Evoking Silva Dias on his centenary: History and memory

Abstract

To evoke an author may involve an objective historical analysis and the recourse to memory, i.e. to the author's personal testimony. Such was our intention by writing the present paper on José Sebastião da Silva Dias. Therefore, we studied Silva Dias as an ideologist, who shifted from Catholicism and integralism, with a social ballast, to a democratic socialist outlook. We have also tried to highlight that Silva Dias arrived at that ideology through an objective analysis of History, connecting the knowledge of the document to philosophical thinking. Above all, as a modernist and contemporanist (in this case mostly as a research supervisor) we owe him a «school« or «schools». Ultimately, he renewed historiography, laying the grounds, since the 1960s, of scientific Contemporary History Studies.