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Cold War history has emphasized the division of Europe into two warring camps with separate ideologies and little in common. This volume presents an alternative perspective by suggesting that there were transnational networks bridging the gap and connecting like-minded people on both sides of the divide. Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were institutions, organizations, and individuals who brought people from the East and the West together, joined by shared professions, ideas, and sometimes even through marriage. The volume aims at proving that the post-WWII histories of Western and Eastern Europe were entangled by looking at cases involving France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, and others.

The collection of well researched chapters assesses the uses and misuses of history 25 years after the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. As opposed to the emphasis on the recovery of memory or revival of national histories that seemed to be the prevelant historiographical approaches of the 1990s, the last decade has seen a particular set of narratives equating Nazism and communism and so providing opportunities to exonerate wartime collaboration, cast the nation as victim even when its government was allied with Germany, and acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust while obfuscating its meaning and significance. In their comparative analysis the authors are also interested in new practices of performing ‘Europeanness’. Therefore their presentations of Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Slovenian post-communist memory politics move beyond the common national myths in order to provide a new insight into transnational interactions and exchanges in Europe in general. The juxtaposition of these politics, the processes in other parts of Europe, the modes of remembering shaped by displacement and the transnational memory practices enable a close encounter with the divergences and assess the potential of the formation of common, European memory practices.

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.

From the late fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works grew from complex early modern debates about law, religion and classical scholarship. Anthony Grafton's book is based on his Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, and it proves to be a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas. Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight – and why, in the centuries that followed, most scholars gradually forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr's celebrated Trevelyan Lectures, What Is History?.

The writing and reading of history in the early Middle Ages form the key themes of this 2004 book. The primary focus is on the remarkable manifestations of historical writing in relation to historical memory in the Frankish kingdoms of the eighth and ninth centuries. It considers the audiences for history in the Frankish kingdoms, the recording of memory in new genres including narrative histories, cartularies and Libri memoriales, and thus particular perceptions of the Frankish and Christian past. It analyses both original manuscript material and key historical texts from the Carolingian period, a remarkably creative period in the history of European culture. Presentations of the past developed in this period were crucial in forming an historical understanding of the Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian past and, in subsequent centuries, of early medieval Europe. They also played an extraordinarily influential role in the formation of political ideologies and senses of identity within Europe.

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 result of extensive collaboration among leading scholars from across Europe, Conceptual History in the European Space represents a landmark intervention in the historiography of concepts. It brings together ambitious thematic studies that combine the pioneering methods of historian Reinhart Koselleck with contemporary insights and debates, each one illuminating a key feature of the European conceptual landscape. With clarifying overviews of such contested theoretical terrain as translatability, spatiality, and center-periphery dynamics, it also provides indispensable contextualization for an era of widespread disenchantment with and misunderstanding of the European project.

This book shows the ways in which English, French, and German eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century encyclopaedias dealt with things Chinese, offering an analysis of the broad variety of sources and an overview of the main strands of discourse on China.

A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. Deborah Cohen is an Associate Professor of History at Brown University. Maura O'Connor is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.