O  dr. Joaquim Manuel Barros de Sousa teve a gentileza de oferecer para o meu arquivo todo um conjunto de documentos, incluindo manuscritos, panfletos, materiais gráficos, assim como periódicos e livros, que cobrem vários aspectos da sua actividade como oposicionista de antes do 25 de Abril e da sua vida pública na democracia  (como governante, deputado, autarca, dirigente associativo, autor, etc.). ligada a áreas da política, do jornalismo, educação, desporto, e à sua terra, a Figueira da Foz. Desse conjunto se fará aqui um inventário e se dará notícia e publicação dos documentos com mais interesse para a nossa história contemporânea, em particular da oposição democrática anterior ao 25 de Abril. Juntamente com o inventário se publicará  uma sua biografia mais detalhada.

*

Junto se publicam alguns dos materiais gráficos existentes num extenso dossier sobre o III Congresso da Oposição Democrática, ocorrido em Aveiro entre 4 e 8 de Abril de 1973. Nesse dossier encontra-se documentação inédita sobre o Congresso, originais de intervenções, documentos do núcleo da Figueira da Foz e materiais sobre a repressão da PIDE-DGS. Os materiais gráficos aqui reproduzidos tinham como objectivo essencial a recolha de fundos pela sua venda. Trata-se de postais e de percursores dos autocolantes. No caso destes últimos, a sua função era muito restrita, porque seria impossível o seu uso no vestuário numa altura em que era proibido a manifestação pública de preferências políticas, muito menos da oposição.

fonte: IISH

On 28 March 2008, the historic collections of the Netherlands institute for Southern Africa (NiZA) were handed over to the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam.

In order to guarantee the continuity and management of the collections, and thus to create opportunities for their future study and consultation, NiZA and IISH have jointly decided to house the collection at the IISH

fonte: http://www.uc.pt/tomenota/20080326_1

O arquivo pessoal do professor, jornalista, historiador e militante contra o Estado Novo Flausino Torres vai passar a integrar o espólio do Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril da Universidade de Coimbra.

No dia 27 de Março, em cerimónia que decorrerá pelas 12H00, na Reitoria da Universidade de Coimbra, o historiador e arqueólogo Cláudio Torres, filho de Flausino, e outros membros da família Torres, entregarão ao director do Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, mais este importante arquivo, que integra documentos fundamentais para o estudo da história política do século XX, com especial destaque para história das elites políticas portuguesas das décadas de 30 a 60.

Os documentos que agora serão entregues à Universidade de Coimbra foram cuidadosamente analisados e arrumados por Paulo Torres Bento, neto de Flausino Torres e também ele historiador. O arquivo é constituído por cinco caixas, contendo documentos políticos e correspondência, organizados por épocas, originais de muitos dos livros que publicou e um CD-Rom com fotografias digitalizadas, agrupadas também por épocas.

Os arquivos do PC dos EUA foram doados à New York University (agradeço as notas enviadas por Eduardo Cintra Torres e Jorge Lobo Mesquita sobre o assunto). Reproduzo a seguir a notícia do New York Times de 20 de Março de 2007 sobre essa doação. de autoria de Patricia Cohen:

The songwriter, labor organizer and folk hero Joe Hill has been the subject of poems, songs, an opera, books and movies. His will, written in verse the night before a Utah firing squad executed him in 1915 and later put to music, became part of the labor movement’s soundtrack. Now the original copy of that penciled will is among the unexpected historical gems unearthed from a vast collection of papers and photographs never before seen publicly that the Communist Party USA has donated to New York University. (…)

The cache contains decades of party history including founding documents, secret code words, stacks of personal letters, smuggled directives from Moscow, Lenin buttons, photographs and stern commands about how good party members should behave (no charity work, for instance, to distract them from their revolutionary duties).

By offering such an inside view, the archives have the potential to revise assumptions on both the left and the right about one of the most contentious subjects in American history, in addition to filling out the story of progressive politics, the labor movement and the civil rights struggles.

“It is one of the most exciting collecting opportunities that has ever presented itself here,” said Michael Nash, the director of New York University’s Tamiment Library, which will announce the donation on Friday.

Liberal and conservative historians, told by The New York Times about the archives, were enthusiastic about the addition of so many original documents to the historical record. No one yet knows whether they can resolve the die-hard disputes about the extent of the links between American subversives and Moscow since, as Mr. Nash said, “it will take us years to catalog.” But what is most exciting, said Mr. Nash and other scholars, is the new areas it opens up for research beyond the homegrown threat to security during the cold war.

