Historians traditionally claim to be myth-breakers, but national history since the nineteenth century shows quite a record in myth-making. This exciting new volume compares how national historians in Europe have handled the opposing pulls of fact and fiction and shows which narrative strategies have contributed to the success of national histories.

The essays in Nationalizing Empires challenge the dichotomy between empire and nation state that for decades has dominated historiography. The authors center their attention on nation-building in the imperial core and maintain that the nineteenth century, rather than the age of nation-states, was the age of empires and nationalism. They identify a number of instances where nation building projects in the imperial metropolis aimed at the preservation and extension of empires rather than at their dissolution or the transformation of entire empires into nation states. Such observations have until recently largely escaped theoretical reflection.

In a campaign for state or local office these days, you’re as likely today to hear accusations that an opponent advanced Obamacare or supported Donald Trump as you are to hear about issues affecting the state or local community. This is because American political behavior has become substantially more nationalized. American voters are far more engaged with and knowledgeable about what’s happening in Washington, DC, than in similar messages whether they are in the South, the Northeast, or the Midwest. Gone are the days when all politics was local. With The Increasingly United States, Daniel J. Hopkins explores this trend and its implications for the American political system. The change is significant in part because it works against a key rationale of America’s federalist system, which was built on the assumption that citizens would be more strongly attached to their states and localities. It also has profound implications for how voters are represented. If voters are well informed about state politics, for example, the governor has an incentive to deliver what voters—or at least a pivotal segment of them—want. But if voters are likely to back the same party in gubernatorial as in presidential elections irrespective of the governor’s actions in office, governors may instead come to see their ambitions as tethered more closely to their status in the national party.

The collapse of the Soviet Union famously opened new venues for the theories of nationalism and the study of processes and actors involved in these new nation-building processes. In this comparative study, Kudaibergenova takes the new states and nations of Eurasia that emerged in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and seeks to better understand the phenomenon of post-Soviet states tapping into nationalism to build legitimacy. What explains this difference in approaching nation-building after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What can a study of two very different trajectories of development tell us about the nature of power, state and nationalizing regimes of the ‘new’ states of Eurasia? Toward Nationalizing Regimes finds surprising similarities in two such apparently different countries—one “western” and democratic, the other “eastern” and dictatorial.

In historical studies, 'collective memory' is most often viewed as the product of nationalizing strategies carried out by political élites in the hope to create homogeneous nation-states. In contrast, this book asserts that collective memories develop out of a never-ending, triangular negotiation between local, national and transnational actors.

This study of nationalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union develops an original account of the interlocking and opposed nationalisms of national minorities, the nationalizing states in which they live, and the external national homelands to which they are linked by external ties.

Popularizing National Pasts is the first truly cross-national and comparative study of popular national histories, their representations, the meanings given to them and their uses, which expands outside the confines of Western Europe and the US. It draws a picture of popular histories which is European in the full sense of this term. One of its fortes is the inclusion of Eastern Europe. The cross-national angle of Popularizing National Pasts is apparent in the scope of its comparative project, as well as that of the longue durée it covers. Apart from essays on Britain, France, and Germany, the collection includes studies of popular histories in Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe, notably Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Armenia, Russia and the Ukraine, as well as considering the US and Argentina. Cross-national comparison is also a central concern of the thirteen case studies in the volume, which are, each, devoted to comparing between two, or more, national historical cultures. Thus temporality –both continuities and breaks- in popular notions of the past, its interpretations and consumption, is examined in the long continuum. The volume makes available to English readers, probably for the first time, the cutting edge of Eastern European scholarship on popular histories, nationalism and culture.