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National History

Nation And History Today



Challenged by social, demographic, women's, and gender history, national histories no longer occupy the monopolist position they once did. In The Practice of History (1967) Geoffrey Elton reacted to the rise of explicitly theoretical social history with a vigorous defense of the objectivity of political history. In fact, the national framework has remained essential to historical writing. The social and women's history of the 1970s and 1980s continued to be written within the confines of nation-states, and much of it, as in Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, dealt with the question of national specificities. The impact of poststructuralism upon historical writing has not substantially altered the situation. Poststructuralism has led to suspicion of essentialist definitions of nation, class, and gender but has caused historians to focus upon the historical, and mutual, construction of identities, including national identities. As yet few historians have taken up the critique of national histories advanced by cultural transfer theorists.



The international political climate also sustains interest in national histories. In the Balkans, contemporary diplomats are as ready as their counterparts at Versailles in 1919 to use historical arguments to justify territorial claims. In eastern Europe postcommunist states are engaged in reassessing their pasts—often presenting the communist period as an aberration in the normal path of national development, just as German, Italian, and French historians explained away Nazism, Fascism, and collaboration. The European Union is also tempted by the use of history for purposes of historical legitimation. The Maastricht Treaty (1992) called upon the commission to "bring the common cultural heritage to the fore."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berger, Stefan. The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003.

Berger, Stefan, Mark Donovan, and Kevin Passmore, eds. Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Boer, Pim de. History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818–1914. Translated by Arnold J. Pomercans. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Bosworth, R. J. B. Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War, 1945–1990. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Breuilly, John. "Historians and the Nation." In History and Historians in the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Burke. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Burleigh, Michael. Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Espagne, Michel, and Michael Werner, eds. Transferts. Les relations interculturelles dans l'espace Franco-Allemand. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1988.

Kenyon, John. The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.

Slavin, Arthur J., "Telling the Story: G. R. Elton and the Tudor Age." Sixteenth Century Journal 21 (1990): 151–169.

Smith, Bonnie G. The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Stuchtey, Benedikt, and Peter Wende. British and German Historiography, 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions, and Transfers. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Thompson, E. P. "The Peculiarities of the English." In his The Poverty of Theory. London: Merlin Press, 1979.

Kevin Passmore

Additional topics

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