Hendrik Kraay is Professor of History at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Race, State, and Armed Forces in Independence-Era Brazil: Bahia, 1790s–1840s (Stanford University Press, 2001).

"Kraay, in his intricate descriptions of the public and private ways in which the days of national festivity were lived over a long period of time...sheds light on how modernization reached many different sectors of society."—Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Latin American Research Review --- "This book is a massively researched, pioneering work on civic ritual in 19th-century Brazil. It is in line with some of the best recent research on nation-building and state-building in Brazil and other areas in Latin America."—B. J. Barickman, University of Arizona --- "With a peerless level of primary-source research and an impressive synthesis of secondary material, this is a very significant work on the cultural and political history of Brazil. It should force others to rethink aspects of the political history and to delve deeper into aspects of the cultural history of the period."—Jeffrey D. Needell, University of Florida --- "Kraay uses diplomatic correspondence, foreign travel accounts, poems, plays, operas, sermons, speeches, festival books, and parliamentary debates to good effect . . . Kraay critiques his press sources meticulously, consistently identifying the ideological and partisan tendencies embedded in Rio's principal periodicals and pamphlets . . . A short review cannot do justice to the richness of empirical detail that Kraay brings to this work. He provides an essential contribution to our understanding of the political culture of the Brazilian Empire."—Judy Bieber, The Americas