Foreword

FOREWORD

On the night of July 3 1980, at Macapá Street, in the city of São Paulo, a group of historians of the Board of Directors of the National Association of University History Professors (Anpuh) met at the residence of Professor Alice Canabrava with the firm intention of founding a scientific journal. For months, various contacts with agencies created to stimulate development had been made in the search for funds. The good news was that Capes (Coordination of Support for Research and Higher Education) had granted, as initial support and impulse, the funding of the first two numbers, to be followed by others, funded by the Association's own resources.

In August, 1980, the house in Macapá Street hosted another meeting, at which various practical problems involved in the creation of a journal for the Association were discussed, such as its name, size, periodicity, contents and financial feasibility. After debate, the title of Revista Brasileira de História (the Brazilian Journal of History) was decided upon, as the Anpuh organ, to be a half-yearly periodical, with the contents consisting of articles, bibliography and news items, among other details. It was also agreed that the first number would be launched in the XI Symposium of 1981, in the city of João Pessoa.

Since that time, the Revista Brasileira de História has overcome numerous challenges. Its unfailing regularity was due to the efforts of its many editors and counsellors, in fifteen administrations — composed of historians from institutions that were geographically quite dispersed — elected through the processes of participation in Anpuh. It published articles of great impact, signed by Brazilian and foreign authors. It organized valuable and pioneering dossiers for historiographical renovation, carrying themes and different approaches, stimulating the production of knowledge that was intended to transform.

In the act of publishing, making accessible, making possible the circulation of knowledge, contemporary society has invented means that have been shown to be powerful instruments in research, for the production of knowledge, as well as for education. In the first numbers of the Revista Brasileira de História, the indexes of some magazines were reproduced, but its availability remained difficult in most universities. At present, the internet, the portals and the indexers provide us with channels which are decisive in overcoming distances. Approximation does not only occur among historians from the most varied parts of Brazil, but there is also the chance opening up of circulation beyond our borders, inaugurating a renewed and stimulating dimension of historical knowledge. The historian is constructing a transnational and transdisciplinary viewpoint.

It is now a question of opening up the Revista Brasileira de História to a network of a range of researchers, situated in various countries, dedicated to the different areas of historical knowledge. To this end, the portals to which it belongs, SciELO and Redalyc, provide free and easy access to the abstracts, summaries and whole articles. The Scopus base, available free in Brazil from the Periodicals Portal of Capes, and in the libraries of the most varied universities in the world, also carries and makes available contents, that are increasingly public, circulated, and known, and opened up to debate and criticism.

In this number, the Dossier contains reflections on the commemoration of the two hundred years of the birth of Darwin. Thomas Glick focuses on the presence of the geneticist and evolutionist Dobzhansky in Brazil and the renovation of research practice in scientific circles, from the perspective of the history of science. Celso Uemori shows the peculiarities of certain readings of Darwin, singling out Manoel Bomfim who, unlike many of his contemporaries, related the struggle for survival to the practice of solidarity and cooperation. Karoline Carula deals with the Darwinist presence in the Glória conferences, in Rio de Janeiro, between 1875 and 1880, and Juanma Sánchez considers the debates on evolutionism, religion and Marxism.

In the Articles section, Elaine Lourenço analyses the collection História Nova do Brasil, launched in 1964 and soon aborted by the military dictatorship, as an important attempt at renewing the teaching of history; Kaori Kodama investigates the activities of the newspaper O Philantropo (1849-1852) in the debates on the slave trade; Claudio DeNipoti focuses on the trade and circulation of books in Portugal, at the turn of the 18^th to the 19^th century, and the mechanisms of dissemination of philosophical illuminist and liberal literature; Helder Macedo discusses the existence of Indian slaves in the remote back country of the Captaincy of Rio Grande and their relation to the economic activities in this territory, with emphasis on cattle raising and subsistence agriculture; Francisco Ferraz looks at the processes of social reintegration of North American, French and English ex-servicemen, in the two World Wars; Daniel Pereira and Eduardo Felippe analyse the notion of territorial formation in the letters sent by Capistrano de Abreu to the Barão do Rio Branco, between 1886 and 1903; Jean Sales analyses the impact of the crisis of real socialism in the trajectory of the Brazilian Communist Party, and André and Mariângela Joanilho revisit the strip cartoon as a source for the history of mass culture and reading.

In the State of the Art, José Murilo de Carvalho — one of the pioneering collaborators of the Revista Brasileira de História, who had an article published in the second number, in 1981 — contributes an essay on the commemorations of the two hundred years of the arrival of the Portuguese Court in Brazil.

There follow six Reviews, filling the role of discussing and presenting critically works valuable for directing contemporary historical debate.

We hope to maintain the Revista Brasileira de História as an efficient vehicle for the publication of articles, in the interactive social and academic networks context. This will certainly be the way to keep her young, like a beautiful and desired Balzacian woman with her connections to an infinity of complicated stories: desired by the readers — presenting herself as a vehicle of intellectual stimulation- but also by the authors — the desired destination of their most provocative texts. Only in this way can we do justice to the pioneering efforts of that group of historians meeting in the Macapá Street, and to the many others that, over almost three decades, have dedicated their time and ideals to this journal.

The Editorial Board

Translated into English by Roger Arthur Gough.

• 1 GLEZER, Raquel. A fundação da revista. Revista Brasileira de História, ano 1, n.1, p.129-130, mar. 1981.

¹

Anpuh had arisen during a meeting of faculty, the 1^st Symposium of History Professors in Higher Education, in October 1961, and was intended to break through the isolation in which University History Professors were working, stimulating dialogue and the sharing of experiences. At that time of the Macapá Street meeting it had, therefore, completed twenty years of existence. It was a question of commemorating, and the project for the founding of the journal was inserted neatly into this purpose. After all, those were also times of great expectations, with the extinction of the Institutional Act 5, the rekindling of the social movements, the struggle for political democratization, the campaign for Amnesty, intense manual workers strikes, and of various white-collar workers as well, and, above all, the expectation that such a lamentable period had finally ended.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 Jan 2009
• Date of issue
  2008