Writing the Nation
Douban
A Global Perspective
Berger, Stefan 编
overview
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 institutionalization and professionalisation of history writing is analysed in the context of history's increasing nationalization 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.
contents
1 Introduction: Towards a Global History of National Historiographies
2 The Power of National Pasts: Writing National History in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe
3 Seven Narratives in North American History: Thinking the Nation in Canada, Quebec and the United States
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
5 Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation
6 Between Myth and History: the Construction of a National Past in Modern East Asia
7 Writing the Nation in India: Communalism and Historiography
8 Writing the Nation in the Arabic-Speaking World, Nationally and Transnationally
9 Writing National and Transnational History in Africa: the Example of the ‘Dakar School’
