Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe

Although professional historians have traditionally claimed to be 'myth-breakers', national history from the nineteenth century onwards shows that they have quite a record in 'myth-making'. This tension between myth-making and -breaking is actually still with us today. Nationalizing the Past offers a truly comparative and transnational analysis of how some of the most important national historians in Europe have handled the opposing pulls of fact and fiction, and which particular narrative strategies have contributed to the success of national histories. What role did the narrative framing of beginnings, middles and endings of national histories play? How were continuities and discontinuities constructed? How did the discourse of 'the nation' integrate narratives of ethnicity, race, class, religion and gender? This volume also shows how twentieth-century dictatorships have influenced the ways in which the past has been 'nationalized' by historians, and asks whether national history as a genre still has a future in the twenty-first century.