A taste of the latest from Prospect online: Julia Blunck
The first thing to burn were memories. Physical registries of history were gone in minutes. Written documents dating from early Portuguese colonisation and a vast archive of the Portuguese-Brazilian monarchy, never digitised, mixed into the black smoke.
It wasn’t simply colonisers’ bookkeeping being erased from memory. This was a democratic tragedy: registries of indigenous people burned too, alongside testimonials on the lives of slaves, fossilised remains, mummies, pottery, and much else from among the 20m pieces that comprised the Brazilian National Museum’s collection.