Press, Power, and Culture in Imperial Brazil introduces recent Brazilian scholarship to English-language readers, providing fresh perspectives on newspaper and periodical culture in the Brazilian empire from 1822 to 1889. Through a multifaceted exploration of the periodical press, contributors to this volume offer new insights into the workings of Brazilian power, culture, and public life. Collectively arguing that newspapers are contested projects rather than stable recordings of daily life, individual chapters demonstrate how the periodical press played a prominent role in creating and contesting hierarchies of race, gender, class, and culture. Contributors challenge traditional views of newspapers and magazines as mechanisms of state- and nation-building. Rather, the scholars in this volume view them as integral to current debates over the nature of Brazil. Including perspectives from Brazil’s leading scholars of the periodical press, this volume will be the starting point for future scholarship on print culture for years to come.

Judy Bieber is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico and has published a monograph and several articles on the themes of nineteenth-century Brazilian politics, frontiers, and race relations. She has also published historiographical essays on Brazilian history in the U.S. and in Brazil. Her current research examines policy towards indigenous peoples in nineteenth-century Brazil.

Hendrik Kraay is a professor of history at the University of Calgary and the author of Days of National Festivity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1823–1889.

Celso Thomas Castilho is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship.

Teresa Cribelli is an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama and the author of Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels: Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.