Professor Ângelo Machado: career, scientific contributions, and the iconic neuroanatomy book

ABSTRACT Professor Ângelo Barbosa Monteiro Machado (May 22, 1934 to April 6, 2020) was one of the most outstanding and respected professors in the Brazilian history. He worked broadly as a professor, neuroscientist, writer, dramaturgist, neurobiologist, and entomologist. The publication of the neuroanatomy book is pioneer, revolutionary, and iconic in the history of academic medical education in Brazil. In the literature field, he also wrote many books in which he adapted scientific knowledge to children. In this article, the authors approach the academic life of Professor Ângelo Machado and the steps that culminated in the most renowned Brazilian textbook of neuroanatomy: Neuroanatomia Funcional.

War of Canudos

The War of Canudos was fought in the northeastern desert-like backlands (sertão) of Brazil at the end of the 19th century between the community of Belo Monte/Canudos and Brazil’s recently established republican government. The leader of Canudos, a charismatic man known as Antônio Conselheiro, was considered a holy man by his followers and exemplified many of the beliefs and practices of folk Catholicism in the region. While he wandered the backlands for many years, rebuilding churches, pronouncing sermons, and living a deeply ascetic life, he entered into conflict with authorities following the passage from monarchy to republic in 1889, a secular form of government that lacked authority in his eyes. Once Conselheiro settled in a hamlet in 1893, baptizing it Belo Monte, the settlement became a center of attraction and grew quickly, draining labor and threatening the power of neighboring landowners. After two small Bahian expeditions sent to fight with the inhabitants of Belo Monte (called Canudos by outsiders) were routed, news of the community and its leader spread like wildfire in both the Bahian press as well as newspapers in the country’s center of power in the southeast. The failure of a third and larger military expedition sent by the federal government turned Canudos into a media event, leading to songs, caricatures, conspiracy theories, and even carnival costumes. While the community did not arguably pose any real threat to the still nascent republic, it became symbolized as such in the media. A fourth and much larger military expedition finally destroyed the community after months of siege. While the war continued to exert an outsized presence in a variety of media, including poems, memoirs, novelizations, and testimonials, its status as a singular and epic event in Brazilian history was cemented with the publication of Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões four years after the end of the conflict, a book based on the author’s experience as a war correspondent for a São Paulo newspaper. The consecration of Os Sertões as one of the foundational texts of Brazilian nationality, however, poses a challenge for understanding the War of Canudos outside the optics and intelligibility established by da Cunha’s text.

Gender and Sexuality in Colonial Brazil

The topics of gender and sexuality in Brazilian historiography, though available from colonial chroniclers to the present, were notably absent in 19th-century historiography, which was constrained by the moral taboos and racial prejudices of that age. This was true until the early 20th-century turning point represented by the works of Paulo Prado with regard to language, and of Gilberto Freyre with regard to content, in their pioneering attempts to address the issue, emphasizing how interracial procreation and sexual desires shaped Brazilian history. Historical research at universities began in the 1980s, based on unpublished sources and international scholarship on new topics. This resulted in studies on marital relations, misogynist patriarchalism, accepted models of licit sexuality, and various other transgressions such as adultery, concubinage, male and female homosexuality, sexual imagery, libidinous behavior by members of the clergy, and acts considered deviant behavior or associated with heresy. Recently, sources have come into use from the Ecclesiastical Court and the Portuguese Inquisition, which assumed jurisdiction over accusations of bigamy, sodomy, priests who took advantage of the confessional to molest their parishioners, and declarations that contradicted Catholic moral theology with regard to chastity, celibacy, and fornication or were suspected of being heretical due to their association with Protestant doctrines. Additionally, there are important works inspired by French scholarship on the history of mentalities and the historical and philosophical contributions of Michel Foucault.

