Alexandre Herculano and the historian’s construction

Abstract

This article aims to track the history of the Portuguese historian Alexandre Herculano, his education and career choices. For this purpose, we emphasize his early years of learning and the importance of his exile experience, before entering his professional development and the junction of his affairs as librarian and historian. We want to show the conciliation between the two stages, while discussing the construction process of the 19^th century historiography — when a historian, in order to write his historic summary, should firstly gather the necessary materials through unremitting researching, cataloging and studying documents that had not been properly handled to serve such purposes. Finally, we show how Alexandre Herculano was read over the years and the change of the analytical studies’ critique perspective