A freeborn Azorean who chronicled Portugal’s contemporary politics

The historian José Medeiros Ferreira, who left us this year at the age of 72, will be remembered as one of the most remarkable figures of the “1962 generation,” as one of the chief architects of the pro-European reorientation of post-revolutionary Portugal, as well as someone who intervened in the academic and public debates of his country with a spirit of unflinching rationalism.