All Publications
The complete list of works published by the Academy, gathered in one place.
All Publications
Showing 1–24 of 38
Florence Exhibition Gathers 4,500 Years of Broken Artworks
Smithsonian Magazine reported on an exhibition in Florence of more than 80 incomplete artworks, which will later travel to Washington, D.C.
Melting Norwegian Ice Reveals 48 Prehistoric Arrows
Smithsonian Magazine reported that archaeologists recovered 48 prehistoric arrows from melting ice in Norway's Jotunheimen mountains.
The Reader of Time: "Midnight Mass", by Machado de Assis
Rio, May 1894: a reader opens the magazine and finds a new story by Machado. It is printed here in full — a conversation the narrator never understood.
The Reader of Time: News of the Drought in Ceará, July 1877
Letters from the interior of Ceará, printed in Rio in July 1877: 4,619 migrants counted on a single road, families eating wild plants, children left behind on the way.
The Personalities of the Military Dictators After 1964 and the Country That Emerged from Them
Five men, twenty-one years, and a machine of repression that outgrew each of them. A study of character, and of what character does when it holds absolute power.
The Marquis of Tamandaré, the Old Sailor
In 1848, off Liverpool, a Brazilian commander threw himself into the rescue of an emigrant ship bound for Boston. He refused the reward, and asked for no military honors at his ow…
The Middle Ages and Their Military Monastic Orders
Warrior monks who invented banking, founded states in Palestine, and ended as a state of their own on the Baltic: the Templars and the Teutonic Knights.
The Reader of Time: The Last Farewell to Dom Pedro II in Paris
Rio, 1892: a French newspaper arrives with the Emperor's funeral on its cover. Republican France honored him; his own country sent no one.
Dona Leopoldina, an Extraordinary Woman
An Austrian archduchess convened the council that decided Brazil should separate from Portugal, and wrote to her husband: "The fruit is ripe; pick it now."
The Reader of Time: Preparations for O Guarani
Rio, December 2, 1870: the night a Brazilian novel, turned into Italian opera and applauded at La Scala, finally opened at home — on the Emperor's birthday.
The Emperors of Brazil and Freemasonry
Pedro I was a Grand Master; Pedro II refused the Vatican's demand to punish Masons. The constitutional gap that made both possible — and the "Religious Question" that helped toppl…
The Reader of Time: A Moreninha
Rio, 1885: a wife plans a trip to Paquetá because of a novel — and explains why the Court once summered on an island called the Isle of Loves.
The Dezembrada: The December Campaign That Decided the Paraguayan War
"Follow me, all who are Brazilian!" In under a month of December 1868, Caxias crossed the Chaco marshes and broke what remained of López's army.
The Art of Pedro Américo
The Battle of Avaí, seen beside the Battle of Austerlitz: two vast history paintings, two palettes, and what a painter chooses to do with the suffering of thousands.
Evolution, God, and the Syndrome of Cain
Confucius, Darwin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy disagreed about almost everything. On one prohibition they did not: do not kill.
Samurai and Medieval Knights: Bonds and Sanctions
Two warrior institutions that shared a time but never a territory: the bushidō and the oath of homage, the harakiri and the excommunication.
The Greatest Philosophers: Illuminated Guides to a Full Life
Socrates, Plato, the Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, Teresa of Ávila: thinkers who never met, whose ideas meet in a single spiral of self-knowledge.
For the Conceptualization of Philosophy as Intangible Heritage of Humanity
Banned by Justinian in 529, recovered in Florence a thousand years later, and running through Hegel to this day: the case for philosophy as the greatest intangible heritage we hav…
The USSR: A Blend of Atheism and Religion
Forty thousand churches pulled down, and an embalmed body in Red Square. What the Soviet state destroyed as religion, it rebuilt as cult.
Confucius: The Master Still Echoes
A state that governs by kindness rather than force, the Golden Rule, and the Mandate of Heaven: why the Chinese philosopher still speaks to the search for happiness.
Catalan Medieval Art: A Heritage Read Politically
Why Romanesque painting is dark and Gothic painting is luminous — and what the change of palette says about hunger, plague, and power.
The Grand Middle Kingdom
From the Xia to the Qing: the dynasties that made China, and the alternation of disorder and splendor that carried it to the position it holds today.
The Reader of Time: Maria Augusta Generoso Estrella, Brazil's First Woman Physician
In 1880, a couple in Rio reads in the Gazeta a letter from the girl who left for New York at fifteen to study medicine. The letter is reproduced here in full.
From Award-Winning Pavilion to the Erasure of the Monroe Palace
Brazil's pavilion at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair won the architecture prize, crossed the ocean, hosted the Pan-American Conference — and was demolished in 1976. Two marble lio…