Portugal contemporâneo: estudos de história

This volume brings together diverse texts that discuss what Portugal was from the early half of the 19th century to the first quarter of the 20th century, with some incursions into more recent or earlier times. The chronological scope thus, extends from the collapse of the Old Regime and the arrival of the liberal contemporaneous period, starting in 1820, to the end of the First Republic and the triumph of the new dictatorial order in 1926, later crystallized in the Estado Novo. The book's connecting thread is not given merely by the chronology and sequential arrangement of the texts. There is some thematic continuity and articulation between all of them, revealing the main themes of eighteenth- and eighteenth-century Portugal explored here: the events and ruptures, the institutions, laws, projects, values, practices and habits that (in)shaped political evolution and culture, the dynamics, spaces, instruments and dimensions of public opinion, and the conditions, utopias and limits of awareness and the exercise of modern citizenship. The publication of this collection of studies thus aims to make available in a single volume a set of texts whose sum conveys a vivid, diachronic, and problematizing image of what contemporary Portugal was, a reality of the recent past and of undeniable importance as a key to the country's present and future, because it was in that first century of the contemporary era that Portugal and the portuguese people were transformed into much of what they are nowadays.