José Manuel Sobral

National Identity and Higher Education: From the Origins till 1974

In his chapter, Sobral sets out to reconstruct the connection between national identity and higher learning from Portugal’s beginnings as a political identity in the Middle Ages until the democratic revolution of 1974. Assuming that the Portuguese nation is a product of the founding of the Kingdom of Portugal, the author traces the links between its history and that of the establishment of a Portuguese university. Though there is a connection between the kingdom’s prestige and the university, only later was it assumed that the university should have a central role in the development of the nation, a role that continued under the liberal regime and the Republic. The dictatorship of the Estado Novo marked a break in the expansion of higher learning almost to the end, when policies changed the better to put Portugal in a position comparable with more developed countries.

The High and the Low in the Making of a Portuguese National Cuisine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The sphere of food and cuisine is one area that reflects the major contrast Goody establishes between Eurasia and Black Africa of pre-colonial times (Goody 1982: 98). In Goody’s view, unlike Sub-Saharan Africa, Eurasia has long been deeply stratified in terms of social position and culture between the high and the low: the upper classes or castes versus the lower ones and haute cuisine versus the fare of commoners. Haute cuisine has always been a reserved area for elites — in the quantity and diversity of the ingredients used, in its exotic components and in the complexity of preparation. Though not devoid of creativity, the food of the majority was dominated by cheaper and locally available foodstuffs.

Perante a Pneumônica: a epidemia e as respostas das autoridades de saúde pública e dos agentes políticos em Portugal (1918-1919)

The Spanish influenza epidemic occurred in Portugal when this country faced enormous economic, political and sanitary problems. The country was poor, living mainly from agriculture and was involved in the First World War. There were food shortages, a high cost of living, as well as a strong social and political crisis. Although people were used to deal with successive epidemic diseases, the sudden and violent character of the Spanish influenza took everybody by surprise. According to some estimation it killed about 140 thousand in a 6 million persons countryThe answer of the political and sanitary agents was marked by contextual factors (the economic, social and political crisis) as well as by structural ones (very poor hygienic and sanitary conditions, lack of financial resources, of doctors and medicines, impotence of medical knowledge in dealing with the pandemic).