! at the Universal Exhibitions of Paris (1889) and Chicago (1893) and the painting’s role in visual narratives of nationhood in the late Empire and early Republic. Drawing on newspapers, catalogues, reproductions, and the artist’s correspondence, it engages Robert Rydell’s view of world’s fairs as devices of symbolic power and Ulpiano Meneses’s reflections on visual culture and object biography. The article argues that the painting assumed distinct statuses: In Paris, it circulated in fragmented form through studies and reproductions; in Chicago, it became part of a Republican narrative linking independence to Paulista protagonism. The article concludes that these exhibitions expanded its international circulation and contributed to its insertion into the national imaginary prior to its musealization at the Museu do Ipiranga.

The article sheds lights on why the historiography of Brazil’s contemporary relations with Angola has neglected the episode of Frederico Carlos Carnaúba’s 1961-1963 consular mission, which was carried out under the auspices of independent foreign policy. An analysis of Itamaraty’s internal historiography cross-referenced with consular correspondence from the period reveals that Carnaúba’s mission, considered unsuccessful by Brazilian diplomacy, has been overshadowed by the successful mission of Ovídio de Melo in 1975, which the Ministry has chosen to highlight in its official and hegemonic account of the resumption of Brazil-Angola relations. The article concludes that professional historiography has not been unscathed by the “politics of forgetting” the Carnaúba mission, as Itamaraty’s tradition of “closed archives” has led to recurring document access restrictions that have contributed to the perpetuation of the episode’s obscurity.

This paper analyzes the nature of German propaganda disseminated in Brazil during the First World War as it relates to Germany’s political and economic initiatives in Brazil and recent historiographical debates regarding the totalization of the war. Drawing on theoretical frameworks provided by cultural studies of the Great War, this article contributes to filling a historiographical gap regarding the cultural dimensions of the conflict. The primary focus is the German state and private initiatives and their dissemination within Brazilian territory. This investigation is grounded in a comprehensive set of German propaganda materials, complemented by diplomatic records, reports, and consular correspondence from the National Archives in London. The article demonstrates that from the beginning of the conflict, Germany and other belligerent powers incorporated Brazil into their strategic efforts.

This article analyzes the representation of enslaved children based on the child character Benedito, from the novel O Mulato by Aluísio Azevedo (1857–1913). It engages a dialogue between History, literature and intersectionality, seeking to capture in the schematization of the fictitious entity and in its enunciation, aspects of Brazilian reality in nineteenth-century Maranhão. The article draws on additional documents, including notices related to the sale and escape of enslaved individuals published in Maranhão newspapers, as well as municipal codes of conduct from São Luís. Using these sources, the article confronts text and context in order to understand how literary discourse reinforces images of control over Black people. It starts from the premise that the term “moleque” constitutes a literary and social category constructed to define the role of the Black child within the slaveholding order. The word carries a historical dimension and is marked by racial stereotypes that have been re-signified over time.

This article is a study of the history of food focused on understanding details about food production in the Captaincy of Paraiba during the period of Dutch rule in Brazil. It starts from the principle that food is a sociocultural act, as highlighted by Massimo Montanari, that allows us to understand the customs, behaviors, practices, and beliefs of a people. Thus, eating is not only a biological act but also a cultural one. To carry out this analysis, the article uses written sources produced by Portuguese and Dutch authors during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drawing on the methodological observations of Poulain and Proença (2003) and other authors, and referencing the researchs of Mello (2007; 2010) and Papavero (2010), who have analyzed food in Dutch Brazil. The article concludes that the Captaincy of Paraiba produced a considerable amount of food during this period, which attracted both fascination and bewilderment from the Dutch, as seen in their accounts.

This article examines the translations and adaptations of elements of sociological jurisprudence and U.S. legal realism by Oliveira Vianna, a Brazilian jurist actively involved in labor regulation during the 1930s. Vianna’s work reflects a pragmatic approach aimed at bridging legal theory and bureaucratic practice within the Ministry of Labor, Industry, and Commerce. His self-styled “legal realism” served an instrumental form of authoritarianism. Through an analysis of legal opinions, legislative proposals, and theoretical writings, the article highlights the convergence between legal thought and governance strategies in Brazilian labor regulation. The translation of U.S. legal theories found expression in Vianna’s multiple theoretical and practical agencies – not as mere imitation, but as a form of “inventive translation” tailored to his normative agenda.