Following the outbreak of the Liberal Revolution, which broke out in Portugal after the revolutionary actions that happened in Porto on 24 August, and in Lisbon on 15 September 1820, a new political regime emerged and, consequently, changes in values as well as in ways of thinking and acting. It is a new conception of sovereignty with the shift of…

The historiography of education has increasingly used oral testimonies to understand school culture and the social microcosm of a school in its historical and social dynamics -- as, through oral testimonies, past experiences can be evoked and resignified in the narrated present. This paper thus aims to explore oral testimonies of former Portuguese…

We evoke here events that took place in an ordinary school, the Teacher Training College in Coimbra (Portugal), during the on-going revolutionary process ("processo revolucionário em curso"; PREC), in an attempt to understand people's actions within the collective becoming of a certain time and place, and to grasp how memory works as a…

Latin American independence from Spain and Portugal in the first decades of the nineteenth century was a process of global relevance. A considerable number of new polities emerged that had to deal with radically new political situations. Particularly in the case of the former Spanish colonies, a general rejection of the colonial past determined…

While working on the development of literacy in Portugal and comparing it with other European societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I not only saw how late Portugal had been in achieving this process, but also how inaccurate the available numbers about it were. I decided that as part of securing a better understanding of the…