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On a stage festooned with Confederate flags, a singer was belting out “Dixieland Delight” by Alabama near an obelisk honoring the Americans who fled to this outpost in the aftermath of the Civil War. “We’re not racists,” said Cícero Carr, 54, an engineer whose great-great-grandfather hailed from Texas. Wearing a fedora featuring the rebel battle flag, he explained in Portuguese, “We’re just revering our ancestors who had the good sense to settle in Brazil.” At the annual celebration of Brazil’s self-described Confederados one scorching Sunday in April, Confederate flags adorned the hoop-skirted gowns of young belles and the trucker caps...

Why thousands of Southerners fled to Brazil after the Civil War, why they stayed, and why their descendants still remember I set out from rural North Carolina where folks drink beer, eat barbecue, and listen to Skynyrd on the local classic rock station, flew ten hours to São Paulo, took a cab eighty miles north through a pleasant stretch of Brazilian countryside, and exited onto a dirt road that wound through endless fields of sugarcane before delivering me here to the Cemitério do Campo, where I’ve just stepped through the gate to find folks drinking beer, eating barbecue, and listening...

It had all the trappings of a down-home country fair somewhere well below the Mason-Dixon line: Lynyrd Skynyrd medleys, mile-long lines for fried chicken, barbecue and draft beer, and a plethora of Confederate flags emblazoning everything from belt buckles to motorcycle vests to trucker caps. But Sunday's party marking the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War took about 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) south of the South, in a rural Brazilian town colonized by families fleeing Reconstruction. Thousands turn out every year, including many who trace their ancestry back to the dozens of families who, enticed by...

PLANT CITY - Plant City Chapter 1931 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy will meet at 10 a.m. July 20, at the 1914 Plant City High School Community Center, 605 N. Collins St. Guest speaker will be Scott L. Peeler Jr. He will present a program on ``Confederates in Brazil,'' dealing with a group of Confederate soldiers who formed a colony in Brazil after the Civil War. The program is free and open to the public. For information, call (813) 752-0243.

AMERICANA, Brazil Now well past 90, Judith MacKnight Jones is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, the illness that robbed her of all of her memory, her most precious asset. She has been lying here for the past 11 years, covered by a patchwork blanket, made from pieces her great-grandmother brought from the United States between 1865 and 1885, after the Confederacy lost the Civil War. Unable to speak or remember now, her book "Soldado Descanso" ("Rest Soldier") is written in Portuguese, but soon will be translated into English, as the publisher thinks Americans should know about the proud history of Confederate...

SANTA BARBARA D'OESTE, Brazil (Reuters) - A handful of Confederate soldiers are loitering about on a breezy, sun-kissed day, chatting up a bevy of southern belles. The sounds of "Dixie" play in the background. The smell of fresh-baked biscuits and homemade fried chicken waft over a grassy field. And the red, white and blue Confederate flag flutters in the wind. The antebellum scene could have come straight out of "Gone with the Wind," except that it is taking place somewhere more southern than the Deep South: Brazil. "We're trying to preserve our culture," says Frederico Padoveze, a 23-year-old dressed like...

American expatriates plant roots in Brazil after loss in Civil WarAMERICANA, Brazil -- The monument could stand on any small-town courthouse square in America's Deep South, the names etched in white marble calling up memories of the bloody war that split the United States more than 140 years ago.But this monument isn't in Vicksburg or Antietam. Tucked beneath shade trees on a picturesque hilltop, it is more than 4,000 miles south of the land once known as Dixie.The families memorialized here were Southern survivors of the Civil War who left America in the wake of defeat and resettled in Brazil,...