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Introduction: Localités And Nationalism As The Vestigial And The Lncipient?, Newton E. Key

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

The professionalization of history was tightly bound to nationalism. Historians in early modern Europe distinguished between story and inventory: chronology and chorography. The latter was the domain of the local antiquarian and county historian.3 Nineteenth-century historians sought to validate their narratives as the story of something important, the growth of the nation-state. The earliest professional journals and organizations-The English Historical Review (first published in 1886), the American Historical Association (founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889)-were national. Even as local history professionalized and cut its antiquarian/chorographical roots, the profession still marginalized it, and local history was mainly published …