This paper takes the issues proposed by Michel de Certeau in his text “The Historiographical Operation” to analyze the writing of Brazil’s history between the 1870’s and the 1930’s. A particular intellectual of this period, Benjamin Franklin Ramiz Galvão, will be our guide for this analysis. Although he does not currently hold a central position in the pantheon of national historians, at his time Ramiz Galvão was a key-intellectual and a reference for his work in several knowledge institutions during the imperial and republican periods, such as the Brazilian Institute of History and Geography and the National Library. By analyzing his performance in these institutions, we seek to highlight two aspects: first, how the task of writing a past for Brazilian nation in the transition from the 19th century to the 20th century encompassed several practices, agents and places; and second, how he is representative of a change in the rules of historiographical modus operandi. This change helps us understand why he holds a position in the discipline memory.

This article aims to consider the historiographical operation, the question on who and how historiy can be written, taking as its theoretical frame -with some reformulations and developments - the narrativist theory of historiographical discourse proposed by Hayden White in his masterpiece Metahistory. The proposal here is to apply the narrativist framework to a textual base which represents, to some extent, the paradigm of the "professional" historiographical work of the late twentieth century in Argentina: the book Coacción y Mercado. La minería de la plata en el Potosí colonial, 1692-1826, by Enrique Tandeter. The purpose is twofold: to illuminate some aspects of the historiographical operation at stake in Coacción [...] and at the same time to point out some of the limitations of whitean narrativist approach