The Prestes Column: An Interior History of Modern Brazil, By Jacob Blanc
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historians of Brazil have embraced region as an important category of analysis since at least the 1970s, a sensible strategy for the world’s fifth largest country, which occupies half a continent. We now have excellent English-language studies that compare Brazilian regional identities, from the São Paulo planters and industrialists who took credit for bringing modernity to Brazil to the Northeastern public intellectuals who represented the people of their region as the true backbone of their nation. Jacob Blanc’s historiographical aim is to bring attention to the “relational and imaginative category” of “the Brazilian interior,” zooming in to the regions that people from coastal and urban areas have imagined as “the space just beyond reach—far enough away so as to still pose risks, but close enough to offer the potential of settlement or extraction” (199, 14). To this end, Blanc’s first book, The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil (Duke, 2019), explored the competing efforts of Indigenous communities, landless peasants of mixed heritage, and farmers of European descent to defend their lands in the interior where Brazil meets Paraguay. This second monograph, like his co-edited volume, The Interior: Recentering Brazilian History (University of Texas, 2025), maintains the focus on interior peoples and spaces but expands the goal in time and in scope. Starting in the 1890s and stretching to 2022, Blanc analyzes how ideas about the interior were generated before, during, and after Army Captain Luís Carlos Prestes crisscrossed the hinterlands in thirteen of Brazil’s then-twenty states with his column of rebel soldiers and officers. The 1,000-person column engaged in some 150 skirmishes with federal, state, and local forces, marching the equivalent of “Los Angeles to New York and back again three times” from 1924 to 1927 before leaving for exile in Bolivia (1).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".