From Sea-Bathing to Beach-Going: A Social History of the Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2023 Honorable Mention, Warren Dean Prize in Brazilian History

In From Sea-Bathing to Beach-Going B. J. Barickman explores how a narrow ocean beachfront neighborhood and the distinctive practice of beach-going invented by its residents in the early twentieth century came to symbolize a city and a nation. Nineteenth-century Cariocas (residents of Rio) ostensibly practiced sea-bathing for its therapeutic benefits, but the bathing platforms near the city center and the rocky bay shore of Flamengo also provided places to see and be seen. Sea-bathing gave way to beach-going and sun-tanning in the new beachfront neighborhood of Copacabana in the 1920s. This study reveals the social and cultural implications of this transformation and highlights the distinctive changes to urban living that took place in the Brazilian capital. Deeply informed by scholarship about race, class, and gender, as well as civilization and modernity, space, the body, and the role of the state in shaping urban development, this work provides a major contribution to the social and cultural history of Rio de Janeiro and to the history of leisure.

B. J. Barickman (1958-2016) was an associate professor of Latin American history at the University of Arizona. While he began his research career as a scholar of Bahia's sugar-plantation economy, he later turned his interests to urban Rio de Janeiro's society and culture. His previous works include A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780-1860.

Hendrik Kraay is a professor of history at the University of Calgary and the author of Days of National Festivity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1823–1889.

Bryan McCann is a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is the author of Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro.