Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present

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.

Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute of Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum. He is also chair of the executive board of the Foundation Library of the Ruhr at the House for the History of the Ruhr in Bochum. His areas of research are modern and contemporary European history, comparative labor history, the history of social movements and nationalism and national identity studies. He is author of Inventing the Nation: Germany (2004) and co-editor (with Chris Lorenz) of The Contested Nation (2008).

Chris Lorenz is Professor of Historical Culture of Germany at VU University Amsterdam and at the Amsterdam University College. He has published predominantly on theory of history, on German historiography, and on modern educational policy. His most recent publications include Bordercrossings. Explorations between History and Philosophy'(in Polish, 2009) and Nationalizing the Past. Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe (co-edited with Stefan Berger, 2010).

Billie Melman is Professor of Modern History, Henri Glasberg Chair of European Studies and Director of the Graduate School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her fields of teaching and research are British and Western European cultural and social history, popular culture, colonialism, and gender. She is author of The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800-1953 (2006) and Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace 1870-1930 (1998).