Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America and in Latin America. At 8.5 million square kilometers (3,300,000 sq mi) and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area and the seventh most populous. Its capital is Brasília, and its most populous city is São Paulo. The federation is composed of the union of the 26 states and the Federal District. It is the only country in the Americas to have Portuguese as an official language. It is one of the most multicultural and ethnically diverse nations, due to over a century of mass immigration from around the world, and the most populous Roman Catholic-majority country.
Colonial Brazil comprises the period from 1500, with the arrival of the Portuguese, until 1815, when Brazil was elevated to a kingdom in union with Portugal as the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. During the early 300 years of Brazilian colonial history, the economic exploitation of the territory was based first on brazilwood extraction, which gave the territory its name; sugar production ; and finally on gold and diamond mining. Slaves, especially those brought from Africa, provided most of the work force of the Brazilian export economy after a brief period of Indian slavery to cut brazilwood.
Paubrasilia echinata is a species of flowering plant in the legume family, Fabaceae, that is endemic to the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. It is a Brazilian timber tree commonly known as Pernambuco wood or brazilwood and is the national tree of Brazil. This plant has a dense, orange-red heartwood that takes a high shine, and it is the premier wood used for making bows for stringed instruments. The wood also yields a historically important red dye called brazilin, which oxidizes to brazilein.
The Captaincies of Brazil were captaincies of the Portuguese Empire, administrative divisions and hereditary fiefs of Portugal in the colony of Terra de Santa Cruz, later called Brazil, on the Atlantic coast of northeastern South America. Each was granted to a single donee, a Portuguese nobleman who was given the title captain General.
The Brazil socio-geographic division is a slightly different division than the Brazilian Division by Regions. It separates the country into three different and distinctive regions:
Martim Afonso de Sousa was a Portuguese fidalgo, explorer and colonial administrator.
The Confederation of the Equator was a short-lived rebellion that occurred in the northeastern region of the Empire of Brazil in 1824, in the early years of the country's independence from Portugal. The secessionist movement was led by liberals who opposed the authoritarian and centralist policies of the nation's first leader, Emperor Pedro I. The fight occurred in the provinces of Pernambuco, Ceará and Paraíba.
The Independence of Brazil comprised a series of political and military events that led to the independence of the Kingdom of Brazil from the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves as the Brazilian Empire. Most of the events occurred in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo between 1821–1824.
The name Brazil is a shortened form of Terra do Brasil, a reference to the brazilwood tree. The name was given in the early 16th century to the territories leased to the merchant consortium led by Fernão de Loronha, to exploit brazilwood for the production of wood dyes for the European textile industry.
Angola–Brazil relations refers to bilateral relations between Angola and Brazil. As former Portuguese colonies, Angola and Brazil share many cultural ties, including language and religion. Both nations are members of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, Group of 77 and the United Nations.
Russian Brazilians are Brazilian citizens of full or partial Russian ethnic background or Russian-born people residing in Brazil. The term can also refer to someone with a Brazilian mother and Russian father, or vice versa. Today, there are close to 2 million descendants of Russian immigrants in Brazil, many of this population are descendants from the Volga Germans that immigrated to Brazil following their expulsion from the Soviet Union. However many are White Russians who arrived in Brazil right after the Russian Civil War in the 1920s. In the 1950s, a wave of Chinese immigrants belonging to the country's ethnic Russian community also arrived in Brazil.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, the lands that now constitute Brazil were occupied, fought over and settled by diverse tribes. Thus, the History of Brazil begins with the indigenous people in Brazil. The Portuguese arrived to the land that would become Brazil on April 22, 1500, commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral a Portuguese explorer on his way to India under the sponsorship of the Kingdom of Portugal and the support of the Catholic Church. From the 16th to the early 19th century, Brazil was created and expanded as a colony, kingdom and an integral part of the Portuguese Empire. Brazil was briefly named "Land of the Holy Cross" by Portuguese explorers and crusaders before being named "Land of Brazil" by the Brazilian-Portuguese settlers and merchants dealing with Brazilwood. The country expanded south along the coast and west along the Amazon and other inland rivers from the original 15 donatary captaincy colonies established on the northeast Atlantic coast east of the Tordesillas Line of 1494 that divided the Portuguese domain to the east from the Spanish domain to the west. The country's borders were only finalized in the early 20th century - with most of the expansion occurring before the independence, resulting in the largest contiguous territory in the Americas.
