This research aims to investigate the forms of figuration of a national historical time on Francisco Muniz Tavares História da Revolução de Pernambuco em 1817 (1840). Interpreting the Pernambuco revolution of 1817, Muniz Tavares conceived it as an attempt to anticipate the future of independence that expressed a non-synchronicity between Pernambuco and Brazil. This is because the Brazilian independence was understood as the growth of a germ of emancipation whose planting would have already taken place in a precursory way in the revolution promoted in Pernambuco, then conceived as presage of the future in the past. Furthermore, in his narrative of the Pernambuco movement, this author proposed an interpretation of Brazilian history that was quite critical of Portuguese colonization, understood as a past still present even after independence. The acknowledgment of what, in his view, would be marks of the colonial period, such as slavery and the absence of progress on the part of Brazilians, produced a way of conceiving the national historical time that emphasized the non-synchronicity between the different spaces and groups that were part of the nation and in which the assumption of an autonomous temporal movement pervaded by progress coexisted with the permanence of unwanted pasts. This produced a less harmonious view of national temporality whose understanding allows us to enrich and tense the studies related to the 19th century historiographical canon, revealing dissonant narratives about Brazilian history.