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The concern with gathering information to deepen the understanding of the country's reality led António Alfredo Barjona de Freitas, the Minister of Public Works, Commerce, and Industry, to launch an annual competition for monographs on rural parishes in 1909. The report in which it was presented was explicit about its objectives: to initiate the much-needed inquiry into the economic and social life of the Portuguese nation, starting from the smallest and most homogeneous administrative unit with a long historical tradition, namely the rural parish. That same year, the University of Coimbra invited sociologist Léon Poinsard to give lectures on the methods of studying small communities, as used in social science in France. This led to the publication of a work on the so-called "monographic method" and Poinsard's Le Portugal Inconnu, published in the bulletin of the International Society for Social Science in 1910 (a Portuguese translation was published in 1912). Economic description and demographic statistics had already been important in regional and local studies since the second half of the 19th century, but the sociological approach and, through it, the first steps towards social history only began to be seriously considered at the beginning of the new century. From the perspective of enhancing regional and local studies in the early 20th century, Fidelino de Figueiredo, one of the founders of the Portuguese Society for Historical Studies (1914) is also worthy of mention. A professor, historian, literary critic, and essayist, Figueiredo emphasised the importance of local historical studies, noting the need to publish "volumes of documents from public and private archives, all developed according to a previously established plan regarding how to extract, group, and classify, to create indexes, etc." (quoted in O Minho nas Monografias (sécs. XIX-XX), 1991-92, p. 34). He was also of the opinion that when there were sufficient local studies, it would be possible to include the history of the region or the city or town where the majority of the population end up spending their lives in primary school curricula. This perspective led to the inclusion of local history in the secondary education curriculum approved by a Sidónio Pais government in 1918. Fidelino de Figueiredo belonged to a generation in which nationalism was in keeping with regionalist and municipalist values. These were not seen as opposing or conflicting but as part of the process of constructing an idea of the nation that naturally could not exclude its various components. Also in the field of theory and methodology, it is important to highlight the proposal made by Professor Marcello Caetano to his students in the Administrative Law subject to undertake Monografias sobre os Concelhos Portugueses [Monographs on the Portuguese Municipalities] (1935).
