| Historiography And Nationalism |
Article Index for Historiography |
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Information AboutHistoriography And Nationalism |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT HISTORIOGRAPHY AND NATIONALISM | |
| historiography | |
| nationalism | |
| national mysticism | |
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: The teleological nature of history encourages historians to retroactively imagine or construct past communities in accordance with contemporary cartographies. Today these cartographies are dominated by the nation-state and its territorially oriented mapping of geo-political space. {Link without Title} That is, historical phenomena are interpreted as they relate to the nation-state; the state is projected into the past. National histories cover everything that has ever happened within the current borders of a country, turning Mousterian hunter-gatherers into incipient Frenchmen. Ruins are proudly displayed as relics of a glorious national past, and the achievements of peoples who never imagined themselves as being Chinese, Persian, Russian, etc., are annexed as Chinese, Persian, Russian achievements. Conversely, historical developments spanning many current countries may be ignored, or analyzed from narrow parochial viewpoints. Nationalism was so much taken for granted as the "proper" way to organize states and view history that it was essentially invisible to historians until fairly recently. Then political scientists such as Ernest Gellner , Benedict Anderson , and Anthony Smith made attempts to step back from nationalism and view it dispassionately. Historians could then ask themselves how this ideology had affected the writing of history. Recent publications:
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