Presentation

This issue of the magazine História (São Paulo) brings readers the dossier Meio ambiente, museus e patrimônio (Environment, museums and heritage). Organized in collaboration with Dr. Paulo Henrique Martinez, from UNESP, the set of articles offers different perspectives on issues that have increasingly drawn the attention of scholars and society in Brazil and worldwide.

Regina Horta analyzes the stimulating dialog between the environmental historian and civilian society in the face of ecological imbalances today. José Luiz de Andrade Franco discusses the formation of the concept of biodiversity and the emergence of conservation biology through articles, events, and the trajectory of researchers. The interaction between society and nature in the past is investigated by Marcelo Lapuente Mahl in the context of coffee expansion in Northwest Paulista, through publications, photographs, and illustrations of that time. The institutional and social intervention in urban public spaces, in order to preserve nature and promote culture, is one of the most urgent challenges for Brazilian cities and the object of study by two other works. In the first one, three authors - Marta Mantovani, Raquel Glezer, and Paulo Massabki, addresses the complex management of a university science museum within an environmentally protected area in ​​the city of São Paulo. In the second one, Luiz Henrique Assis Garcia analyzes the implementation of a public park in Belo Horizonte and the ecological and cultural activities developed there.

In the free articles section, a wide range of topics is covered in an original way. The medical-scientific relations between Brazil and Germany are systematized by Jaime Benchimol in order to understand the networks and the circulation of knowledge on a transnational scale, as well as the conversion of the European country to the style of Brazilian medical practices of the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War. The following paper, written by three authors - Agnaldo Valentin, José Flávio Motta, and Iraci del Nero da Costa, proposes an innovative methodology of demographic analysis for the study of post-mortem inventories, taking as an example two locations in the interior of São Paulo during the nineteenth century. The text of Victor A. Melo focuses on a forgotten custom - bullfighting, a practice from colonial Brazil inherited from Iberian colonizers, which sparked controversy in Rio de Janeiro at the end of the Empire, when favorable and disapproving positions intersected with national policies and cultural changes. The New State, a regime where everything seems to have been said, deserves an interesting analysis from Adriano Codato about the role of the Federal Controllers in the exercise of political control of the state by the Vargas government. The last of the articles, by Maria Carmen G. M. de Oliveira, analyzes how the German nun Hildegard de Bingen developed an imaginary salvation of the soul in one of her works, Scivias, in the context of the papal reformism of the twelfth century.

In the review section, recent books dealing with Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, environmental history and civilizations of antiquity are appreciated.

Finally, we express our gratitude to the federal agencies that financially sponsored the translation of the articles from the dossier to the English language - MCTI (Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation), CNPQ (National Research Council), MEC (Ministry of Education) and CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Personnel in Higher Education).

The editors

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  09 Jan 2014
• Date of issue
  Dec 2013