Historiographic “innovation” before History as discipline

Alcântara Machado and writing about São Paulo in the colonial period

Abstract

This article analyzes the production of a novelty in writings on history in the 1920s, that is, before the creation of faculties of history in Brazil and professionalization of historians. The objective is to show that the categorization of works in a genealogy of theories, methods and authors normally considered as historians (by profession or not), that today compose a view of the discipline’s “evolution”, is insufficient to encompass the complexities involved in the election of a book as a novelty. In order to show this, Vida e morte do bandeirante, by José de Alcântara Machado (1875-1941), published in 1929, is taken as the guiding thread, as well as its relations with other authors who wrote on the same theme in the same period. By comparing these authors “in competition”, analyzing book reviews and contrasting the work with other books in the past, it can be understood that the novelty was expressed more by the form of writing, by approaching an already existing tendency of reports of curiosities about the past and the establishment of connections with law, rather than the attachment to historiographic methods or the distancing from them. Bringing all this to the debate thus allows a better understanding of the relations established between the author, the work, its readers and the intellectual space of São Paulo in the 1920s.