Retomando a perspectiva de Manoel Luiz Salgado Guimarães a respeito da escrita da história no Brasil no século XIX como um campo de disputas em aberto, “um debate que se travava sem que o vencedor estivesse definido a priori”, buscamos recuperar uma forma de escrita da história relegada a segundo plano naquele contexto, presente em dois autores que tiveram obras suas consideradas plágio no Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro: José Inácio de Abreu e Lima (1794-1869) e Alexandre José de Melo Morais (1816-1882). A leitura de plágio vinha da maneira como ambos utilizaram suas fontes; é nossa hipótese que ambos realizaram uma historiografia que se aproximava da compilação, gênero de longa duração, mas que seria descartado no século XIX enquanto possibilidade de oferecer um modelo para a escrita da história do Brasil.
Brazilian historiography in the 19th century stands for a variety of practices and ways of doing history. In the beginning of the century, the writing of history assumed a specific color after the arrival of the Portuguese Court in 1808, who were escaping the invasion of Portugal by Napoleonic troops. After political independence from Portugal (1822), this writing had to deal with the questions that occupied the minds of its authors, people mostly close to or part of the political elite of the country. Forging a nationality through history, dealing with the tensions between local affiliations and the nation-state, placing indigenous and African peoples in the historical narrative, combining an exemplary history with future-oriented thinking, and using history for international relations issues (such as boundaries disputes) were among the motivations and preoccupations involved in that work. Underlying it all, the myriad ways of writing history in the 19th century had to do with the ways the authors circulated among a world of public archives in the making, personal archives available through certain connections, booksellers, publishers, oral informants, and a changing community of readers and critics that were conforming and disputing rules of acceptability as to what could be considered a work of history. Thinking about the Brazilian historiography of the 1800s as a way of combining practices of archiving, reading, copying, writing, and evaluating can help us understand the remarkable variety of histories and historiographical works written in the period.
This article seeks to reflect on the tensions internal to the modern conception of history through two important texts concerning Brazilian historiography and the writing of Brazilian history: Capistrano de Abreu's Necrológio de Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1878) and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda's O pensamento histórico no Brasil nos últimos cinquenta anos (1951). Considering both in the light of the modern conception of history, as representatives of a new experience of time, characterized by the difference towards the past, and by a new horizon of expectations about the future, which changes the way history is written, we see them both marked by tensions such as particular studies and synthesis, theory and empirical work, objectivity and subjectivity, still relevant to historians.
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