Writing the Nation: Historians and National Identities from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Geary
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Jules Michelet

Many nineteenth-century national historians, such as Alexandre Herculano, Cesare Balbo, François Guizot, Jules Michelet and Thomas Babington Macaulay, self-consciously created the deep past of their respective nations for receptive and enthusiastic national audiences. Influenced by the novels of Walter Scott, they wrote history as biography of the nation, an account of how that nation, composed of the best of all of its social strata, had come into existence. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, novelistic and professional approaches to history bifurcated, with the former reducing the scope of historical writing to investigations of highly specialised topics that have little resonance outside of academe and with a wider public. This chapter explores alternative ways for professional historians to engage with their societies and asks about the legacy of contemporary historical writing.

Darsie Latimer’s “Little Solidity,” or the Case for Homosexuality in Scott’s Redgauntlet

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Incorvati
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Attachment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Character Type ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Walter Scott

Abstract By the early 1820s Walter Scott had been sharply criticized for conjuring up conspicuously passive heroes for his tales, but that criticism did not prevent him from presenting his reading public with his most singularly submissive character, Darsie Latimer, in 1824’s Redgauntlet. In fact, Scott devotes considerable energy in the novel to the delineation of a particular breed of unmanliness, linking Darsie’s inertia with his unusually strong emotional attachment to a schoolmate, his peculiar fascination with strong men, and his marked awkwardness around eligible women his own age. I argue that the coalescing of such features in one character warrants consideration of Darsie as a type of homosexual—that is, a character marked not only by an orientation of desire toward one’s own sex but also by a litany of character traits (among them, in this case, self-doubt, self-consciousness, and irresolution) which were typically associated with this non-normative desire. After considering evidence from this novel as well as from diary entries that reveal Scott’s views on sodomy and on wayward passions, I re-examine the Foucaultian contention that the homosexual was a late-nineteenth-century invention which transformed the sodomite into a species. Scott’s Redgauntlet gives us reason to believe that the conception of such a species was in place by the late Romantic period and that it was possible to consider this character type as distinct from the sodomite insofar as the former designated a disposition rather than the implication of sexual indulgence.

British Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bentley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Structural Evolution ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Turn

This chapter studies British historical writing, tracing its transformations from the end of the war—when, arguably, much of the late nineteenth-century empiricist agenda was still intact, and political history continued to dominate—through signal events such as the founding of a new journal of radical historiography called Past and Present (1952), to the advent of neoconservatism in the 1980s, the puffing up and eventual bursting of the bubble of Franco-American-style quantification, and the advent of the cultural turn. Intertwined in the narratives of structural evolution, as well as generational narratives, one might see another in the growing presence of technology as a force impelling historical method and providing new ways of disseminating research. By 1995, many of Britain’s most successful historians defined themselves as ‘public intellectuals’ or tele-dons commanding a wide audience in ways that no one could have dreamed of in 1945.

The Open-Air Museum of Bokrijk: Staging Pre-Modern Architecture in the Margins of the 1958 World Fair

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 295-315
Author(s):  
Fredie Floré
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Collections ◽  
Social Customs ◽  
World Fairs ◽  
Late Nineteenth

At many late nineteenth- and twentieth-century World Fairs architecture was an important tool in the representation of national identities. Pavilions at these Fairs offered telling ‘scenery’, against which to display old and new objects, machines, art collections, interior designs and social customs. They formed architectural settings that contributed to the staging of the nation’s vision of its own past, present or future. Furthermore, as the architectural historian Edward N. Kaufman has pointed out, the late nineteenth-century World Fairs were important forerunners of the first open-air museums. In these more permanent exhibition settings, architecture also often played a crucial role in the representation of national or regional identities. In many open-air museums buildings were conceived as important exhibits providing visitors, sometimes implicitly, with information about the nation or region’s past: information considered fundamental to its present or future identity.

S. F. Platonov, P. N. Miliukov and the Theory of “Two Schools” in Russian Historiography

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-248
Author(s):  
G. M. Hamburg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Clear Delineation ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article uses the correspondence between Sergei Platonov and Pavel Miliukov to show that, before 1900, there was no clear delineation between Russian historical writing in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The theory of the “two schools,” one in St. Petersburg and its rival in Moscow, was an early twentieth century “invention,” retrospectively applied to the late nineteenth century.

The international relations of the ‘imagined community’: Explaining the late nineteenth-century genesis of theChinesenation

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUKE COOPER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
Uneven And Combined Development ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Conceptual Underpinning

AbstractBenedict Anderson'sImagined Communitieshas long been established as one of the major contributions to theories of nations and nationalism. Anderson located the rise of national identities within a long-evolving crisis of dynastic conceptions of identity, time, and space, and argued print-capitalism was the key cultural and economic force in the genesis of nations. This article offers a critical appropriation and application of Anderson's theory through two steps. Firstly, it evaluates the conceptual underpinning of his approach through an engagement with recent scholarship on the ‘theory of uneven and combined development’. The fruits of this interchange provide a deeper analytical framework to account for what Anderson calls the ‘modularity’ of national identity, that is, its universal spread across the globe. Modularity is now reconceptualised as a product of combined development with its causal efficacy derived from the latent dynamics of a geopolitically fragmented world. The latter gave shape and form to the new national communities. Secondly, this revised framework is applied to the emergence of Chinese national identity in the late nineteenth century. This allows Chinese nationalism to be recast as an ideological amalgam of indigenous and imported elements that emerged out of the crisis-ridden encounter between Imperial China and Western imperialism in the nineteenth century.

Contents of Western Sociology of Religion as a Science and Educational Discipline

2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).

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