In the 1980s, while working as a researcher, Miriam Halpern Pereira also embarked on the ambitious project of gathering and compiling the manuscripts and parliamentary speeches of Mouzinho da Silveira (whom she considered, following in the footsteps of Alexandre Herculano, to have been fundamental in breaking with the old regime and defining a new one) and a large part of his published and unpublished works, thus initiating, with Magda Pinheiro and Valentim Alexandre, a long-term research project with a team of researchers and palaeographers. This project resulted in two large volumes totalling more than 900 pages, published in 1989 by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation with introductory studies by her and the two aforementioned historians. In her presentation, Miriam Halpern Pereira wrote that Mouzinho da Silveira’s work, then published, brought together “some of his most important political writings of reflection and intervention, as well as his parliamentary speeches, from which one can gain a concrete idea of the modernity of his legal and political thinking”. The book became an indispensable tool for anyone studying the first half of the nineteenth century and liberal reformism.

Throughout this extensive historiographical and archival work, her interest in the complex problem of contemporary history archives in Portugal grew and led her to try to make available to researchers tools that could guide them through the then labyrinthine path of these archives. To this end, she published, with Maria José Silva Leal, under the aegis of Joel Serrão, the Roteiro de Fontes da História Portuguesa Contemporânea (Guide to Sources of Contemporary Portuguese History, 3 volumes, INIC, 1985), which for years was the main compass for this orientation.

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