Oliveira Lima, Manuel de (1867–1928)

Manuel de Oliveira Lima (b. 25 December 1867; d. 24 March 1928), Brazilian historian and diplomat. Although he was born in Recife, Oliveira Lima received most of his education in Portugal, where he began his diplomatic career in 1890 as an appointee of the new republican government. He later occupied many posts in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. A notable speaker and an engaging but outspoken conversationalist, he acted on several other occasions as an ambassador of Brazilian culture abroad. In 1920, he retired from public service and established himself in Washington, D.C., where he taught at the Catholic University of America. He donated over forty thousand books and manuscripts, which he had collected from his many travels, as a token of international peace and friendship to found the Oliveira Lima Ibero-American Library at the Catholic University. Most of the works focus on the history and culture of Portugal, Spain, and their American domains.

Oliveira Lima published a historical drama and several works on his diplomatic experience and many conferences on Brazilian history and literature, some of which he wrote in French. His first historical study, Pernambuco, seu desenvolvimento histórico (The Historical Development of Pernambuco [1895]) is a remarkable history of the province from its beginnings to 1848. Still useful are the notes he appended in 1917 to Francisco Muniz Tavares's Historia da Revolução de Pernambuco em 1817 (History of the 1817 Revolution in Pernambuco, [1840]). It is in his masterpiece, Dom João VI no Brasil (King John VI in Brazil, 1908), that scholarship, literary skill, and sociological insight are matched to a degree rarely attained in Brazilian historical writing.

See alsoBrazil: Since 1889; Pernambuco.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuel De Oliveira Lima, Memórias (Estas minhas reminiscências …), edited by Gilberto Freyre (1937), includes James A. Robertson's memorial address on Oliveira Lima, which was delivered at the International Association of Arts and Letters.

Additional Bibliography

Freyre, Gilberto. Oliveira Lima, Don Quixote gordo, 2nd edition. Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 1970.

Lyra, Heitor. A diplomacia brasileira na Primeira República, 1889–1930; e outros ensaios. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 1992.

                           Guilherme Pereira das Neves