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"Historian John Chasteen traces the global history of marijuana, exploring its rich heritage with captivating insight. Among the first domesticated plants, only infrequently has it been used as a recreational drug. Instead, there is a vibrant spiritual dimension to its long history that has been continually ignored"--

AbstractRio's pre-Lenten carnival and its Afro-Brazilian dance, samba, have been symbols of Brazilian identity since the 1930s. This article explores the choreographical antecedents of samba, before the crystallisation of the modern dance genre with that name, highlighting the importance of earlier social dances in the evolution of the twentieth-century symbol. It traces the development of carnival dancing in Rio de Janeiro from the time when few danced, through the long reign of the polka, to the emergence of generalised carnival street dancing around 1889. A modified view of the roots of samba has interesting implications for on-going debates on the social meaning of Brazilian carnival.

"What I suffer is pleasant because it shows that I am putting myself above the run of common men, that I am worthy of my Patria and of you…"Insurgent officer to his wife, 1893The appeal of sacrifice so frequently encountered in expressions of nationalism is an equally familiar theme in the rhetoric of political warfare in Latin America. Stories of political warfare take up a considerable part of Latin American historiography. The intent of this exploratory article is to suggest how the rhetoric and narrative written about nineteenth-century insurgency can be read to illuminate the political history of Latin America. Two South American civil wars of the 1890s constitute the empirical starting point for my speculations, although they are scarcely a convincing sample of the hundreds of insurgencies that have occurred since independence. Consequently, these observations on a Latin American discourse of insurgency must largely be content to ask questions, raise issues, and suggest hypotheses.