Manoel Ferreira de Araújo Guimarães, a Academia Real Militar do Rio de Janeiro e a definição de um gênero científico no Brasil em inícios do século XIX

Abstract

Following the transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1807-8, the Royal Military Academy of Rio de Janeiro was created in 1810 to train the state's technical and scientific elite. Guided by its educational aims, this higher education technical school institutionalized a polytechnic model of science and science teaching in Brazil. Astronomy is a case in point. In a period when spherical astronomy was becoming an autonomous discipline, Manoel Ferreira de Araújo Guimarães, professor of astronomy at the Royal Military Academy of Rio de Janeiro, decided to orient his course to this applied branch of astronomy and authored what was to become one of the first textbooks on spherical astronomy, a major genre of scientific literature in the nineteenth century.