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Thomas E. Skidmore (1932–2016)

Forfatter af Modern Latin America

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Om forfatteren

Thomas E. Skidmore is Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He is the coauthor of Modern Latin America, Sixth Edition.

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Juridisk navn
Skidmore, Thomas Elliott
Fødselsdato
1932-07-22
Dødsdag
2016-06-11
Køn
male
Nationalitet
USA
Fødested
Troy, Ohio, USA
Dødssted
Westerly, Rhode Island, USA
Uddannelse
Denison University (BA)
University of Oxford (BA, MA)
Harvard University (PhD)
Erhverv
historian
university professor
Kort biografi
Born in Troy, Ohio on July 22, 1932, Thomas E. Skidmore moved with his family to Cincinnati when he was six months old. Skidmore once recalled in an interview that the fact that he had grown up in a city of industrial workers probably had had a big influence on his future choices in life. A product of the public school system, Skidmore was state debating champion while at Wyoming High School located in suburban Cincinnati. Not surprisingly, he was also a stellar student, earning statewide honors in merit exams.

Skidmore graduated in Political Science and Philosophy from Denison University in 1954. Interested in continuing to pursue his interest in Philosophy, he received a two-year Fulbright Fellowship to study at Magdalen College in Oxford, England, where he received a second B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 1956 and an M.A. in 1959. It was at Oxford where Skidmore met his future wife, Felicity. She claims that she pursued him diligently for several months until she finally caught him. There were married in style at Oxford.

Skidmore received his doctorate at Harvard in 1960. His specialty was modern European history with a specialization in German and British history. His doctoral dissertation was entitled “The Chancellorship of Caprivi: A Constitutional Study,” and was based on research in ten regional archives. His first publication was an article in the American Historical Review surveying the availability of German archives. And then along came the Cuban Revolution. As Skidmore likes to say, “Sou filho de Fidel”— I’m one of Castro’s sons.

Indeed, Washington and the Ivory Towers shifted their gaze southward to figure out what had gone wrong on that Caribbean Island and how policy makers could prevent another Cuba. Harvard gave Skidmore a three-year post-doc to study a Latin American country, and he chose Brazil. The end result of his three years of research in Brazil was his seminal work Politics in Brazil: 1930-64, An Experiment in Democracy, published in 1967, with multiple reprints, and a Brazilian edition in 1969. The book became a standard in university courses on contemporary Brazil. Every Brazilian intellectual, and even some ex-presidents, owned a copy. A rich scholarly output grew out of this namoro, his love affair with Brazil.

In 1966 Skidmore and his family moved to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he had a stellar career, rising from Associate Professor in 1967 to Full Professor in 1968. He was the backbone of the large Latin American Studies program in Wisconsin, editing the Luso-Brazilian Review and training many generations of scholars. He raised a family with his wife and maintained a continuously close relationship with Brazil.

After twenty years at Madison, he came to Brown University as the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Modern Latin American History and Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. For a decade he directed the Center for Latin American Studies (now the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies), and retired in 1999. Skidmore actively engaged in service in the academic world. Among other positions, he was a member of the Executive Board of the Latin American Studies Association from 1968-1973, the President of LASA in 1972, and the President of the New England Latin American Studies Association.

To recognize his life-time contribution to the academic world, the Brazilian Studies Association honored him at its VIII International Conference at Vanderbilt University in October 2006 with their first Lifetime Contribution Award, recognizing his significant role in developing and supporting Brazilian Studies.

Skidmore was also well-known and important in Brazil. Of all of the U.S. scholars studying Brazil, brasilianistas, he was at the top. On at least two occasions, his public statements about the political situation in Brazil during the military dictatorship caused confrontations with the Brazilian government. In 1970, Skidmore, along with three other prominent scholars of Brazil in the United States, signed an open letter condemning the imprisonment of the leading Marxist historian Caio Prado Júnior. At the time, Skidmore served as the Chair of the Government Relations Committee of the Latin American Studies Association. In that capacity, he sponsored a resolution condemning the military regime’s systematic repression of Brazilian academics and other oppositionists. In retaliation for his political stance, the Brazilian government denied him a research visa to teach a seminar at the University of Campinas-São Paulo during the summer of 1970.

