The midterm is an open-book, open-note take-home essay exam. Your essay should be approximately eight pages in length (typed, double-spaced, reasonable font and margins). Do not forget page numbering.
In formulating your answer, you may consult outside reading, classmates, and the professor. However, your written essay must reflect your own ideas, written in your own words.
The midterm is due at the beginning of the lecture period on Tuesday, April 1, 2003.
You are requested to sign, in your own hand, the Honor Pledge on the essay.
The civilian-military alliance that rallied around Marshall Deodoro da Fonseca in November 1889 encountered little immediate support or resistance to the bloodless overthrow of the monarchy and the imposition of a republic. Although Deodoro's actions on November 15, 1889, would later be heroiziced in grand historical painting and public statuary, the actual Proclamation of the Republic was a relatively minor historical event, when few Brazilians even bothered to openly celebrate or lament the forced exile of the Braganças and the transition to republican rule.
Emília Viotti da Costa picks up on this historical problem, arguing that the events of November 15, 1889, must be seen as a minor hiccup in a larger continuities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where real substantive change—such as the inclusion of popular and middle groups in the new republican regime—were thwarted by the machinations of a modernizing planter elite who opportunistically rallied behind Marshall Deodoro in 1889.
"1889," wrote da Costa "did not mark a significant break in the Brazilian historical process. The urban middle classes and emerging proletariat were not strong enough to undermine the power of the new rural oligarchies during the First Republic (until 1930)...November 15 was thus a journée des dupes for all the other social groups who that hoped that the republic would represent a break with tradition." [The Brazilian Empire, pp. 233]
Viotti da Costa's pessimism notwithstanding,
the Proclamation of the Republic did make a difference, especially when the
historical context is expanded to consider the period 1870-1920. The actual
events of November 15, 1889 may never rise to the level of grand History (with
a capital H). The new Republic may well have been commandeered by a conservative
planter elite. Urban middle classes, freed slaves, and rural workers may well
have been excluded from the fruits of the republican dream. Nevertheless, a
broad range of social, economic, and political interests played a
role in the events leading up to 1889 and their aftermath. The ways
in which these groups and interests responded to the events of November 1889
were, indeed, very significant in understanding many central historical problems
of the late empire and early republican periods.
Select one of the following four time frames and develop an essay that locates the Proclamation of the Republic in its proper historical context:
Your essay should establish the basic chronological sequence of events for the selected time frame. It should identify key social actors, important economic developments, and influential cultural trends significant to the selected time frame. It should engage historiographic debate about the selected time frame. And, most importantly, the essay should make a argument about the significance of November 15, 1889, relative to the focus indicated above.
Needless to say, this midterm requires that you draw heavily upon the assigned readings.
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