Historians examining nineteenth-century Brazil have generally approached their subject from the national perspective, although, as far as the Northeast is concerned, we have Manuel Diegues Júnior’s O banguê nas Alagoas, Felix Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Mello’s delightful Memórias de um Cavalcanti, and the various studies of the movements for regional independence, the best of which is probably Carlos Guilherme Mota’s Nordeste 1817.
The two works reviewed here in very different ways complement this genre. M[anoel] de Oliveira Lima’s Pernambuco: Seu Desenvolvimento Histórico is by no means new: the second edition, in fact, is a facsimile reproduction of Oliveira Lima’s first book, written while the author was stationed in Berlin and published in Leipzig in 1893. To some degree, the study remains a museum-piece: its twenty-eight chapters peruse Pernambuco’s history in essay-like fashion, without documentation. What the book offers, however, is a glimpse of the mind of the Brazilian elite, in this case that of a literary critic, diplomat, and scholar who tired of what he personally considered to be the provincialism of his own country and lived in what amounted to permanent self-exile in Europe and the United States. Of particular interest is the author’s view of the Second Empire as “effusively liberal, Voltarian . . . tolerant to the point of license” and his musings on Pernambuco’s future as a state under the Republic given its insurrectionary tradition.
José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, a thoroughly professional historian and the major authority today on the colonial and imperial Northeast, has carefully scoured the pages of the venerable Diario de Pernambuco—on the occasion of that newspaper’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary—to create an invaluable two-volume documentary collection. Gonsalves de Mello, who prefers the traditional spelling of his family’s name, divides his selections into eight principal categories, covering in nearly a thousand pages the years between 1845 and 1887: the economy; society; culture; demography; Pernambuco and the Empire; Pemambucan history; Recife; and biography-necrology. This is a rich compilation of material ranging from tabular statistics to poetry, and easily lends itself to use as the basis for a semester or yearlong seminar on the social history of the Northeast. The only shortcoming is the lack of an author’s introduction, but Gonsalves de Mello has provided this elsewhere, in his “Por uma história do Império vista do Nordeste,” Estudos Unwersitários (Recife) VI (1), January-March 1966.
