“Em prol do progresso intelectual e material desta grande zona sertaneja”: ideais de progresso e modernidade em Feira de Santana - Bahia no jornal Folha do Norte (1909-1940).

Abstract

The first of the Republic years in Brazil were marked as a time of redefinition of spaces and power relations that because the promise of equality, the abolition of slavery and the legalization of elections at all levels, threatening the order and distribution hierarchical in force until then, and they published a new political and social order for the Brazilian society in the early twentieth century, providing the ideal environment for the emergence of new experiences between individuals in cities. In this context, the improvement of towns was imposed as a result of the claim for the provision of basic needs to the city dwellers imbued with the ideals of "modernity", "progress" and "civilization": hygiene, lighting, security, mobility, demanding the creation of vigilante elements for these services due to population concentration that created problems for administrators. Thus, this study was aimed at analyzing the ideals of progress and modernity in Feira de Santana / Bahia through North newspaper Folha discourse between 1909 and 1940 - associated with the publication of the Municipal Code of Postures and works of memoir writers and chroniclers - in its materiality: stroke streets, opening new neighborhoods, electrification system, zoning, adoption of updated construction techniques, appropriate styles to visually express the "arrival" of progress and thus the withering anyway contrary to it. As well as understand the city of Feira de Santana as a territorial machine, which was built and designed by a local elite in the process of urbanization / modernization to control all kinds of flows, whether of men, goods or own desires, seeking it disciplinary look and produce pleasing images to progress. Our work follows and dialogue with the theoretical formulations of Roger Chartier, Sandra Jathay Pesavento, Maria Stella Brescianni, among others, concerned with the sensibilities and urban imagery suggested historiography thought the city from the representations, sensitive cities, towns pensadas.Tomamos loan methodological proposals historian Carlo Ginzburg, especially the so-called test "Signs: roots of an evidential paradigm" in which the author takes up the concept of evidential paradigm, linking it to the concept of clinical examination, versed in building an interpretative method in which attention to detail, the symptoms, the evidence, the slopes would allow the historian to grasp a deeper reality, otherwise unattainable. We realized through the newspaper to the continuing concern of public bodies and local authorities in carrying out the displacement of the representation of Feira de Santana as a city of rural bases, to set it as a metropolis endowed with a powerful trade and a city structure. So in that sense, it is to investigate the relations between the ideals present in modernizing republican ideals and its alliance as new forms of perception of the city expressed in that journal.