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Rio de Janeiro's illustrated press celebrated the anniversaries of the Lei Áurea (the Golden Law), which freed slaves in Brazil in 1888. These celebrations occurred mostly in the 1890s, the first years of a new political regime that emerged with the proclamation of the Republic. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the Republican period approached the anniversaries of an important political and social event in the history of Brazil's Empire. We will be dealing with two magazines – Revista Illustrada and Don Quixote – that portrayed the Abolition through different points of view, thus enabling us to understand the political scenario in early Republican Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angelo Agostini is widely known as one of the most important cartoonists of nineteen century Brazil. His fame was built on the many images of Blacks he published. In those images, the Italian artist seems to be a tireless defender of the slaves' cause. This article analyzes such images through a different set of interpretive keys. Instead of celebrating the implacable abolitionist, it seeks the underlying racial meanings, and the political logic of his caricatures of Black people. The Italian-Brazilian artist created, and recreated stereotypes of his subjects, defining those characters as sluggards, or as dangerous and irrational, and even as passive under the horrors of slavery. Mixing slavery and race to produce his drawings, Agostini created his own reputation as an abolitionist hero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]