New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lv

New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lv

Lord Byron’s fatal sortie into the Greek war against the Turks in 1824. The impact of nationalist

historical consciousness was magnified, following the revolutions of 1848 and the return of

progressive ideas in liberal or even radical political clothing, by national unification movements

such as the Italian Risorgimento, and in the emerging independence of former satellites in Europe

from imperial rule (already anticipated in the American Revolution sixty years previously)

and that of other former colonies in North and South America.

Though there had certainly been eminent historians in newly established kingdoms like Belgium

prior to their independence, sovereignty or the drive toward it provided an urgent need to

establish both the shape of a national past and the capacity to write about it. Even those regions

such as Bohemia that did not achieve political autonomy during the period still celebrated their

separate identity and marked out a distinctive past. Thus František Palacký’s (1798–1876) fivevolume

history of the Czech nation from earliest times to the Habsburg union of 1526 espoused

a highly romantic and nationalist view of the Czech heritage, celebrating the Hussite religious reformers

of the fifteenth century, for instance, as exponents of Slavic liberty against Germanic authoritarianism.

European Jews, after centuries of rabbinically dominated treatments of their past,

acquired a modern national history for the first time in the successive works of Isaac Marcus Jost

(1793–1860) and Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891). The latter was a German whose Geschichte der

Juden put Jewish history on a firm archival and philological basis while not losing sight of the

connecting theme of endurance through centuries of exiles, persecutions, and massacres.

The pattern is similar elsewhere. In Hungary, Romantic historians such as István Horvat

(1784–1846) created a popular if highly fictionalized remote past for the Hungarian people. The

unsuccessful revolt of 1848–1849 was followed by nationalist histories (often authored by exiled

liberals such as Mihály Horváth [1809-1878]) and by the foundation of the Historical Commission

of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1854) and the Hungarian Historical Association

(1867), as well as by the extensive publication of source material in the Monumenta Hungariae

Historica (initiated 1857). Polish aspirations for independence and political reform are likewise

reflected in the great quantity of sources published in the early nineteenth century, and in the liberal,

pro-peasant multivolume history of Poland by Joachim Lelewel (1786–1861). The proto-

Romantic nationalism of the historian Father Paisiy of Hilendar (1722–1773) set his native

Bulgaria on a century of historical nation-building leading up to independence in 1878, at first

affirming in an uncritical manner the nation’s Slavic affiliations and ancient descent from remote

nomadic progenitors like the Scythians—a time-honored convention going back to medieval and

Renaissance theories of mythical national descent from peoples like the Trojans. Romania, which

achieved independence in 1877, established a national academy shortly thereafter, and history was

introduced at its newly founded universities.

In northern Europe, Norway acquired a university in 1811, just prior to its establishment

(1814) of a semi-independent state in union with Sweden. Most historical activity remained for

a time the work of politicians, jurists and poets, such as Henrik Wegeland (1808-1845), author

of Norges Konstitutions Historie (1841-1843). An academic historiography first emerged in the

1830s with Peter Andreas Munch (1810-1863) and Rudolf Keyser (1803-1864); it retained the

romantic outlook of earlier writers, but made significant advances in source-editing. French liberal

historiography (Michelet and Guizot) as well as Darwinian-Spencerian notions of progress introduced

a more positivist climate in the next generation, which was dominated by the radical

proponent of complete independence, Ernst Sars (1835-1917). In Finland, academic historiography

had existed since the foundation of the University of Turku in 1640, and had flourished in

the Enlightenment with historians such as Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739-1804), who had mainly

written in international Latin. The new nationalist impulse (Finland became an autonomous state

in 1809) ensured that vernacular-language works eventually overtook in volume those written in

Swedish; the first full-length Finnish-language history of Finland would be produced by Yrjö Sakari

Yrjö-Koskinen (1830-1903). Historical consciousness was further stimulated by authors such as

the journalist, educator, and novelist Zacharias Topelius (1818-1898), a Finnish Sir Walter Scott,

while foreign-authored histories from the south were also widely read. As in Norway, positivist

historiography found an audience: England’s Henry Thomas Buckle would have one of his

strongest followings in Finland.

