Richard Graham is one of a handful of historians who shaped the field of Latin American studies in the United States. Graham taught for many years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor of History Emeritus. At Texas he directed more than 20 doctoral dissertations and served as associate editor and then editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review from 1971 to 1975. Graham is the author of five books, among them Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil (1968), Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (1990), and Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780-1860 (2010). He has edited five books, including Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer (1999), Independence in Latin America (1972 and 1994), and The Idea of Race in Latin America (1990); he has published more than 40 articles. He was awarded the Conference on Latin American History's Distinguished Service Award in January 2011 (see his CLAH Luncheon Address in this issue), one of many scholarly honors.

Historians of colonial Brazil have conventionally located the conclusion of the great era of bandeira-led conquest somewhere near the end of the seventeenth century. The onset of the colony's gold cycle, corresponding with a series of major inland mineral strikes, reoriented those most actively engaged in the bandeira enterprise. Concentrated in the southern coastal captaincy of São Vicente, later, São Paulo, these wilderness adventurers had explored Portuguese America's immense interior and hunted its indigenous inhabitants. When their accompanying search for alluvial riches finally had born fruit, the Paulista backwoodsmen remade themselves into miners and merchants. The bandeirantes had first discovered gold in 1693 in Brazil's southeastern interior, the region that would soon acquire the name Minas Gerais or the General Mines; they made secondary strikes far to the west in Mato Grosso and Goiás in 1718 and 1725. Many then found themselves quickly displaced by the tide of Portuguese fortune-seekers and their African slaves who followed the paths now opened to the mining zones. As gold and then diamonds flooded the Atlantic world in unprecedented quantities, the colony's subsequent historical legacy would accrue not to São Paulo's peripatetic rustics but to those who consolidated control over the flow of riches. During the second half of the eighteenth century, with the mineral washings already in decline, attention would shift still further away from wilderness exploits, supposed to reflect a bygone era, back toward the coastal agricultural export enclaves that had traditionally preoccupied the Portuguese crown. The scholarly concerns of a later era would generally follow suit. As a consequence, the persistence of armed expeditions of exploration and conquest, which continued to roam the unmapped interior of Portuguese America, would go all but unnoticed as a critical feature of the late colonial period.