Dom Pedro I declared the independence of Brazil on this day in 1822.
I don't know this story well, nor do I know the history of Portugal well, which this event is tightly tied into. Pedro was a Portuguese-born member of a noble family close to the thrown in Portugal. Born with the full name of Pedro de Alcântara Francisco António João Carlos Xavier de Paula Miguel Rafael Joaquim José Gonzaga Pascoal Cipriano Serafim, he not only became Emperor of Brazil, but bizarrely, due to revolution and family associations, was briefly later King of Portugal.
Something often missed in the United States is the fact that early independence movements in Latin America sometimes featured contests between propertied American located noblemen vs. their European opposites, and were not examples of common people rebelling against their colonial masters. No matter how a person might tend to characterize the American Revolution, they were often not analogous to it and featured little input or concern for common people. I'm not familiar, as noted, with the Brazilian episode, as noted, but it is interesting to note that this provides an example of a contest between societal monarchical elites. The first revolutions in Mexico very much followed this pattern before they turned into true revolutions against the Spanish noble class.
