The Prestes Column

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. Blancs 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 Brazils interior: a space that was seen by coastal elites as simultaneously backwardin relation to the more modern coastand 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, Blancs framework of interior history helps explain the columns initial rise to fame and also its enduring legacy across the twentieth century, offering a new approach for the study of space and nation.