The Prestes Column Rebellion: An Interior History of Twentieth-Century Brazil

FAIN: FEL-267222-20

Jacob Blanc
University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh EH8 9AG Scotland)

Research and writing leading to a book on the Prestes Column, a rebellion of military personnel that shook Brazilian politics and ignited the public imagination during the 1920s.

This project offers the first critical reinterpretation of one of the most mythologized events in Brazilian history: the Prestes Column rebellion, when from 1924 to 1927, a group of junior army officers marched nearly 25,000 kilometers through Brazil's vast interior. While existing scholarship has treated the passage through the interior as a backdrop to the rebellion, I focus on the interior regions themselves, exploring how the country's so-called “backlands" served as both a place and a concept in the formation of modern Brazil. By analyzing the rebel passage through the interior and also the meanings attached to that experience afterwards, I will chart the Column's political, conceptual, and geographic significance throughout the twentieth century.My study of the Prestes Column will also serve to develop an entirely new subfield: interior history, an innovative approach for studying Brazil and also Latin America as a whole.

Associated Products

The Prestes Column and the Myths of Brazil's Interior (Book)
Title: The Prestes Column and the Myths of Brazil's Interior
Author: Jacob Blanc
Abstract: My book offers the first critical reinterpretation of the Prestes Column, using the discourses and platforms of its mythologizing to reimagine the interior of Brazil as both a place and an idea. While this approach is germane to several famous examples of expeditions into the Brazilian hinterlands, the Prestes Column is a powerful case study to understand the intersection of national mythology and geography. As a corrective to the dominant narrative of the Prestes Column and a contribution to scholarship on myths more generally, I explore how elements of a mythology can persist and be adapted to changing political contexts. My study of the Prestes Column and Brazil’s interior offers an example of how to rethink the histories of space, modernity, and nation in Brazil, elsewhere in Latin America, and across the globe.
Year: 2023
Access Model: The book will be open access, and also available in print form
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Interior: Rethinking Brazilian History from the Inside (Book)
Title: The Interior: Rethinking Brazilian History from the Inside
Editor: Jacob Blanc
Editor: Frederico Freitas
Abstract: The main objective of this book is to reinterpret Brazilian history from the inside. While much of the scholarship on Brazil has framed the country’s interior regions in relation to the country’s coastal areas, we seek to reimagine Brazil’s interior as a new epistemological framework. Moving beyond the natural and geographic pillars of environmental history, and broader in scope than the recent wave of scholarship on regionalism in Brazil, a history of the interior seeks to offer a new interpretation of the role of the interior in the history of Latin America’s largest country. Our goal is to not only establish interior history as a new subfield, but to actually create a new subject of history itself: the interior. Similar to how borderlands history opened the study of borderlands in response to a problematic understanding of the role played by frontiers and borders in national histories, we see this project as the catalyst for new histories of interiors across the globe.
Year: 2024
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Type: Edited Volume
Copy sent to NEH?: No

UKLAH Blog Post #2: Interior History in Brazil (Blog Post)
Title: UKLAH Blog Post #2: Interior History in Brazil
Author: Jacob Blanc
Abstract: I wrote a blog post about my research on interior history for the website of the United Kingdom Latin American History Network.
Date: 08/03/2020
Website: https://uklah.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/uklah-blog-post-2-interior-history-in-brazil/

Invited Presentation at IHEID seminar (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Invited Presentation at IHEID seminar
Author: Jacob Blanc
Abstract: I presented my work at the seminar of the Graduate Institute of Geneva (IHEID), a workshop entitled Reckonings & Revisions.
Date Range: 03/19/2020
Location: Geneva, Switzerland

Invited presentation to the Grupo de Pesquisa História dos Sertões/UFRN (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Invited presentation to the Grupo de Pesquisa História dos Sertões/UFRN
Author: Jacob Blanc
Abstract: I was invited to present my work to the Grupo de Pesquisa História dos Sertões at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil.
Date Range: 12/11/2020
Location: Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil

The Prestes Column and the Myths of Brazil's Interior (Book)
Title: The Prestes Column and the Myths of Brazil's Interior
Author: Jacob Blanc
Year: 2023
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph

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