This dissertation examines the writings of Latin Americans who traveled to the United States between 1783 and 1900 and wrote about their experiences. It aims to provide an intellectual and cultural history of Latin America, as seen through the lens of elite Latin Americans' perceptions of the emerging United States. The seventy-six travelers whose eighty-nine texts I examine comprise slightly more than half of the total number of such travelers identified. Employing text-analysis software, I have mined their published writings to compile data that specify the travelers' substantive interests in and observations concerning the United States. Such interests are expressed as nouns.

The 18,943 nouns used in the texts are presented so that we learn not only which were employed by individual authors, but also which were used by how many of the other writers comprising the sample. We can now specify what substantive matters (persons, places, things, ideas) caught the travelers' interest or were on their minds, how often they mentioned each of these words in their texts, how many of their fellow travelers used the same words, and in what percentage of the total texts those same words appeared. Thus, we can know as never before what Latin Americans were actually thinking about the United States during the era addressed - from the dawn of the First Republic to its emergence as hemispheric hegemon and global empire. These findings provide quantitative data to support (or refute) the sort of qualitative judgments that have heretofore lacked measurable certainty.

I also place the travelers in the context of their time and place, with chapters addressing the validity of travelers as historical sources, the highly influential social and intellectual status of many of the travelers, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin American intellectual history, and the originally complementary yet soon antagonistic philosophical perspectives held in Latin and Anglo-America towards the end of the nineteenth century. In an appendix, I provide biographies of each of the travelers whose works are addressed. Another appendix lists travelers whose works are not examined here, many of whom merit at least equal scholarly attention.

The emergence of regional inequities and the genesis of modern economic growth in Brazil have remained shrouded by a dearth of historical evidence. Although quantitative scholars have revealed the efficacy of the First Republic (1889-1930) in fomenting economic progress, the extent to which Brazil’s early economic growth fostered improvements in health remains unclear. My dissertation fills this void in scholarship by relying on hitherto untapped archival sources with data on human stature—a reliable metric for health and nutritional status.

Heights offer an excellent source of knowledge regarding human development for Brazil in the 1850-1950 period—an era of deep social, political, and economic transformations. My analysis centers heavily on a large (n≈17,000), geographically-comprehensive series compiled from military inscription files, supplemented by an ancillary dataset drawn from passport records (n≈6,000). This dissertation also integrates reports of the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Board (IHB), which spearheaded rural health campaigns in Brazil targeting hookworm and malaria in the 1910s and 1920s.

This thesis details the inadequacies of traditional approaches to human development for Brazil in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I rely on regression analyses to estimate the secular trends in height, consider alternative hypotheses, and assess selection biases. Venturing beyond conventional methods of historical anthropometrics, I endeavor to identify causal forces behind the observed patterns with historical climate and geographic data used to proxy for the virulence of the disease environment. I also utilize statistics on health expenditures and mortality rates in order to contextualize the observed height patterns.

I document inferior heights in the North and Northeast that predated the advent of industrialization. At the national level, my findings reveal a 3-centimeter stature increase from 1880 to 1910, a growth rate commensurate with that observed in more industrialized economies in the latter-twentieth century. In the South and Southeast, I argue that increased real income and public-health interventions explain the earlier upward trend in heights, while rural sanitary reforms were most important in the North and Northeast, where heights remained stagnant until the 1910 decade and diseases such as hookworm and malaria were most rampant. I show that, although rural sanitation in the early-twentieth century improved health conditions, administrative shortcomings hemmed down the rollout of modern health institutions and continued to plague the nation.

This dissertation examines the diverse ways by which slaves in Ouro Preto, the capital of Minas Gerais province, Brazil, during the nineteenth century acquired freedom through manumission, which is the process of going from being a slave to being a free person within a society where slavery is legal, as opposed to obtaining freedom through abolition. Minas Gerais had a large slave and manumitted population, and manumission had been a common practice in the region since colonial times. This dissertation investigates the unique conditions behind this practice as well as the circumstances of its occurrence and the strategies slaves used to achieve freedom before general abolition. Slaves were manumitted in a variety of ways, such as in the last wills of their slave owners and via self-purchase, which the available data shows was in fact the most efficient way to obtain a letter of freedom. Manumitted individuals also appealed to the judiciary to be granted freedom and to fight against attempts of re-enslavement. This dissertation goes further to examine the exercise of agency by the diverse subjects involved in manumission, including the slaves, the slave owners, lawyers, judges, and local and provincial authorities. The life stories of the enslaved individuals are revealed by the primary sources, even though these are official and private documents often written by the slave owners and local authorities. The slaves’ stories reveal an ongoing, active pursuit of freedom, often after a lifetime of compulsory labor.