Brazil–Finland relations refers to the diplomatic relations between the Federative Republic of Brazil and the Republic of Finland. Both nations are members of the United Nations.
The Baroque in Brazil was the dominant artistic style during most of the colonial period, finding an open ground for a rich flowering. It made its appearance in the country at the beginning of the 17th century, introduced by Catholic missionaries, especially Jesuits, who went there in order to catechize and acculturate the native indigenous peoples and assist the Portuguese in the colonizing process. In the course of the Colonial period, expressed a close association between the Church and the State, but in the colony there was not a court that would serve as a patron of the arts, the elites did not bother to build palaces, or to help sponsor the profane arts, but at the end of the period, and how the religion had a strong influence on the daily lives of everyone in this group of factors derives from the vast majority of the legacy of the Brazilian Baroque period, is the sacred art: statuary, painting, and the work of carving for the decoration of churches and convents, or for private worship.
The Portuguese royal court transferred from Lisbon to the Portuguese colony of Brazil in a strategic retreat of Queen Maria I of Portugal, Prince Regent John, the Braganza royal family, its court, and senior functionaries, totaling nearly 10,000 people, on 27 November 1807. The embarkment took place on the 27th, but due to weather conditions, the ships were only able to depart on the 29 November. The Braganza royal family departed for Brazil just days before Napoleonic forces invaded Portugal on 1 December 1807. The Portuguese crown remained in Brazil from 1808 until the Liberal Revolution of 1820 led to the return of John VI of Portugal on 26 April 1821.
São Mateus do Sul is a municipality of the Brazilian state of Paraná, located in the southern region of the country.
Chief Tibiriçá baptized as Martim Afonso was an Amerindian leader who converted to Christianity under the auspices of José de Anchieta. He led the Tupiniquim people of Piratininga and other tribes. His daughter, Bartira, took the name Isabel and married a Portuguese man named João Ramalho. After his conversion to Christianity he became a strategic ally and protector of the Jesuits and the Portuguese; his name appears on letters to Saint Ignatius of Loyola and King João III of Portugal. Tibiriçá chose to side with the Jesuits and against his own brother Piquerobi with help of his nephew and his son-in-law João Ramalho. His granddaughters and their descendants married Portuguese noblemen that led the colonization of São Paulo under Martim Afonso de Sousa, including Jorge Ferreira, Domingos Luiz, and Tristão de Oliveira, son of capitão-mor Antonio de Oliveira and Genebra Leitão de Vasconcelos, both of important noble families.
The coffee cycle was a period in Brazil's economic history, beginning in the mid-19th century and ending in 1930, in which coffee was the main export product of the Brazilian economy. The coffee cycle succeeded the gold cycle, which had come to an end after the exhaustion of the mines a few decades earlier, and put an end to the economic crisis generated by this decadence.
The Brazilian sugar cycle, also referred to as the sugar boom or sugarcane cycle, was a period in the history of colonial Brazil from the mid-16th century to the mid-18th century. Sugar represented Brazil's first great agricultural and industrial wealth and, for a long time, was the basis of the colonial economy.
The cotton cycle refers to the period when this product had great prominence in the Brazilian economy, especially in Maranhão, between the mid-eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, being responsible for strong economic growth in the region. In the colonial period, cotton was also developed in the Captaincy of São Vicente, from where the product was exported to Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. Other regions produced it for local consumption and to manufacture cloth for slaves.
