History | Frederico Freitas

The Making of a Forest

May 24, 2018 by fredericofreitas

Landscape change at the Argentine-Brazilian border, 1953-2017 This series of interactive maps are a sequel to the ones I launched in 2014. They show deforestation and reforestation in national parks at the border between Brazil and Argentina, between the 1950s and the 2010s. They use as source aerial imagery unearthed from Brazilian archives and historical satellite pictures, including some from US spy satellites from the 1960s. The visualizations show the impressive environmental change occurring in almost seven decades, when this […]

Categories: History, Uncategorized

Big Water

November 20, 2017 by fredericofreitas

Big Water is a book I edited with Jacob Blanc and published through University of Arizona Press in 2018. It is a book that focus on a overlooked Latin-American borderland, the Triple Frontier area between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. From the press: “Big Water explores four centuries of the overlapping histories of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay (the Triple Frontier), and the colonies that preceded them. Examining an important area that includes some of the first national parks established in Latin […]

Categories: History

Academic Posters

May 4, 2015 by fredericofreitas

Here are some academic posters I have made for events at Stanford.

Categories: Graphic Design, History • Tags: Brazil, History, Literature

Boundaries of Nature

September 24, 2014 by fredericofreitas

Landscape Change in Southern Brazil, from 1953 to the Present Day Sixty years of landscape change in the Iguaçu National Park, Brazil The Iguaçu National Park was created between 1939 and 1944 by the Brazilian national government at the border with Argentina. The creation of the park was disputed by the local state government, which, in the late 1950s, started to settle hundreds of families of Brazilians farmers inside park area. This later resulted in a conflicted process of removal […]

Categories: History • Tags: Animation, Argentina, Deforestation, Graphic Design, History, Land Use, National Park, Visualization

Rivers and Whirlpools

December 5, 2011 by fredericofreitas

Rivers and Whirlpools: a spatial and historical interpretation of La Vorágine The initial scene of the 1972 film, Aguirre, the Wrath of Good, depicts a sixteenth-century expedition descending from the Andeans highlands into the Amazonian lowlands. The expedition led by Francisco Pizarro is in search of the mythical city of El Dorado. The movie, directed by Werner Herzog, is a hodge-podge of different exploratory travels of sixteenth-century conquistadores, from Francisco de Orellana’s upriver Amazonian voyage to Lope de Aguirre’s downriver […]

Categories: History • Tags: Amazon, Brazil, Colombia, Eustasio Rivera, History, La Vorágine, Literature, Spatial History, The Vortex

Land Use and Deforestation in Southeastern Brazil — 1753-1840

November 18, 2011 by fredericofreitas

Land Use and Deforestation in Southeastern Brazil — 1753-1840[1] This article analyzes the pressure of farming on tropical forests in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil. Making use of GIS technology, it was possible to create a map for the South Central of the Minas Gerais province and geocode historical data for agriculture and livestock production. We have found an association between corn and swine production in areas of forest, and we suggest a correlation of the practices of slash-and-burn agriculture, pig […]

Categories: History • Tags: 18 Century, 19th Century, Deforestation, History, Land Use, Minas Gerais

The Plays of França Júnior

August 30, 2011 by fredericofreitas

The Plays of França Júnior is an interactive visualization showing the social network formed by the characters in the plays of Brazilian nineteenth-century playwright França Júnior. This visualization is part of a larger research project on social networks in Brazilian literature led by Zephyr Frank at Stanford University’s Spatial History Project. See the interactive visualization here. It is plain, then, that there is an intention to encapsulate a representative type of the Brazilian ruling class, through relationships peculiar to him […]

Categories: History • Tags: 19th Century, Brazil, Drama, França Júnior, History, Network Analysis, Rio de Janeiro, Visualization

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

August 1, 2011 by fredericofreitas

Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas / The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is an animation showing the social network formed by the characters in the Machado de Assis‘s nineteenth-century Brazilian novel. This visualization is part of a larger research project on social networks in Brazilian literature led by Zephyr Frank at Stanford University’s Spatial History Project. In this narrated visualization, the characters in Machado de Assis’s masterpiece are presented in the space of social […]

Categories: History • Tags: 19th Century, Bras Cubas, Brazil, History, Literature, Machado de Assis, Network Analysis, Rio de Janeiro

The South Atlantic Columbian Exchange

May 31, 2011 by fredericofreitas

The South Atlantic Columbian Exchange In his classic 1972 book, The Columbian Exchange, Alfred W. Crosby Jr. assesses the biological and cultural consequences of the introduction of new species into transatlantic environments. From 1492 on, different species of animals, plants, viruses and bacteria were exchanged between the Old and New Worlds following their human symbiotic companions. The consequences of these exchanges for human history were manifold — from the decimation of the majority of Americas’ indigenous population by Old-World germs […]

Categories: History • Tags: Africa, Brazil, Columbian Exchange, History

Frederico Freitas

History and Design

Category Archives: History