In Portugal\u2019s Overseas Historical Archives, the recovery has been concluded of all the documentation referring to the colonial administration of the Captaincy of S\u00e3o Paulo (which came to include Minas Gerais and the whole of the south of Brazil). Partly financed by FAPESP under the Bar\u00e3o do Rio Branco Recovery Project, coordinated by the Ministry of Culture, aimed at the recovery of some 300,000 documents referring to the colonial period of the country, which was divided into captaincies in those days -, this documentation is now available on microfilm and CD-ROMs, and will soon reach the Internet.<\/p>\n
The material was handed over on September 25th last, in the Foundation\u2019s auditorium, at the opening of the Recovery Project and Millennium Agenda Congress<\/em>, which joined the Brazilians and the Portuguese involved in the research (please see the following article).<\/p>\n At the time, FAPESP\u2019s acting president, Paulo Eduardo de Abreu Machado, stressed the \u201ceffort to compile this documentation\u201d, and said that the project means \u201cthe recovery of even our citizenship, as we become acquainted with our roots\u201d. He revealed that \u201cthe next challenge is to make this data available to the international community through the Internet\u201d: the Recovery Project should be on SciEL site (Scientific Electronic Library on line), which, by\u00a0 electronically formatting the main Brazilian scientific publications, ensures visibility for the whole national scientific production.<\/p>\n Historian Jos\u00e9 Jobson de Andrade Arruda, a member of FAPESP\u2019s Senior Board and a coordinator of the S\u00e3o Paulo part of the Recovery Project, celebrated the conclusion of this phase, which resulted in over one thousand hitherto unknown documents (besides the 5,100 that were already known, but which were cataloged again), 11 CDs and 103 rolls of microfilms, now deposited in the State Archives and in the university libraries. He stressed that, with the storage of this great volume of primary sources \u2013 the most important in historiography \u2013 , the researchers are receiving \u201ca guideline, a mapping out of the territory where history treads on\u201d.<\/p>\n Fernando de Souza, the representative of Portugal\u2019s Ministry of Science and Technology, revealed that \u201cat the end of the year, we will be gathering opinions to define a policy for cooperation in common projects\u201d between Portugal and Brazil.<\/p>\n Recovery of citizenship Talking about the progress of the \u201cenormous effort\u201d made with the Recovery Project, and mentioning the states where it has been finished and those where it is still under way, Weffort stressed the idea of putting the documents within the reach of the public on the Internet: \u201cThis has enormous intellectual significance on the international level\u201d. He made it known that the stage of recovering colonial documentation in the Dutch archives has already begun, and that this year the project will be moving towards the archives of Spain, Italy and France.\u00a0 And he warned: \u201cBe prepared: new requests for funding will come, because this will multiply research projects all over Brazil\u201d.<\/p>\n According to Jos\u00e9 Fernando Perez, FAPESP\u2019s scientific director, the Recovery Project, coordinated by the Ministry, like the Foundation\u2019s Genome and Biota programs, are mobilizers, because they not only generate hefty collections of information, they also transform this data into knowledge.<\/p>\n During the reception that followed, Ambassador Murtinho revealed that two thirds of the project have been concluded, the documentation for the captaincy of Bahia (the seat of the General Government for two and a half centuries) is in the final stages, and that Rio de Janeiro (no less than the capital of the kingdom) would still call for some work, being the biggest. \u201cWe have already learned a lot\u201d, says the ambassador, for whom the most important achievement is \u201cthe view of the whole\u201d. He also points out the format of the research material provided by the project: \u201cThe CD-ROM has made access to the documents more democratic. Microfilm viewers are few, and computers are many\u201d.<\/p>\n Guardian of the treasure<\/strong> The Portuguese side has also profited. \u201cThe Archives\u201d, says Maria Lu\u00edsa, \u201care much in demand, and, to benefit those who researched into the 19th and 20th centuries, we did not have the time to organize everything\u201d. Once it was stirred up by the presence of around 50 Brazilians, it was possible to make progress in the 15 kilometers (measured as the length of the shelves) of documentation that was still awaiting proper organization.\u00a0 As to Brazil, says Maria Lu\u00edsa, \u201cwe succeeded in organizing the whole of the documentation\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The documents about the Captaincy of S\u00e3o Paulo is handed over","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"coauthors":[573],"class_list":["post-52086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policies-st-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52086\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52086"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=52086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/strong>After personally handing over the material of the S\u00e3o Paulo Recovery Project to the representatives of the universities, the Minister of Culture, Francisco Weffort, emphasized the participation of the Brazilian coordinators of the project, Ambassador Wladimir Murtinho and Professor Esther Bertoletti.\u00a0 \u201cIf we had three important projects for the commemoration of Brazil\u2019s 500 years and of Portugal\u2019s Great Discoveries, this was one of them\u201d, he said. He considered that the project \u201crecovers the sense of citizenship with regard to Portugal\u201d, and praised the \u201cextraordinary cooperation of the Portuguese\u201d.<\/p>\n
\nMaria Lu\u00edsa Abrantes, from Portugal, points out, more than the easiness of access, the abundance of documents that she patiently helped to survey, as a director of the Overseas Historical Archives. To get an idea, she says, \u201c50% of the Archive\u2019s documents on all the former Portuguese colonies refer to Brazil\u201d. And she adds that, if we consider that Brazilian independence, at the beginning of the 19th century, stopped the flow of documents, while the documents from the other colonies kept coming until the 70s, Brazil\u2019s participation becomes even more important.<\/p>\n