Professor Sidney Chalhoub. Slavery and emancipation were major issues in nineteenth-century Brazilian history. In the 1870’s and 1880’s, with the drama of emancipation unfolding, yellow fever meant death to European immigrants and a major obstacle to achieving a social configuration that valued the whitening ideal and excluded people of African descent from social and economic opportunities. Although the primary focus of this course is Brazil, students may opt to write a final paper that compares an aspect of the social history of slavery and/or race and/or disease in... Read more about HIST 1931: Slavery, Disease and Race: A View from Brazil

Professor Sidney Chalhoub. This course will analyze major themes in the social and political history of Brazil from Independence (1822) to the present. Themes to be addressed are the following: Independence, colonial legacies and national identity; state formation and the question of citizenship rights; the African slave trade; land and labor policies in a slave society; slave emancipation and the crisis of the monarchy; the establishment of the republican regime; gender and the crisis of patriarchy; urban renewal and popular protest; social movements in rural areas; the... Read more about HIST 1032: A History of Brazil, from Independence to the Present

Professor Sidney Chalhoub. For a long time, the writing of history focused mainly on kings, politicians, landlords, slave owners, capitalists –that is, on those with the means to write letters, autobiographies, official documents. In the past decades, historians have increasingly studied the lives of people not apparently entitled to have their histories told: peasants, slaves, women, industrial workers. Social History is the study of the experiences of those who lived most or all of their lives submitted to the power and the oppression of others. What did these people do... Read more about HIST 97K: "What is Social History?"

Professor Alejandro de la Fuente. Students in this seminar will work with the editor of Transition to design, edit, and produce the journal. Housed at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research (hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/transition), Transition is the longest running Pan African cultural magazine in history. Founded in Uganda in 1961, the journal quickly became Africa's leading intellectual forum. It was later edited by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka in Ghana before arriving at... Read more about AFRAMER 220: Seminar: New Themes in the Study of the African Diaspora: Editorial Internship with Transition