In this text we seek to investigate the historical buildings present in the textbooks of history, rethinking the role of textual and image references on specific historical periods, in works of different periods in redemocratized Brazil. We delimited a thematic analysis where we intend to analyze how the history textbooks discuss the society's coffee of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and what representation of this period spread, following parameters of analysis performed by researchers in the History and Education area that use the textbook as a source for research as Gatti Jr., Bittencourt and Schimidt and Cainelli. We take as a source two books of wide circulation in the 1990s and another approved in the National Program of Textbooks Assessment (PNLD) of 2008 because we understand that these books are used by thousands of students throughout Brazil to be chosen by teachers and distributed free by the Ministry of Education.