Hill’s last rhyme — which begins, “My Will is easy to decide/ For there is nothing to divide” — was discovered in one of the 12,000 cartons. (Hill was convicted, some thought wrongly, of murder.) In other boxes were drafts of the party’s programs with handwritten editing changes and a stapled copy of its first constitution. “The Communist Party is a fact,” C. E. Ruthenberg, the executive secretary wrote on Sept. 18, 1919, days after the founders met in Chicago. A 1920 document marks the merger of the Communist Party and the Workers Party. It lists “Dix” as the secret party name of Earl R. Browder, who would later become general secretary of the party, “L. C. Wheat” as Jay Lovestone, who later turned against communism and worked with the AFL – CIO and the CIA, and Alexander Trachtenberg as “one of the confidential agents of Lenin in America.”

From years of being folded, many of the pages are impressed with grooved lines like wrinkled faces; others are scarred by cigarette burns and thin as onion skin. Some folders, filled with crumbling artifacts, look as if they’ve been sprinkled with yellowed confetti.

Ruthenberg underscores the “secret manner in which the party is conducted.” The Los Angeles branch, known as “XO1XO5” uses the password “ ‘Kur-heiny,’ which means: ‘Are you advancing?,’ ” he writes. “The answer is: ‘Teip,’ meaning ‘yes.’ ”

He copies a letter signed by the Russians Nikolai Bukharin and Ian Berzin that he said was hidden in the coat lining of a Bolshevik about how the Americans should operate. The two order the party to urge soldiers and sailors to agitate “against officers” and to arm workers. They warn against allowing members to engage in philanthropic or educational activities, insisting that they form “FIGHTING ORGANIZATIONS FOR SEIZING CONTROL OF THE STATE, for the overthrow of government and the establishment of the workers’ dictatorship.”

Robert Minor, a cartoonist and radical who covered the Russian civil war, has a clear-eyed and lyrical account of an interview with Vladimir Lenin in Moscow, dated December 1918. Lenin was fascinated by America, calling it a “great country in some respects,” and shot question after question at Minor: “ ‘How soon will the revolution come in America?’ He did not ask me if it would come, but when it would come.” Minor, who had not yet joined the party, found Lenin a bewitching figure. “When he thunders his dogma, one sees the fighting Lenin. He is iron. He is political Calvin,” Minor says in his typewritten notes. “And yet, Calvin has his other side. During all the discussion he had been hitching his chair toward me,” he writes. “I felt myself queerly submerged by his personality. He filled the room.”

As he leaves the Kremlin, Minor notices two men drive up in limousines. “A few months ago they were ‘bloodthirsty minions of predatory capital,’ ” he writes, “But now they are ‘people’s commissaries’ and ride in the fine automobiles as before, live in the fine mansions.” They rule “under red silk flags to protect them from all disorders. They have learned the rose smells as sweetly under another name.”

That description is “very important,” said John P. Diggins, a historian at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York . He said he expected a lot of new dissertations and books to result from the new archives. Historians have spent too much time arguing about the party’s subservience to Moscow, he said, neglecting Communists’ work in organizing labor and fighting racism, and their philosophical take on Marxism.

Every box offers up a different morsel of history. One contains a 1940 newsletter from students at City College in New York criticizing Britain for betraying the Jews in Palestine; another has a 1964 flyer from the Metropolitan Council on Housing urging rent strikes “to oppose the decontrol of over-$250 apartments.” There are the handwritten lyrics to Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”; a letter from W. E. B Du Bois in 1939 denying he took money from Japan for propagandizing on its behalf; and detailed complaints of police brutality against African-Americans.

Piles of prison correspondence from activists or party members show the human hand behind the rhetoric. “My dear wife Lydia,” Minor writes in pencil after being arrested in 1930 during a labor rally in Union Square in Manhattan. “That little half-hour today seemed the shortest of my whole lifetime. And so indescribably sweet!”

The party started out as an underground revolutionary organization but achieved its greatest successes and popularity in the late 1930s as part of the Popular Front, which it joined at Moscow’s direction, said Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College who has written several books on American communism. At the same time, he said, some Communist Party members were recruited into an espionage network, which expanded tremendously during World War II, and ultimately infiltrated the team working on the atomic bomb.

Despite its devotion to the Soviet line, the party was still influential in left-wing and labor circles into the first few years of the cold war era. But in 1948 it suffered a triple whammy: the Progressives expelled the Communists; the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, which was backed by the Soviets, soured many of its members; and the Red Scare ravaged its ranks. Revelations about Stalin’s crimes in 1956 disillusioned many of those who remained and dealt the party a near-fatal blow.

The Communist Party USA contacted Tamiment, which is devoted to the study of labor history and progressive politics, a year ago. Mr. Nash said he was surprised when he got the call. “I didn’t really realize it still existed,” he admitted.

