Gilberto Freyre and the new history

Abstract

The point of departure of this article is a series of similarities between the ‘new history’ associated with the French journal Annales, and the social history, psycho-history or historical anthropology of Gilberto Freyre; similarities which range from a concern with material culture (food, clothes and housing), to an interest in mentalities and the history of childhood, a theme which preoccupied Freyre in the years before he published Casa-grande & senzala. These similarities of approach were recognized by both Febvre and Braudel when they discovered Freyre’s work in the later 1930s. Freyre was not imitating Annales, nor were Febvre and Braudel imitating him. He learned his interdisciplinary style at Columbia, a centre of the American ‘new history’ movement of the beginning of the century. However, Freyre was, like Febvre, admirer of Michelet. His ‘historia intima’ also owes something to the Histoire Intime practised by the Goncourt brothers, the importance of which in the history of historical writing has not been sufficiently recognized.