TITANS OF CAPITALISM IN THE MODERNIZATION OF BRAZILIAN TERRITORY: URBAN AND AWARDS PUBLIC ASSISTANCE DURING THE FIRST REPUBLIC (1889-1930)

In Brazil, the newly created Republic expressed interests of the elite increasingly committed to foreign capital. The Rio de Janeiro saw accumulate vast resources in trade and finance, deriving for industrial applications. The city appears as articulator of Brazilian territory and mediation between it and the international market. In the capital of the Republic, the conservative plan would sweep the old city and inaugurate images copied from Europe and installed in the tropics with civilizing purpose. This materialized with infrastructure financing and loans to entrepreneurs in Europe and North America, awarded public service concessions. The project relied on strong support of mayors (members or representatives of the companies involved in the reforms). This work aims to address the relationship between the mayors of Rio de Janeiro during the First Republic and international capital, focusing on strategies for the production of new spaces in motion the modernization of Brazil and its international image.

Elections and Democracy in Brazil: Victor Nunes Leal and the 1945 Transition

This article discusses the necessary conditions for a democratic government to prevail, with the study Coronelismo: the Municipality and Representative Government in Brazil as the point of departure. The article seeks to identify the book's causal explanations for the emergence of democracy, and more precisely for regimes in which governments lose elections. Why were elections not truly competitive over the course of the Empire and the First Republic? Why did they change after the fall of the Estado Novo? Nunes Leal was one of the few Brazilian authors to explicitly tackle this challenge.

'Beheading', Rule Manipulation and Fraud: The Approval of Election Results in Brazil, 1894-1930

Studies of electoral fraud tend to focus their analyses only on the pre-electoral or electoral phases. By examining the Brazilian First Republic (1889-1930), this article shifts the focus to a later phase, discussing a particular type of electoral fraud that has been little explored by the literature, namely, that perpetrated by the legislatures themselves during the process of giving final approval to election results. The Brazilian case is interesting because of a practice known as degola ('beheading') whereby electoral results were altered when Congress decided on which deputies to certify as duly elected. This has come to be seen as a widespread and standard practice in this period. However, this article shows that this final phase of rubber-stamping or overturning election results was important not because of the number of degolas, which was actually much lower than the literature would have us believe, but chiefly because of their strategic use during moments of political uncertainty. It argues that the congressional certification of electoral results was deployed as a key tool in ensuring the political stability of the Republican regime in the absence of an electoral court.

Moderna República velha: um outro ano de 1922

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar diferentes recepções da jovem República, sobretudo em seus primeiros anos. Afinal, a tradição se inscrevia em meio à modernidade, e o novo se confundia com o velho. E é junto a esse caldo de paradoxos e conflitos que se desenha a Semana de Arte Moderna - um sopro de vanguarda, de cosmopolitismo e certo otimismo, nesse contexto - mas também outras experiências sociais de caráter mais político reivindicativo. Nesse sentido, ouso expor um pouco da experiência de Lima Barreto. Não para dela fazer um exemplo que ilumina toda uma época, ou muito menos "para estragar a festa" do ano de 2012. Ao contrário, ela representa um "outro caso", outra face da mesma modernidade. Quem sabe ela sirva como testemunho do ambiente que assolou parte da intelectualidade brasileira de inícios do século, cada vez mais descrente dos destinos dessa nação, e, nesse caso, muito impactados pelos discursos raciais deterministas, os quais, após a abolição da escravidão, criavam um novo tipo de "desigualdade", dessa feita pautada na biologia.