Up to this moment, your research on capoeira should be done by reading "The Nestor Capoeira Trilogy", that can be found in bookshops or ordered by e-mail through North Atlantic Books (www.northatlanticbooks.com) or Amazon (www.amazon.com):

• The little capoeira book.  Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1995.
• Capoeira, roots of the dance-fight-game. Berkeley: NAB, 2001.
• A streetsmart song, capoeira philosophy and inner life. Berkeley: Blue Snake (NAB), 2006.

However, if you read Portuguese, please go back to the 1st page of the sight, "click" the Brazilian flag (Portuguese language), "click" on "livros" and take a look ate Nestor's expanded PhD thesis.  Mestre Nestor is puting this text at this site as he manages the different chapters.  The whole ch.1, "Globalização", is already there.  The 2nd ch., "História", has already reached the 1950s.  This is, more or less, half of the whole work.  Nestor expects to conclude "whenever it is finished".

The information is freely available to all who are interested or doing research.  In the future we hope to have the translation of the text (some 500 pages) in English.

If you don't speak Portuguese, besides Nestor's books, you should look for Mestre Acordeon's (Capoeira, a Brazilian Art Form), Mathias Rohrig's book, and J.Lewis' (Ring of Liberation) book, wich are excelent.  They are available, by e-mail, at Amazon  (www.amazon.com).