Tropical marginalia: A footnote history of the General History of Brazil by Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1854-1953)

The first history of Brazil written by a Brazilian was the General History of Brazil, originally published during the years of 1854-1957. Since then, the history of Brazil has been majorly understood as a sequential series of historical stages of national development towards an ideal age, which back in the time when the General History of Brazil was published, it was represented by the Brazilian Second Empire. A few decades later, already under the Republican regime, the book began to be noted by historians others then the author and doubled its volume of pages. This huge amount of text has been specially attached to the General History of Brazil by the addition of footnotes. It means once one starts reading all this parallel textual content, he/she will be presented not only to the original work, but also to this second hidden-amongst-footnotes-book. During this process some ideas on Brazilian identity, history, and culture were invested of canonical status perpetuated for almost a century.