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In the beginning, all history was political. The most important historians worked on this variant, but the field experienced a tumultuous existence. Having occupied a central space in the way of thinking about the past, especially from the 19th century onwards, traditional political history later fell into disuse, being marginalised, rejected, and condemned by the emerging canons as unscientific, despite its proponents initially claiming scientific validity for this field of study. By the end of the 1980s, a resurgence of political history occurred, which was particularly evident in the historiography of continental Europe. Political history became modernised and was transformed into a "New Political History" as a direct result of changes in the prevailing historiographic paradigms influenced by the ideological debate following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. The enhancement of the genre was primarily due to the decline of Marxism as a philosophy of interpreting historical phenomena, and to the recognition of the inadequacies and limitations of the structural analyses deriving thereof, which had been favoured by the hitherto dominant "Annales School" and its followers. These scholars preferred to focus on the collective and the actions of large social masses, leaving little room for the affirmation of the individual as the true driver of history. Some exceptions, such as the case of Lucien Febvre, who wrote several historical biographies, including that of Martin Luther, confirm the rule. As a result of this renewed appreciation for the role of humans as the principal subjects of action and as a reaction against serial history, from the 1990s onwards, both Portugal and other contexts witnessed a "return to the event" and the rehabilitation of politics by the scholars of the time, especially concerning the contemporary period, similar to developments in France. This was, after all, another episode in the classic historiographical conflict between the primacy of the group and the assertion of the individual, or, in other words, between the dominance of structure and the supremacy of action. More recently, the fragmentation of historical studies has again relativised the importance of political history in the international context, as well as in Portugal. This entire evolution never dispensed with the debate on the various epistemological perspectives, and this is the proposed journey to be explored in the following pages.
