Thomas Elliot Skidmore è stato uno storico e studioso americano specializzato nella storia brasiliana. La sua attenzione si spostò verso il Sud America dopo la Rivoluzione Cubana, con la sua ricerca post-dottorato ad Harvard incentrata sul Brasile. Ha esplorato l'unico esperimento brasiliano con la democrazia, analizzando i processi politici e sociali della nazione. Il lavoro di Skidmore illumina la complessa storia del Brasile e il suo percorso verso il governo democratico.
Thomas E. Skidmore, a prominent expert on Brazil, analyzes over two decades of military rule in Brazil, from the 1964 overthrow of Joao Goulart to the return of democratic governance in 1985 under Jose Sarney.
Published to wide acclaim in 1974, Thomas E. Skidmore's intellectual history of Brazilian racial ideology has become a classic in the field. Available for the first time in paperback, this edition has been updated to include a new preface and bibliography that surveys recent scholarship in the field. Black into White is a broad-ranging study of what the leading Brazilian intellectuals thought and propounded about race relations between 1870 and 1930. In an effort to reconcile social realities with the doctrines of scientific racism, the Brazilian ideal of "whitening"—the theory that the Brazilian population was becoming whiter as race mixing continued—was used to justify the recruiting of European immigrants and to falsely claim that Brazil had harmoniously combined a multiracial society of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples.
This history of Latin America includes the ongoing war against international drug trafficking, the difficulties and promises of NAFTA, the increasing trend toward democratic and pluralist politics, and the large-scale immigration of Latin Americans into the United States.