Writing the Nation A Global Perspective

History has been a crucial element in underpinning national identities across the globe for a very long time. Each construction of national identity is incorporating a sense of a long, proud and preferably unbroken history. This book brings together experts on national history writing from all five continents to discuss the role of history in the making of national identities in a transnational and comparative way. The institutionalisation and professionalisation of history writing is analysed in the context of history's increasing nationalisation in the course of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The narrative construction of nation and its interrelationship with other 'master' narratives, such as class, religion, race and gender are discussed, and many of the contributions also reveal to what extent spatial definitions of the nation were linked to both local/regional as well as transnational history writing.

Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, as well as Executive Chair of the Foundation Library of the Ruhr. Previously, he was Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History at the University of Manchester (2005 – 2011), and Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Glamorgan (2000 – 2005), UK. He has published widely on the history of historiography, national identity, memory history, and the history of social movements.

1. Introduction: Towards a Global History of National Historiographies; S.Berger
2. The Power of National Pasts: Writing National History in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe; S.Berger
3. Seven Narratives in North American History: Thinking the Nation in Canada, Quebec, and the United States; A.Smith
4. The Mirror of History and Images of the Nation: The Invention of a National Identity in Brazil and its Contrasts with Similar Enterprises in Mexico and Argentina; E.de Freitas Dutra
5. Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation; M.Hearn
6. Between Myth and History: the Construction of a National Past in Modern East Asia; Q. E.Wang
7. Writing the Nation in India: Communalism and Historiography; R.Seshan
8. Writing the Nation in the Arabic-speaking World; B.Schaebler
9. Writing National and Transnational History in Africa - the Example of the 'Dakar School'; I.Thioub
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