Historians and Nationalism

Abstract

Abstract Peripheral cultures have been largely absent from the European canon of historiography. The principal aim of this book is to contribute to redressing the balance. It does so by offering an insight into the complexities of historical writing in nineteenth‐century East‐Central Europe and by ascertaining this tradition's place within the European historiographical heritage. At the core of the book lies a comparative analysis of the life‐work of five prominent scholars: Joachim Lelewel (Polish); Simonas Daukantas (Lithuanian); František Palacký (Czech); Mihály Horváth (Hungarian) and Mihail Kogălniceanu (Romanian). Rather than approaching these scholars' historical achievements from a narrow perspective, the book accommodates them in the context of their promotion of a unified vision of national culture. It discusses their accomplishments in the fields of language and literature, their pursuits in publishing journals and primary sources, and their contribution to the institutionalization and professionalization of the historical discipline.Through the reconstruction of these scholars' shared intellectual background and an in‐depth analysis of their historical narrative the author puts forward the claim that the five historians' professional and political agenda, influenced predominantly by liberalism and Romanticism, shared far more with their contemporaries elsewhere than has previously been assumed and thus renders them genuine representatives of a common European tradition.

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