During the summer, Mr. Nash said, he and a group of students scoured the party’s offices on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. They frantically packed up papers before contractors came in to renovate the space, which was being rented out. The donation includes 20,000 books, journals and pamphlets and a million photographs from The Daily Worker’s archives.

Sam Webb, national chairman of the Communist Party USA, said, “We felt that Tamiment could better maintain the collection and provide for a much wider audience.” He said hardly any of the files were reviewed before being given away.

The primary source of American party documents available to the public has been the Library of Congress, which microfilmed a batch of Communist Party USA records in Soviet archives that had been shipped there 50 years earlier for safekeeping. John Earl Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress who was the first American to examine the Soviet files, said that since N.Y.U. has a copy of the Library of Congress material, “This will give Tamiment the enviable position of being able to offer researchers access to what is in Moscow as well as the new C.P.U.S.A. collection.”

When the collection opened in 2000, the Library of Congress said, “the C.P.U.S.A. has always been a secretive organization,” and “the previous paucity of the archival record has been a major obstacle to scholarship on the history of the American Communist movement,” and a reason for “highly contentious” debates.

That contentiousness continues. In an article on The New Republic Web site last week unrelated to the donated archives, Ronald Radosh, a historian, attacked N.Y.U.’s newly created Center for the United States and the Cold War, which is partly sponsored by Tamiment Library. Looking at its spring calendar of events, he accused it of planning “completely one-sided and partisan events” and said the guests invited to Friday’s gathering are “all, without an exception, either communists or still-believing fellow-travelers.”

Mr. Nash, who is a co-director of the center, characterized Friday as a public relations event, and said overall its programs represent all views.

After flipping through boxes, Mr. Nash moved to a glass case that contained a photograph from the files, a picture of eight American officers who had fought in the Spanish Civil War as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In the next room was Moe Fishman, 92, one of the brigade’s last surviving members, who just happened to be in the library that day for the filming of an unrelated documentary. He had carried over the battalion’s tattered blue flag. Asked if he was in the black-and-white photograph, he slowly walked over, put on his glasses and peered down. “I’m not in that,” he said, “I wasn’t an officer.” But he added, “I have the same one at home.”

Começou a ser publicado no Arquivo Marxista na Internet o livro do historiador trotsquista Pierre Broué sobre o Partido Bolchevique escrito no final da década de cinquenta.

Nos últimos dois meses foi acrescentada ao Marxist Internet Archive / Arquivo Marxista na Internet uma série de textos de Staline, Mao Zedong e de comunistas brasileiros. Os textos estão em português do Brasil. Entre os textos disponíveis encontra-se o relatório de Luiz Carlos Prestes, A Situação Política e a Luta por um Governo Nacionalista e Democrático de Janeiro de 1959 e documentos das experiências de guerrilha maoista do Araguaia.

Lista dos novos textos em linha:

Está disponível o inventário do espólio de Manuel Sertório oferecido pela família ao Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril da Universidade de Coimbra. Manuel Sertório  foi um dos fundadores da revista Estudos sobre o Comunismo.

Na nota introdutória refere-se que: 

"A documentação foi oferecida por Elsa Sertório, filha de Manuel Sertório e deu entrada no Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril em 29 de Outubro de 1997. Evidenciava um cuidadoso trabalho de sistematização efectuado antes da doação. O estado de conservação dos documentos à chegada, considera-se bom.No respeito pelos critérios de arrumação originais procedeu-se à substituição completa das ferragens dos "dossiers", como medida de precaução contra o perigo de oxidação que, aliás, alguns deles já indiciavam, bem como ao restauro dos documentos mais deteriorados.A documentação entregue abarca, predominantemente, as décadas de 50 a 80 do século XX.

A parte mais representativa do espólio reflecte as actividades de Manuel Sertório enquanto activista da Oposição Política, primeiramente no exílio do Brasil e, depois, como militante da FPLN na Argélia. Na mesma data da doação foi entregue pelos doadores, no Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril, uma lista de documentação disponível na residência da viúva de Manuel Sertório, em Lisboa, e que diz respeito a manuscritos e recortes de imprensa de publicações de, ou sobre Manuel Sertório."

"Dando continuidade ao referido na Newsletter N.º 5, de 5 de Abril, retomamos aqui a divulgação do projecto de digitalização, em curso, da imprensa académica portuguesa, desta vez publicada entre 1933 e 1974. Durante este período, as publicações periódicas, mas também a rádio e os espectáculos públicos, estavam sujeitas à censura política do regime e, a partir de 1972, com a publicação da nova Lei de Imprensa, ao chamado exame prévio. Mas esta situação não impediu que os jornais, mas sobretudo as revistas, criticassem, ainda que de uma forma subtil, as estratégias políticas e culturais do Estado Novo. E, muitas vezes, na linha da frente destas críticas estavam as revistas das associações de estudantes, como, por exemplo, a Quadrante, uma das principiais revistas académicas publicadas no final dos anos 50. Aqui, editamos, em formato electrónico, os números uns ou primeiros números de algumas das colecções existentes na Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa, divulgando assim um espólio da maior importância para o conhecimento do movimento estudantil durante o Estado Novo."

