This issue of HAHR had its origins in a conference on “The Cultures of Dictatorship: Historical Reflections on the Brazilian Golpe of 1964,” organized by Barbara Weinstein and Daryle Williams and held at the University of Maryland on October 14 – 16, 2004. At that conference James Green and Bryan McCann presented earlier versions of the essays in this issue; Benjamin Cowan and Bryan Pitts subsequently submitted manuscripts relevant to the topics addressed at the 2004 event. The result is a provocative collection of articles examining the dictatorship from new and illuminating perspectives. While the first wave of research on that period — exemplified by Thomas Skidmore’s classic, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil — tended to focus on the political and economic aspects of military rule, these essays shift our attention to the social and cultural.
It is well known that the March 1964 coup was motivated by...