In 1984, on the eve of the return to democratic rule, while lecturing in Brazil, Professor Skidmore was summoned to appear before the Federal Police for commenting on the political situation and was threatened with expulsion from the country (charges that were later dropped). Many academics, politicians and journalists came to his defense and attacked the actions of the Federal Police as unconstitutional and a violation of academic freedom. More than this, it has been his brilliant analyses of the political, social, and cultural aspects of Brazil that have left a rich legacy not only on his field of study, but also on colleagues with whom he came into contact.

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Textbook for my Latin American History class. I learned quite a bit from reading this book, it makes me wish I had bought it instead of renting it. If you are interested in a great overview of the various Latin American countries and their history I highly suggest this book.
 
Markeret
Diana_Long_Thomas | 3 andre anmeldelser | Nov 30, 2016 |
I was very interested by this readable overview, though it did feel a little quick at times. The end of the book spends quite a few pages on just the last couple of years, while at points earlier on you wonder quite why things have been gone through so quickly.

My aim was, of course, to learn more about the country I was born in and have a connection to, but where I didn't go to school apart from one year's primary education. I'm sure there's plenty in this book that I would have learned as a schoolkid, but having said that I would also expect details about the military dictatorship not have been as fully explained as I hoped to see in this text.

What I wasn't expecting was the melodrama and silliness of some of the historical happenings. I knew about the Treaty of Tordesilhas and how it would have allocated Portugal just a wee slice of the continent rather than the huge bulge to the west that it ended up with; the story we learned at school was that the bandeirantes purposefully just kept going and pretended to forget that they should have stopped at the appropriate meridian, and I always found that quite amusing. But I didn't know all these bits:
* The Portuguese court fled Napoleon, lock stock and barrel, displacing their court to Brazil — mad queen, corseted regent, archives and all. But what it ended up as was Dom Pedro I, grandchild of the mad queen, declaring independence against not just his own country, but the country of which he was second in line for the throne! Even more amazingly, his father, just before nipping back to Portugal so that he wouldn't lose his throne, counselled the young Dom Pedro I to choose Brazil if he had to make the choice. Some rebellion! ("No other former colony has ever embraced independence with its own monarch a member of the ruling family of the very country against which it had rebelled", as the book puts it.) Pedro I even ended up going back to Portugal once his dad had copped it, leaving a 5 year old as all-powerful Emperor of Brazil.
* Luckily, Dom Pedro II was a bit of a dude, even going as far as learning the indian language Guaraní. Apparently he did well as a Victorian-era monarch, until he went a bit doo-lally with the war against Paraguay, but ah well.
* But the military eventually got worried that the Emperor was a bit too old and sick, and yikes he only had a daughter to succeed him, and she was married to a bloomin' French guy. No way. So there was a coup. But bloodless, with "Order and Progress" as the new state's motto.
* So much for the new state, which has democracy and elections despite having started with a military coup. Well, until the next military coup - in 1930, which set Getúlio Vargas in place as dictator for the next 15 years or so. He wasn't kicked out by another coup, but rather with quiet pressure that allowed subsequent democratic elections, cool; until WTF? Only 5 years after being kicked out as dictator, Vargas was legally elected as president! Hmm.
* Four years later it all degraded into farce, as political attacks by opponent Carlos Lacerda were met by physical attacks by Vargas' chauffeur bodyguard, who hired an assassin to kill Lacerda. Unfortunately the assassin was pretty rubbish and only managed to shoot him in the foot! The subsequent scandal and other pressures got to Vargas so much that he retired to his bedroom - and shot himself. OK fine, but then he was treated by the Brazilian public as a suicide martyr beloved of the folk. More WTF than I can easily call to mind!
* One last bit of extra WTF-ery before I stop - and that's before we get to nowadays. Jânio Quadros, the president a couple of presidents later - the one after the one who built Brasilia - was a talker, oh yes he was. But he was also a weird dude - "He would spend an inordinately long time obsessively positioning himself exactly in the middle of the rear seat of his limousine, for example." As he got weirder, "political commentators began asking how he planned to govern" but instead, Quadros tackled the obstacles to his stabilization program by abruptly resigning - seemingly assuming his resignation would be rejected and he would be given emergency powers by Congress (like General de Gaulle, apparently). Instead, after less than a year(!), it was: seeya, Quadros baby. And another coup after the next president failed - a vice-president promoted beyond expectations and means.

