Edward Bradford Burns earned a BA in History from the University of Iowa in 1954. During his doctorate at Columbia University, he conducted various research projects in Guatemala, Portugal, Venezuela, and Brazil, completing his degree in 1964. That same year, he joined the history department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as an assistant professor, eventually retiring as a full professor in 1993.

Bradford Burns focused his research on Latin American history, publishing his first work in 1966: The Unwritten Alliance: Rio Branco and Brazilian-American Relations, which earned him the Order of Rio Branco from the Brazilian government. This book, which analyses the diplomatic relations between the USA and Brazil at the start of the 20th century, placed him among notable foreign scholars who examined Brazilian society, such as the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and historians Pierre Monbeig , Roger Bastide, Kenneth Maxwell, Thomas Skidmore, and Warren Dean from the United States. These scholars came to be known as " Brazilianists ." In this work, Burns describes the transfer of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil as a disruption in the formation of Brazilian national identity, which had previously taken shape through resistance against Dutch and French invasions.

This idea is further developed in his book A History of Brazil (1970), where he conducts extensive documentary research to explore the role of nationalism in shaping Brazilian society. Burns divides the development of Brazilian nationalism into three stages. The first, which he calls "colonialist nativism," is a period when the Brazilian elite began identifying with the new territory. This identity was forged not only through defending the land from invasions and thereby aligning with Portugal but also through literature that integrated Brazilian society within the Portuguese Empire. Burns argues that this stage, which lasted until Independence, laid the foundation for Brazil’s cohesion after its emancipation from Portugal (p. 28). The second phase, from 1821 to 1930, is termed "19th-century defensive nationalism," marked by a search for national identity coupled with strong anti-Portuguese and anti-British sentiments. The third phase, which began after 1930, Burns calls "20th-century offensive nationalism." For analytical purposes, he further categorises this period into political, cultural, and economic nationalism, demonstrating how nationalism extended beyond the intellectual elite to reach the urban middle class and even the working class.

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