Urbanization often follows on the heels of industrialization, and in Latin America, stark inequality has accompanied this growth. However, we know little about how and when this inequality became entrenched in the region. This dissertation looks at lived workers' experiences and inequality in the city of S�o Paulo, Brazil during the city's rapid Old Republic (1891-1930) growth. S�o Paulo is the ideal environment to study inequality. The city was one of the first in the region to experience rapid expansion, growing from 65,000 inhabitants in 1890 to over one million by 1933, and was also one of the most diverse, as immigrants and migrants flocked to the city. As the first comprehensive and systematic study of wage inequality in such an important city, my project contributes to the historiographical literature on labor, gender and development history in Latin America. Furthermore, the methodology of using firm-level data to measure inequality when official statistics are unreliable can be applied across regions and time periods.

My dissertation directly examines the national, racial and gender discrimination workers faced in S�o Paulo's formal labor market using a variety of archival and official sources. It finds evidence that Afro-Brazilian, Portuguese and women workers encountered significant labor market discrimination. To analyze this discrimination, the dissertation addresses three related topics. It provides the first analysis of incoming immigrant groups' relative skill levels for the city. Immigrant registries suggest employers may have hired Germans into skilled positions and Portuguese into unskilled positions based on the expectation that they would be more or less skilled, respectively. Second, using firm-level employment data, the dissertation provides a much-needed wage series and shows real wages steadily declined and that skilled and unskilled wages diverged slightly in the 1920's. Finally, using firm-level data and a unique set of employee interviews, the dissertation shows that despite heavy criticism and labor market discrimination, some working- and middle-class wives and mothers chose to remain in the labor market. The dissertation findings suggest gender inequality was prominent during the Old Republic, but racial inequality actually expanded in the Vargas-era and Second Republic.

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, women across the Americas experienced increased public scrutiny of their reproductive lives. Modernizing states began criminalizing practices like abortion, while urbanization, immigration, and changes in women’s workforce participation pushed fertility control into the public consciousness. The Brazilian capital of Rio de Janeiro presents one crucial case study for understanding how the uneven process of modernization affected women’s reproduction, and, in turn, how women negotiated these changes. Early-twentieth-century Brazil experienced a shift from familial to state patriarchy during which women’s sexual honor—and reproduction—became public goods. During this time, the professionalization of obstetrics, changes in criminal law relating to abortion and infanticide, and the expansion of the city’s police force intersected with the inadequate development of health services and continued poor reproductive health outcomes.

This dissertation examines legal and medical policies towards women’s reproductive lives under the 1890 Penal Code (1890-1940), which bridged Brazil’s first foray into democratic governance (the First Republic, 1889-1930) and the early period of Get?lio Vargas’s populist regime (1930-1937). It argues that women’s reproductive lives became the object of increased state attention in post-abolition Rio de Janeiro. As the state began to take over patriarchal power from the family, women’s reproductive capabilities—their ability to conceive and raise future citizens—became central to state formation processes. Fertility control—which allowed women to break with patriarchal understandings of women’s proper sexual behavior, their gendered roles as mothers, and their subordination to male decision-making processes—was a direct threat to both individual and state patriarchy. In regards to reproduction, juridical-medical efforts to modernize Brazilian society worked in a paradoxical manner. The state intervened in women’s reproduction through the surveillance of fertility control but did not expand obstetric services or improve reproductive health outcomes. Ultimately, the state created a culture of condemnation around poor women’s pregnancy and childbirth that extended beyond elite discourses into the popular imagination. This project contends that state control over women’s bodies clashed with the everyday embodied experience of poor reproductive health.