Um olhar para as cidades: Richard Morse e a história urbana no Brasil

Abstract

Richard Morse, a North-American historian best known for his work Prospero’s Mirror, a comparative study of Anglo-America and Iberian-America published in the 1980s, is also the author of a seminal book on the history of São Paulo: From Community to Metropolis: A Biography of São Paulo, Brazil, first published in 1954 and republished in 1970. This book from his early years was a kind of study platform that allowed Morse to tread a path through the history of cities to understand society from a singular viewpoint. As he became a professor of Latin American History in the United States, Morse privileged in his courses the study of cities, an approach that provided him with access to society from a special angle, providing clues to understanding the Western culture. The main goal of this paper is to shed light on the way Morse devised his courses, to discuss the outcomes of his ideas in the urban historical studies today in Brazil