Digital Resources: Intellectuals in Brazil

The en masse digitalization of sets of documents held by memory institutions in Brazil and the promotion of remote access to them has impacted the writing and the reinterpretation of Brazilian history and historiography in different dominions. In Brazil, at the national and regional levels, there are numerous academies, libraries, foundations, museums, institutions, and centers of documentation which preserve and are progressively making various—and often meaningful—collections available online to scholars and researchers in the area of intellectual history. Taking into account the quantity and diversity of these collections, already available on the Internet, and the impossibility of elaborating an exhaustive inventory, it was decided to present a sample of institutions of diverse natures which hold expressive sets of collections with online access, whether in their totality or significant parts of them. This option was complemented by the no less important listing of the collection of a foreign university library, as well as the listing of various other digital addresses considered useful for the knowledge of researchers. It is also worth mentioning that the selected sites not only contain significant digitalized sets of documents but also allow free and unrestricted access, through online research instruments.

The History and Historiography of Populism in Brazil (1930–1964)

The first decades of the 21st century brought back to the international arena a family of terms well known in Latin America to designate both styles of politics and the leaders who embodied them: populism and populists. Brazil is seen as a paradigmatic example of this type of experience, called “classic populism,” for two periods of its history, corresponding to its process of transition from a “traditional” society to a “modern” economy and society. The first period ran from the 1930 revolution until 1945, with the fall of the Estado Novo and the removal of its “leader,” Getúlio Vargas. The latter period covered the 1950s, “the golden years of populism,” since, despite the socioeconomic development achieved, democracy did not manage to establish itself in the country. The populist interpretation of this period of Brazilian history was formulated and shared by academia, essentially after the 1964 coup, and was dominant in the 1960s and 1970s. However, it extended these frontiers, using the language of the media, political conflicts, and the common sense of Brazilians. Widely used, the concepts of populism and populist were conflated with the events and characters they name, only being critiqued in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, the number of scholars seeking other references has grown, whether redrafting the meanings of the original proposal, the case of the “populist political system,” or abandoning it completely, in the example of the “trabalhista pact.” In this dense debate, one constant can be observed: in Brazil populism became a “category of accusation,” translating negative values present in the “other” to whom one is referring. Although many academic studies do not use this pejorative tone, it is so consolidated in Brazilian politics that it has become part of the political culture of parties and trade unions, circulating widely.

Uma abordagem metodológica de Sensoriamento Remoto para o monitoramento da contaminação do rio Paraopeba pós-desastre de Brumadinho-MG

The following article aims to present and discuss the monitoring, through Remote Sensing, of the dirt displacement caused by the collapse of the Córrego do Feijão’s dam I of mining waste, which occurred on January 25, 2019, in the rural area of Brumadinho, a city located in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. This event is considered one of the greatest technoindustrial disasters in Brazilian history, placing in danger one of the largest hydrographic basin in Brazil: the São Francisco river basin. The search area comprises from where the sludge mud got in contact with the Paraopeba’s right bank to its mouth into the Três Marias Dam, adding up to approximately 315 km. For this monitoring the spectral band ratio method was utilized, using images from the sensors MSI/Sentinel-2 and OLI/Landsat-8 captured at different dates, employing standardization of means and variances to harmonize the range of the surface reflectance values in each image.

Educational practices and knowledge constituted in the political training processes of black activists: a literature review

This text undertakes a bibliographic survey of academic discussions involving the trajectories of black women activists. Historically, black women have challenged institutional powers, facing racism and sexism, while oppressions crystallized in society. One of the strategies to face oppression is the movement of black women, in the form of organizations that fight within an intersectional perspective. We understand that Black Feminism plays a leading role in the action of educating, highlighting its pedagogical role in the dissemination of knowledge, in addition to its political role throughout Brazilian history. Black feminism highlights the specificity of the feminine that aggregates struggles and processes experienced by black women. We hope, with this text, to present reflections that problematize black women's movements, showing the complexity of concepts related to educational practices and knowledge constituted in political formation processes of black women activists, based on research registered in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations of CAPES.