as the premise of progress, debating the nature of beauty and the ideal, affirming the primacy of art in the social order and its inherent educational and civilizing role, valuing the testimony of history and scientific investigation, and preaching an alliance between reason and sensitivity in the classical way. The same inclination can be seen in part of his correspondence and in the texts on aesthetics and art history that he published through newspapers, such as the Philosophical Considerations on Fine Arts among the Ancients: Art as an Educational Principle (1864), published as a series of 22 articles in the newspaper Correio Mercantil, in Rio de Janeiro, which constituted a pioneering milestone in the history of education and the press in Brazil. His writing is generally very articulate, moving quickly between diverse references. In these works, Américo also often made social, economic, historical and political criticism, complaining about Brazil's backwardness in relation to European nations, pointing out sources of problems and suggesting solutions, often challenging authorities and the government, and trying to understand the cultural phenomenon under a perspective integrated to the whole of society and to the complex of determinants at work in each historical moment. His participation in the politics of the new republic as a deputy yielded several speeches and projects, collected and published as Discursos Parlamentares (1892), where, often, disillusioned, he criticized the inertia and immaturity of public power, denounced the similarity between monarchical rhetoric and the republican one and deplored the general backwardness in which Brazil lived. He mainly defended the creation of free public museums and universities as indispensable institutions in a complete public education system, and as bases for the constitution of a genuinely Brazilian culture. But, according to Francisca Gois Barros, these ideas "did not impress the enlightened assembly, essentially attentive to the serious problems of the country's political reconstitution... gems in an opulent but forgotten herbarium". Novels His novels are ultra-romantic narratives of extreme sentimentality, associated with a realistic, almost photographic description of environments and details. They are semi-autobiographical, manichean, argumentative, asymmetrical, proselytizing, in which typically young men from poor families, but with integrity, heroically try to climb the steps of improvement by their own effort, in the midst of infinite torments and the opposition of the forces of evil, represented by the incomprehension, envy, lack of perspective and the apathy of others. In fact, in his four novels, three have