In the 40 years since he published Politics in Brazil, 1930-1964: An Experiment in Democracy, Thomas Skidmore has simultaneously been a leading U.S. scholar of Latin American history and a prominent public figure in Brazil. Balancing these roles, Skidmore has written and commented extensively on recent Brazilian political and economic history. But he is also the author of an influential intellectual history of racial thought in Brazil, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (1974). Black into White examines what Skidmore calls the “whitening thesis” by which Brazilian intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries managed their racial and nationalist anxieties by interpreting miscegenation as a dynamic process that would dilute Brazil’s black population.