(Newsletter, 8, 25 de Maio 2006)

Transcrevemos do Expresso Online a notícia sobre o depósito na Torre do Tombo do remanescente dos arquivos de Salazar e Caetano que ainda se encontravam na Presidência do Conselho de Ministros.

Os últimos 40 metros de documentos
Salazar na Torre do Tombo

Alterar tamanho
O remanescente dos arquivos de Oliveira Salazar e Marcello Caetano – que até hoje permaneciam sob a guarda da presidência do Conselho de Ministros – vão ser entregues à Torre do Tombo, no próximo Sábado, dia 24. «Com esta transferência documental completa-se finalmente o fundo da presidência do Conselho durante o Estado Novo, criada em 1938», disse ao EXPRESSO Online o comissário das comemorações do 25 de Abril, António Costa Pinto.

O acervo que vai ser entregue este Sábado é o que resta «dos arquivos de Salazar e Caetano que já se encontravam na Torre do Tombo, ficando o arquivo nacional na posse de toda a documentação dos dirigentes do Estado Novo», acrescentou Costa Pinto.

A cerimónia – promovida pelo Comissariado para as Comemorações dos 30 do 25 de Abril – realiza-se no auditório do Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais / Torre do Tombo, na cidade universitária de Lisboa, às 16h00, e será presidida pelo primeiro-ministro. Durão Barroso.

A documentação, numa extensão de 40 metros lineares, é entregue higienizada, organizada e inventariada. Proveniente do organismo de topo da Administração Pública e abrangendo o período de 1938 (data em que a Presidência do Conselho passou a dispor de Secretaria própria) a 1974, este acervo documental reflecte o modo de exercício do poder e, em geral, o funcionamento da sociedade portuguesa durante o Estado Novo. Deste modo, completam-se os «Arquivo Salazar» e «Arquivo Marcelo Caetano» já incorporados na Torre do Tombo

Manuela Goucha Soares

O Occasio Digital Social History Archive, o arquivo Internet do IISH, está disponível em linha. Da página de apresentação do projecto. reproduzimos a descrição do arquivo e as condições de acesso:

The Occasio Digital Social History Archive is the Internet archive of the IISH. It is a collection of newsgroup messages on social, political and ecological issues distributed on the internet. The project was launched in 1995, following a suggestion by Tjebbe van Tijen, when the Antenna Foundation, at the request of the IISH, started to collect and store APC conferences (newsgroups) and material about the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Its aim was to preserve important social and political digital documents and to make them accessible to historians and social scientists. The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) provided initial funding. As a result, 2,300,000 messages from 2,300 newsgroups dating from 1986-2002 are now available for research. They deal with labour issues, human rights, poverty, development, war and peace, health issues, the environment, women’s and gender issues, regional news, ethnic and religious minorities, media, art, and much, much more.

Occasio is an archival collection, so users cannot reply to the messages or post new ones. Antenna and the IISH, however, will continue to collect new messages from newsgroups and mailing lists on social and political issues. In the near future, these documents will also become available from the Occasio webpages.

Segundo regista o Museu da República e da Resistência a Biblioteca Dulce Ferrão será integrada nos seus fundos:

“O espólio de 26 mil volumes da biblioteca que o jornalista, escritor e democrata Carlos Ferrão foi reunindo veio enriquecer o núcleo original da Biblioteca – Museu República e Resistência permitindo que a Biblioteca Dulce Ferrão se apresente como o mais completo repositório bibliográfico do Portugal contemporâneo, com destaque para a História da Primeira República, do Estado Novo e da oposição ao Regime, do 25 de Abril e seus actores, da Guerra Colonial e da Descolonização Portuguesa.”

Publica-se a nota que John Earl Haynes fez para a lista de discussão H-HOAC, dos estudiosos do comunismo americano, sobre o estado deste projecto , fundamental para toda a história contemporânea do século XX :

“COMINTERN E-ARCHIVE CREATED

The Incomka project is now in its final stages. At the end of June the final product will be installed in computer work stations at RGASPI with installation at the partner institutions following. Installation at the Library of Congress is currently scheduled for the end of September 2003. The Incomka product will initially be accessible only at workstations at the partner institutions, an RGASPI requirement. RGASPI is negotiating with web providers to make the Incomka project available on a subscription/fee basis via the web, but that is for the future. Until the web product is available, the Incomka product will be available for free but only at a workstation in each partner institution.”