From favelas to beachfront properties. From democracies to dictatorships. From economic booms to busts. From Catholicism to evangelical Christianity. And from white to many shades of colors.

Brazil's January 8th insurrection occurred two years and two days after our own January 6th insurrection. While our news media has covered the many similarities between these two events, such as false claims of stolen presidential elections made by losing right-wing presidents and their supporters, I wanted to dig into Brazil's history, to look deeper for similarities and differences between Brazil and our own country. This is important because Brazil and the United States are the two most populous democracies in the Western Hemisphere.

So, to better understand Brazil's history and compare it to ours, I spoke with Dr. Marshall Eakin, a distinguished professor of history at Vanderbilt University. 

Dr. Eakin is the recipient of two Fulbright-Hayes fellowships and grants from the Tinker Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the British Library, the Tennessee Humanities Council, and the Corporation for National Service.  He has also been the recipient of numerous teaching and advising awards.

Dr. Eakin is a historian of Latin America specializing in the history of Brazil. Although his work spans all of Brazilian history, his major publications have concentrated on the processes of nationalism and nation-building, economic and business history, and industrialization—primarily in the twentieth century.

He has authored many books on Brazil. In this episode, we discuss two of them: Becoming Brazilians: Race and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Brazil,  and also Tropical Capitalism: The Industrialization of Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

To learn more about Dr. Eakin, you can visit his academic homepage.

In addition, below is a link to another fascinating episode:

S3E8: Chile's History of Polarized Politics, Dr. Claudio Fuentes

I hope you enjoy these episodes.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

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