Sensibilidades e representações urbanas na transferência da capital de Minas Gerais
This study analyzes the urban representations generated as a consequence of the rupture experienced at the time of the transfer of the capital of Minas Gerais, in the last decade of the 19th century. The construction of a modern city, Belo Horizonte, as the new Capital of Minas Gerais, managed to encapsulate the newly-installed brand of Republican power in Brazil, replacing the old Ouro Preto, seat of Government and indisputable symbol of colonial domain and the administration of the recently-deposed monarchy. The contemporaneous urban images evident in political discourse, in chronicles, newspapers, sundry records and even literary writings are expressive of a new urban sensibility emerging from the process of the Capital's transference. Apparent are feelings and perceptions that oscillate between nostalgia, enchantment and fear caused by the simultaneous actions of the abandonment of one capital city and the invention of another. Many of these images have been incorporated into the urban imagination and still contribute today to the formulations of the identity of both cities - Ouro Preto and Belo Horizonte.
Time and Heritage
As a historian studying what can be considered a form of intellectual history, I have slowly come to adopt Michel de Certeau’s observation made at the end of the 1980s that ‘objectifying the past, for the last three centuries, has undoubtedly left unconsidered time within a discipline that has continued to use it as a taxonomic instrument’. To a certain degree, time has become commonplace for the historian who has preserved or instrumentalized it. It is not considered because it is inconceivable, but because we do not think of it or, more simply, we do not think about it. As a historian attempting to pay attention to the time I’m living in, I have thus, like many others, noticed the swift development of the category of the present until it has become obvious that the present is omnipresent. This is what I refer to here as ‘presentism’.
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":