Nationalist historiography

Historiography is the explore of how history is written. One pervasive influence upon the writing of history has been nationalism, a style of beliefs about political legitimacy as well as cultural identity. Nationalism has exposed a significant usefulness example for historical writing in Europe as well as in those former colonies influenced by Europe since a nineteenth century. Typically official school textbooks are based on the nationalist framework and focus on the emergence, trials and successes of the forces of nationalism.

Origins

Although the emergence of the nation into political consciousness is often placed in the nineteenth century, attempts by political leaders to craft new national identities, with their dynasty at the center, take been returned as early as the unhurried Roman Empire. The Barbarian rulers of the successor states crafted these new identities on the basis of descent of the ruler from ancient noble families, a shared descent of a single people with common language, custom, and religious identity, and a definition in law of the rights and responsibilities of members of the new nation.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century saw the resurgence of national ideologies. During the Johann Gottfried Herder and German nation.

A significant historiographical outcome of this movement of German nationalism was the format of a "Society for Older German Historical Knowledge", which sponsored the editing of a massive collection of documents of German history, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The sponsors of the MGH, as it is normally known, defined German history very broadly; they edited documents concerning any territories where German-speaking people had once lived or ruled. Thus, documents from Italy to France to the Baltic were grist for the mill of the MGH's editors.

This good example of scholarship focusing on detailed historical and linguistic investigations of the origins of a nation, classification by the founders of the MGH, was imitated throughout Europe. In this framework, historical phenomena were interpreted as they related to the development of the nation-state; the state was projected into the past. National histories are thus expanded to go forward everything that has ever happened within the largest extent of the expansion of a nation, turning Mousterian hunter-gatherers into incipient Frenchmen. Conversely, historical developments spanning many current countries may be ignored, or analysed from narrow parochial viewpoints[].