ABSTRACT
Long the domain of the retired lawyer or the avocation of the literate elite, the writing of colonial Brazilian history has since the end of the first Vargas era (1945) come increasingly into the hands of professional academics. Legal history, a favorite of the nineteenth-century bachareis, has suffered a decline, while economic studies are all the rage. Such trends reflect the interests of the age and are tied to the concern of Brazilians with their future as well as their past. A good index of the professionalization of historical production in Brazil and of another development, the growth of interest among foreign scholars in colonial Brazilian history, is the increasing number of periodicals that carry articles of importance on the colonial past. It is no longer odd to see experts on the United States South citing Florestan Fernandes, while the best Brazilian scholars continue to read widely and to absorb foreign scholarship.
