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 political and societal uses, expanding 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, making available to English readers the cutting edge of Eastern European scholarship on popular histories, nationalism, and culture.

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.

The present boom in popular history is not unprecedented. The contributions to this volume investigate peaks of historical interest which favour popular approaches from around 1800 to the present. They analyse the media, genres and institutions through which historical knowledge has been disseminated - from artefacts to the archive, from poetry to photography, from music to murals, and from periodicals to popular TV series. They ask how major traditions in the popular imagery of the past have evolved and changed over time. Cultural contexts covered in the book include Western and Southern Europe, the United States and West Africa. Contributors come from a range of disciplines, including history, literary and cultural studies, musicology as well as social and cultural anthropology.

Focusing on the era in which the modern idea of nationalism emerged as a way of establishing the preferred political, cultural, and social order for society, this book demonstrates that across different European societies the most important constituent of nationalism has been a specific understanding of the nation's historical past. Analysing Ireland and Germany, two largely unconnected societies in which the past was peculiarly contemporary in politics and where the meaning of the nation was highly contested, this volume examines how narratives of origins, religion, territory and race produced by historians who were central figures in the cultural and intellectual histories of both countries interacted; it also explores the similarities and differences between the interactions in these societies. Histories of Nationalism in Ireland and Germany investigates whether we can speak of a particular common form of nationalism in Europe. The book draws attention to cultural and intellectual links between the Irish and the Germans during this period, and what this meant for how people in either society understood their national identity in a pivotal time for the development of the historical discipline in Europe. Contributing to a growing body of research on the 'transnationality' of nationalism, this new study of a hitherto-unexplored area will be of interest to historians of modern Germany and Ireland, comparative and transnational historians, and students and scholars of nationalism, as well as those interested in the relationship between biography and writing history.

Includes articles and reviews covering all aspects of American history. Formerly the Mississippi Valley Historical Review,