In The Prestes Column, Jacob Blanc offers a new interpretation of the legendary rebellion, in which a band of rebel officers and soldiers marched fifteen thousand miles through the vast interior regions of Brazil between 1924 and 1927. Blanc’s analysis of the Prestes Column is a showcase of what he calls “interior history.” At a pivotal moment in national politics, the long march of the column came to embody the constructed duality of Brazil’s interior: a space that was seen by coastal elites as simultaneously backward—in relation to the more modern coast—and dormant, an expanse of untapped potential waiting to be brought into the nation. Drawing on a range of materials, from officers’ memoirs and local eyewitness accounts to physical memorials and government archives, Blanc’s framework of interior history helps explain the column’s initial rise to fame and also its enduring legacy across the twentieth century, offering a new approach for the study of space and nation.

Jacob Blanc is an Associate Professor of History and International Development Studies at McGill University, author of Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.

Note on Terminology and Orthography  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Rebellion and the Backlands  21
2. The Accidental March  32
3. Bandeirantes of Freedom  51
4. Competing Visions of the Sertão  70
5. Bandeirantes in Bahia  90
6. Mapping a Myth  114
7. Constructing the Knight of Hope  130
8. Political Conflict and the Spatial Legacies of Tenentismo  160
9. Visions of the Future: Culture and Commemoration  185
10. Memory Battles at the Turn of the Century  216
Epilogue: Memory Sites in the Interior  233
Notes  249
Bibliography  275
Index  289