David Penteado

Objectives

Among these periodicals, in 1833, a periodical derived from this tradition stood out for its longevity and specificity in the search to improve the country’s production methods, O Auxiliador da Industria Nacional (The Helper of National Industry). The periodical was created by the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional (Society for the Promotion of the National Industry), having circulated for sixty years and extinct only in 1896. This research seeks to understand the history and functioning of the periodical and which transformations it underwent, editorial and institutional. Through the analysis of institutional documents, the compilation and classification of the periodical's content, the examination of the relevant official bibliography, and the historiography of science journalism and communication, this project proposes to analyse the history of the periodical over its six decades of publication, the thematic evolution of its content, and the participation of the Brazilian government on its funding and distribution.

This research asks how scientific knowledge became publicly legible and politically consequential in nineteenth-century Brazil through the periodical press, when both publishing infrastructure and scientific institutions were still consolidating. Centring on O Auxiliador da Indústria Nacional (1833-92, with reappearances in 1896 and 1903), funded and distributed by the Imperial Government, it situates the journal within transnational circuits of scientific communication and within the practical demands of imperial governance. It advances three historiographical claims: that O Auxiliador belonged to the wider world of science periodicals, that it served a dual political function for state modernisation and associational advocacy, and that it relied heavily on foreign technical and scientific material.

Methodologically, the project combines narrative reconstruction with corpus work, including the indexing and classification of the journal's full run, totalling more than six thousand items. That approach reveals how editorial practice, institutional strategy, and state patronage shaped what could circulate as useful knowledge, and how the withdrawal of public support contributed to the journal's closure in 1892. Two companion articles extend the argument by foregrounding institutions and people: one shows, through the journal, statutes, and ministerial records, how O Auxiliador functioned as a state-facing instrument for scientific popularisation and programmes of improvement and national integration; the other reconstructs editorial labour through a prosopographic profile of editors and committees, highlighting the prominence of professionals whose careers were closely tied to state administration.