"Nas margens da história": Pedro Ivo, man and myth (1832-1865)

• Grant number: 24/15963-3
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: June 01, 2025
• End date: May 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Maria Luiza Ferreira de Oliveira
• Grantee: Maria Luiza Ferreira de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research seeks to study the trajectory of Pedro Ivo Velloso da Silveira, a soldier and rebel leader born in Olinda in 1811 who died at sea in 1852. A trajectory that will not be understood as linear, endowed with a logical sense, but understood in its multiple situations, in the changing configurations of man's experience in time. The periodization goes from 1832, when Pedro Ivo was sent to Ceará to put down the Pinto Madeira revolt, until 1865, the year in which the abolitionist poet Castro Alves recited the emblematic poem in his honor. We will analyze the dimensions of his experience in the Army, the conditions he faced and the struggles he witnessed; the projects in dispute during the period, the configuration of the political debate at the time; analyze the repercussions of his death and the way in which his figure was rescued in the public debate during the 1850s and the first years of 1860. The research aims to get to know other rebels who walked alongside Pedro Ivo and are little or almost not mentioned in historiography, such as Batinga, Cadete Falcão, Alferes Maniva and, especially, Caetano Alves da Silva, a former Cabano leader. In the 1840s and 1850s there was a politicization in society that was in the newspapers of several provinces, it was in the squares and cafes of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife, and it was also in the forests, among poor free men, freedmen, Indians, quilombolas , enslaved. I will try to understand how man became a myth; He won a nationalist banquet in Niterói, was called the "Kosuth pernambucano" by one of the largest newspapers in the Court, "hero of the national refoundation" by republican newspapers, and leader of the "communists of the backlands", as predicted by an influential conservative publicist. I will map the poems that were published in newspapers throughout Brazil to praise him, investigate who the poets were who recited at parties and in the public square, the editors and typographers who made his name known nationally as it represented a dream of transformation, and, above all, to understand in greater depth the political debates and tensions experienced in this period that shaped a peculiar political culture, marked by a new nationalist project, radical in nature and still little known. (AU)