Old and new visions of Brazilianness: the vagaries of equality, difference and 'race' in history textbooks

Abstract In this paper I discuss the changes in Brazilian history textbooks brought about by the National Textbook Program (PNLD) during the 1980s, to put greater emphasis on the value of democracy and questions of inequality, including those inequalities related to cultural differences, often in terms of "race". The analysis reveals a major paradigmatic shift from the notions of a nation built on "racial mixture" to one based on the tense and often conflictive relations between distinct racial and ethnic groups.