Less absurdly, I was also very interested in the depiction of the treatment of different races in Brazil, because it differs from what happened in the US and elsewhere. Now, I wouldn't claim Brazil isn't a racist society, because it is - but it's a different sort of racism, that in some ways looks less like what we expect it to. In particular, Brazil historically seems to have had the inverse of the "one drop" racist view in which one drop of black blood means that the bearer is black; rather, it seems to have been the case that there was much more racial mobility in Brazilian society throughout history than in most others. (It's still racist; it's just that if you were the descendant of a white property owner by someone not as white, you could end up being classified as more white than you started off being classified as, if you'd acquired property yourself.)

There also were a lot more free, integrated non-white people making up early Brazilian society than in American society, it seems. Again, not because of non-racist reasons per se - Brazilian slave-owners were very definitely not kind (Darwin was sickened at the treatment laden out by a female Brazilian slave-owner on his stay in the country), but they did free slaves much more than was the case in the US. Why? Because they could buy more, cheap as chips.

Er. So, a lot of factoids and interesting snippets from this book, woven into a coherent narrative that I will nevertheless almost certainly be discarding in favour of "dude! the ex-dictator got re-elected, can you believe it, and then when he shot himself for some reason everyone forgave him and wept in the streets! wtf." Sorry bout that.

The bits from the later years are much less astounding, apart from the years where Brazil had 2000% inflation and stuff, which is differently astounding, or the bit where fucking hell there was a mostly uncorrupt government which actually managed to change things round and make Brazil a country with ordinary inflation instead of hyperinflation. And the bits where the country stood up to international pressures to argue that generic AIDS drugs must be made available at cheaper prices, or got around to electing a working-class president with fractured grammar and a finger chewed up in an industrial accident. Ya know, things that make one proud of a country. A different sort of astounding.
… (mere)
 
Markeret
comixminx | Apr 5, 2013 |
Caught up in Hitler's final solution to annihilate Europe's Jews, fifteen-year-old Jack Mandelbaum is torn from his family and thrown into the nightmarish world of the concentration camps.
 
Markeret
chicagofreedom | 3 andre anmeldelser | Apr 2, 2012 |
Tackling the history of a continent of nation-states poses a dilemma: one either lands on the horn of excessive detail (as in Hubert Herring's general history) or the horn of precarious generalizations supported by haphazard examples. But Skidmore & Peter Smith split the difference quite nicely. Two chapters sketch the trends of common experience, with emphasis on the economic constraints of political progress. A final chapter considers the 800-lb. gorilla to the north. Central America and the Caribbean islands each get their own chapter. The bulk of the book delves into the particulars of 6 major countries (including Cuba); and since the 19th century is usually disposed of in a few pages, detail can be lavished on the 20th. Even with all these shortcuts, Skidmore & Smith tuck a superbly satisfying text into their 400-page package.… (mere)
2 stem
Markeret
ccjolliffe | 3 andre anmeldelser | May 22, 2007 |

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Statistikker

Værker
16
Also by
1
Medlemmer
813
Popularitet
#31,389
Vurdering
½ 3.4
Anmeldelser
5
ISBN
49
Sprog
3

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