Looking at the past where it is (not): Araujo Porto-Alegre and the history of Brazil as seen from Portugal

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the scholarship on Brazilian historiography in the second half of 19th Century, more specifically to the issue of how discoveries in fields such as geology and archeology influenced historical writing in the period. The so-called first generation of Romanticism took as its challenge the organization of a new notion of space and the reorganization of various fields of knowledge related to the past. In a manuscript entitled History of Brazil, Manoel de Araújo Porto-Alegre speaks of a ‘broken tradition’, in order to point to the possibility of writing about moments that remain farther in time as appear to be at first. My aim is to understand how Porto-Alegre’s notion of a distant past can turn into a valid notion for the constitution of historical facts.