A guerra do Paraguai na literatura didática: em estudo comparativo

Abstract

This work is linked to the History Teaching and Historical Knowledge research line of the Graduate Program in History at the Federal University of Paraíba, which has Historical Culture as area of concentration. Our goal was to analyze, in a comparative study, the approaches on previously selected issues of History textbooks, produced in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, concerning a specific subject: the war in Paraguay. Considering the debate about this theme carried on the academic level and in the light of new historiographical studies, we emphasized two moments for the analysis of textbooks, the first of which falls on those whose authors (Nelson Piletti and Joana Neves & Elza Nadai) wrote at least since the 1980s, submitting to periodic reviews their works which were published and used until the late 1990s meaning that these school textbooks have passed through the period of the so-called revisionism and neorevisionism regarding the historiography of the Paraguayan War. We stress that, precisely because of the comparative character of the study, we used the 1980s and 1990s editions of the these works. The second stage of analysis investigates the book of the professor Gilberto Cotrim, in editions of 1999 and 2005. In the 1990s, when the first edition of Cotrim was published, the discussions about the Paraguayan War between the so-called revisionist and neorevisionists were intensified. Therefore we attempted to correlate such subject in the selected textbooks, in its various editions, with the bibliography and academic production of the time, and observe the historiographical influences for its production, noticing if there were changes in the concepts of the text and in the interpretation of the authors of textbooks, as a consequence of the historiographical renewal and revisionism, especially of those concepts which concern the causes of conflict. For this purpose, we discussed various aspects that support this objective, such as the transformations in the very materiality and design of textbooks over the issues analyzed, without, however, having the intention to deepen or focus on this latter discussion.