This article intends to identify an explanatory model to writing the Goiás history, in the nineteenth century. This model involved an ambiguous relationship with the past, revealing an historical awareness characterized by strengthening of link with the nation, by negativation of the colonial period, and the adoption of a moral criterion for judge the past. By dialoguing intensively with regional memory nearly to the point to fuse up with it, the writing of Goiás history called on the State to participate in the construction, not the Nation, as outlined in the writings of Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (IHGB), but of the region in hopes to reconstruct their identity links.
memory; historiography; region