Ranging across different countries and cultural domains (museums, opera, literature, history-writing), this collection explores the romantic-historicist complexities at the root of the modern nation-state: how the past became both colourfully exotic and a matter of national identification and public interest.

Throughout Europe, nostalgia and modernization embraced around 1800: the rise of historicism coincided with the emergence of the modern nation-state. Poetical, cultural changes intersected with political, institutional ones: a Romantic taste for medieval or tribal antiquity benefited from a modernization-driven transfer of cultural relics into the public sphere. This process involved the establishment of museums, libraries, archives and university institutes, as well as the dissemination of historical knowledge through text editions, philological studies, historical novels, plays, operas and paintings, monuments and restorations. Antiquaries, philologists and historians produced a new past and rendered history a matter of public, national interest and collective identification. This international and interdisciplinary collection explores the romantic-historicist complexities at the root of the modern nation-state. Contributors are Ellinoor Bergvelt, Eveline G. Bouwers, Peter Fritzsche, Paula Henrikson, Sharon Ann Holt, Lotte Jensen, Krisztina Lajosi, Joep Leerssen, Susanne Legêne, Marita Mathijsen, Mathias Meirlaen, Peter Rietbergen, Anne-Marie Thiesse, and Robert Verhoogt.

In this original and widely researched book, Billie Melman explores the culture of history during the age of modernity. Her book is about the production of English pasts, the multiplicity of their representations and the myriad ways in which the English looked at history (sometimes in the most literal sense of 'looking') and made use of it in a social and material urban world, and in their imagination. Covering the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the Coronation of 1953, Melman recoups the work of antiquarians, historians, novelists and publishers, wax modellers, cartoonists and illustrators, painters, playwrights and actors, reformers and educationalists, film stars and their fans, musicians and composers, opera-fans, and radio listeners. Avoiding a separation between 'high' and 'low' culture, Melman analyses nineteenth-century plebeian culture and twentieth-century mass-culture and their venues - like Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, panoramas, national monuments like the Tower of London, and films - as well as studying forms of 'minority' art - notably opera. She demonstrates how history was produced and how it circulated from texts, visual images, and sounds, to people and places and back to a variety of texts and images. While paying attention to individuals' making-do with culture, Melman considers constrictions of class, gender, the state, and the market-place on the consumption of history. Focusing on two privileged pasts, the Tudor monarchy and the French Revolution, the latter seen as an English event and as the framework for narrating and comprehending history, Melman shows that during the nineteenth century, the most popular, longest-enduring, and most highly commercialized images of the past represented it not as cosy and secure, but rather as dangerous, disorderly, and violent. The past was also imagined as an urban place, rather than as rural. In Melman's account, City not green Country, is the centre of a popular version of the past whose central Images are the dungeon, the gallows, and the guillotine.

In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital skeptics" who fear the end of traditional humanistic scholarship, Rosenzweig re-envisions the practices and professional rites of academic historians while analyzing and advocating for the achievements of amateur historians. While he addresses the perils of "doing history" online, Rosenzweig eloquently identifies the promises of digital work, detailing innovative strategies for powerful searches in primary and secondary sources, the increased opportunities for dialogue and debate, and, most of all, the unprecedented access afforded by the Internet. Rosenzweig draws attention to the opening up of the historical record to new voices, the availability of documents and narratives to new audiences, and the attractions of digital technologies for new and diverse practitioners. Though he celebrates digital history's democratizing influences, Rosenzweig also argues that the future of the past in this digital age can only be ensured through the active resistance to efforts by corporations to control access and profit from the Web.

“A thorough and informative guide . . . with as many references to websites for Northern Irish genealogy as for the Republic of Ireland.” —Who Do You Think You Are Magazine Ireland has experienced considerably more tragedy when it comes to the preservation of resources for family historians than its close neighbor Britain. Many of the nation’s primary records were lost during the civil war in 1922 and through other equally tragic means. But in this new book Chris Paton, the Northern-Irish-born author of the bestselling Tracing Your Family History on the Internet, shows that not only has a great deal of information survived, it is also increasingly being made available online. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the National Archives of Ireland, organizations such as FindmyPast Ireland, Ancestry.co.uk and RootsIreland, and the massive volunteer genealogical community, more and more of Ireland’s historical resources are accessible from afar. As well as exploring the various categories of records that the family historian can turn to, Chris Paton illustrates their use with fascinating case studies. He fully explores the online records available from both the north and the south from the earliest times to the present day. Many overseas collections are also included, and he looks at social networking in an Irish context where many exciting projects are currently underway. His book is an essential introduction and source of reference for anyone who is keen to trace their Irish roots. “Chris Paton has produced this much-needed book for researchers tracing Irish roots, pulling together all the current online resources and expert advice into one handy guide.” —Family Tree Magazine

“With its practical slant and focus on demystifying unfamiliar property documents, this is the perfect introduction to tracing a house history.” —Family Tree Magazine Anyone who wants to find out about the history of their house—of their home—needs to read this compact, practical handbook. Whether you live in a manor house or on a planned estate, in a laborer’s cottage, a tied house, a Victorian terrace, a twentieth-century council house or a converted warehouse—this is the book for you. In a series of concise, information-filled chapters, Gill Blanchard shows you how to trace the history of your house or flat, how to gain an insight into the lives of the people who lived in it before you, and how to fit it into the wider history of your neighborhood. A wealth of historical evidence is available in libraries, archives and record offices, in books and online, and this is the ideal introduction to it. Gill Blanchard explores these resources in depth, explains their significance and directs the researcher to the most relevant, and revealing, aspects of them. She makes the research process understandable, accessible and fun, and in the process, she demystifies the sometimes-obscure language and layout of the documents that researchers will come up against. “This book is more than a guide to researching the history of your house, or a house of interest. It is a font of interest if you are seeking to research and understand the social and domestic lives of people and their communities from early times.” —Federation of Family History Societies

Every day, more and more kinds of historical data become available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This updated and expanded book describes and demonstrates the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding the underlying algorithms at work in search engines or designing and using their own tools to process large amounts of information.Demonstrating what digital tools have to offer and also what 'digital' does to how we understand the past, the authors introduce the many different tools and developing approaches in Big Data for historical and humanistic scholarship, show how to use them, what to be wary of, and discuss the kinds of questions and new perspectives this new macroscopic perspective opens up. Originally authored 'live' online with ongoing feedback from the wider digital history community, Exploring Big Historical Data breaks new ground and sets the direction for the conversation into the future.Exploring Big Historical Data should be the go-to resource for undergraduate and graduate students confronted by a vast corpus of data, and researchers encountering these methods for the first time. It will also offer a helping hand to the interested individual seeking to make sense of genealogical data or digitized newspapers, and even the local historical society who are trying to see the value in digitizing their holdings.