Vox's Spanish Dictionaries for Apps. 
° Rio de Janeiro ° Rio Grande; ° Salvador ° Santos
° Sao Paulo ° Sao Sebastiao ° Tubarao
Brazil's
primary resources made its economy, despite its relative lack of development,
one of broad international significance. It is one of the world's leading
agricultural nations and is especially well known as the world's most
prominent coffee-producer.
Brazil has 4,600 miles of coastline, one of the largest
river systems in the world with 27,000 navigable miles, millions of
acres of soil, adequate water, minerals and hardwood forests. Brazil
has one-seventh of the world's total forest area. Hardwoods predominate
in the Amazon and Atlantic coastal zone. Rio de Janeiro was an important
part of call for ships enroute to the West Coast, Pacific and Australia.
Engravings and diaries of the time illustrated its importance as a place
of renewal for travellers who'd been at sea for weeks or months before
touching land. Its tropical fruits and flowers and spectacular scenery
were a welcome sight.
But despite the vastness of its land and the richness
of its resources, Brazil's economic history has been affected by boom-and-bust
periods. This was the result of being oftentimes heavily dependent on
one or two major agricultural products, the markets for which were highly
sensitive to fluctuations in the world economy and politics. This cyclical
aspect of the economy began with the export of brazilwood in the early
colonial times and was continued with the sugar boom of the 16th century,
the mineral boom of the 18th century (paced especially by gold and diamond
mining), the coffee boom beginning in the mid-19th century, and the
rubber boom of the late 19th century.
Whether Brazil was known to Portuguese navigators in
the 15th century is unsolved, but the coast was visited by the Spanish
sailor Vicente Yáñez Pinzón before the Portuguese expedition led by
Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500. Cabral claimed the land, which fitted
in the Portuguese sphere of influence as defined in the Treaty of Tordesillas
(1494).
The United States entered the 19th century as an independent nation, while Brazil, still a colony, was on its way to gaining independence. In 1808, as Napoleon's armies began the invasion of Portugal, the King transferred his court to Rio de Janeiro. In 1815 the status of Brazil was elevated from colony to United Kingdom with Portugal.
March 28, 1857, Atlas
London, United Kingdom
B R A Z I L . — The Brazilian mail-packet Tamar has arrived with despatches from Buenos Ayres of Feb. 1 and Rio Janeiro of Feb. 25. The great question of the day in Rio is the legality or non-legality of Protestant marriages; and the question was brought about in this wise: A husband and wife, John and Margaret Schopp (Swiss Protestants) quarrelled, and agreed to live separately. Subsequently, Margaret became a convert to the Roman Catholic faith, fell in love with a Brazilian, asked for and obtained a license to marry him from the Bishop of Rio de Janeiro on the ground that her former marriage with Schopp was null and void from the moment that she embraced the Roman Catholic faith. The Protestant community of Rio are furiously indignant at the bishop's conduct. In the eyes of the law, the children born of Protestant parents are all illegitimate. The newspapers, with one single exception, condemn the proceeding of the bishop.
January 27, 1855, Atlas
London, United Kingdom
NAVIGATION OF THE AMAZON.—On Tuesday the Tapajoz, a new iron vessel, just completed by Mr. Laird, for the Amazon Steam Navigation Company, sailed from Liverpool for Oporto. Portugal to take on board 300 Portuguese emigrants, who are to be located on the banks of the Amazon. The Tapajoz, built expressly for the Amazon navigation, is 200 feet long, 27 feet beam, 12 feet deep, and about 760 tons old measurement. She is fitted by Fawcett and Co. with a pair of engines of 200-horse power, feathering wheels, and all the latest improvements. The company for which the Tapajoz has been built has, it is stated, received a grant from the Brazilian Government of 30,000 pounds a year for the regular and efficient navigation of that river.
In Brazil slavery was abolished gradually. In 1871, six years after U.S. emancipation, children born to Brazilian slaves were no longer considered slaves. In 1888, with Emperor Dom Pedro II away in Europe, his daughter, Princess Isabel, acting as Regent, signed the Golden Law (Lei Áurea) which finally abolished slavery in Brazil. The Golden Law set off a reaction among Brazilian slave owners which rapidly eroded the political foundations of the monarchy. After a few months of parliamentary crisis, the Emperor was asked to leave the country and a Republic was established.
When the Brazilian Republic was declared in 1889 it was called the United States of Brazil and the new government structure was based on the U.S. structure: a President and Vice President, a bicameral Congress, and an independent judiciary. (In the 1970's Brazil changed its name to the Federative Republic of Brazil.) Brazil has 26 states and a federal district; the U.S. has 50 states and a federal district. State governments in both countries mirror the federal structure. Federal revenue sharing, a subject of much debate in the U.S. Congress, was incorporated into the 1988 Brazilian Constitution. Thus a federal revenue sharing system provides the Brazilian states, just as it does the American states, considerable resources.
As the 19th century ended, the history of aviation was beginning, a story in which Brazilians and Americans each claim the leading role. While in the U.S. the Wright brothers are the undisputed pioneers of aviation, in Brazil, Alberto Santos Dumont is considered the Father of Aviation. In 1898 Dumont was the first to construct and fly a gasoline-powered, lighter-than-air craft. In 1906 in Paris, France, he succeeded in making the world's first, officially-observed, powered flight of a heavier-than-air machine. Orville and Wilbur Wright made several controlled, sustained flights in a power-driven, heavier-than-air craft near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903, but it wasn't until 1908 that their achievement was recognized in the United States.
In 1889 American poet Walt Whitman wrote a poem welcoming the birth of the Brazilian Republic:
A Loving Hand - a Smile from the North -
A Sunny Instant Hail!
(Let the Future Care for itself, where it reveals
its Troubles, Impediments,
Ours, Ours, the Present Throe, the Democratic Aim,
the Acceptance and Faith);
To Thee To-day our Reaching Arm, our Turning Neck -
To thee from Us the Expectant Eye,
Thou Cluster Free! Thou Brilliant Lustrous One!
Thou, Learning Well,
The True Lesson of a Nation's Light in the Sky,
(More Shining than the Cross, more than the Crown),
The Height to Be Superb Humanity.
