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 15,000 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 backwards-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 eye-witness 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.