South of Finland in the Baltic region, nationalist sentiments were much slower to develop. The

history of Estonia and Latvia was written almost entirely by their Baltic German intellectual elites

prior to their independence in 1918, national sentiments from the 1860s producing relatively lit-

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lvi New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

tle by way of historiography. Lithuanian historiography has been more fully documented thanks

to Virgil Krapauskas, though its story is similar. Tied to Poland through much of the late medieval

and early modern periods and dominated by Russia in the nineteenth century, Lithuania

had actually lacked a written language prior to the late fourteenth century—early historical sources

emanated from Russian, German, or Polish writers. Unlike other ethnic groups, Lithuanians thus

had little by way of historiographical tradition prior to the romantic-era historian Simonas Daukantas

(1793-1864), who wrote in Lithuanian and created a dubious pedigree for his people in a remote

barbarian tribe. Earlier histories were rare. The “Bychovko chronicle,” the long version of a

pro-Lithuanian sixteenth-century text generally known as the Lithuanian Chronicle was not available

till 1846, when it was published by Daukantas’s contemporary, Teodor Narbutt (1784-1864).

Another sixteenth-century Lithuanian chronicle, by Augustine Rotundus (c. 1520-1582), had long

been lost. Daukantas had no immediate followers. As Krapauskas notes, between 1832, when the

Russians closed the University of Vilnius, and the early twentieth century, Lithuania produced no

academically trained historians of its own, though distinguished Poles such as Lelewel wrote about

the Lithuanian past. The creation of a sense of national identity where none had existed fell to

non-professionals: minor noblemen, poets and linguists, who were more interested in creating a

heroic past than in following the canons of western historical scholarship; and the occasional parttime

scholar like Bishop Motiejus Valanc

_

ius (1801-75), whose historical work on his Samogitian

diocese more closely approximates mainstream European critical historiography. Collectively, their

work provided an essential ingredient for the establishment in 1918 of Lithuania’s own short-lived

independence. Beginning in 1883, with the publication of the nationalist newspaper Auszra,

Lithuanian intellectuals increasingly took an anti-Polish tack. While they traced their linguistic

and cultural heritage back, rather tenuously, to the remote centuries of the once-powerful Grand

Duchy of Lithuania, they repudiated connections to that state’s association with Poland in favor

of a Herderian-style concept of the nation.

Russian historical writing continued to be influenced by Western European traditions in the

late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it had in the time of Schlözer. As elsewhere, considerable

activity was devoted in the post-Napoleonic era to the collection and publication of source

materials, especially government documents, under the leadership of the Chancellor Nikolai P.

Rumiantsev (1754–1826). An “Archeographic Commission” undertook a nationwide survey of

archives and repositories analogous to Britain’s Victorian-founded Historical Manuscripts Commission.

Various other archaeological and historical societies were established, such as the Russian

Historical Society of Petersburg, whose Russian Biographical Dictionary (publication of which

was interrupted by the October Revolution in 1917 and the society’s dissolution), is again a counterpart

of a British publication, the Dictionary of National Biography. Influenced by the German

classicist B. G. Niebuhr, M. T. Kachenovskii (1775–1842) adopted a highly skeptical approach

to the early, Kievan period of Russian history. Hegel’s philosophy of history and the works of

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) were widely read among the intelligentsia

of the 1830s and 1840s, influencing a “slavophilic” school of historians, but the general trend was

toward Westernization of practical historical methodology in a “scientific” vein. The two outstanding

historians of the second half of the nineteenth century were S. M. Soloviev (1820–1879)

and V. O. Kliuchevskii (1841–1911). Soloviev had traveled in the West and heard lectures by the

German Leopold von Ranke (see further below), as well as by Guizot and Michelet; he was personally

acquainted with the great Czech Palacký. Soloviev’s prodigious History of Russia since Ancient

Times appeared in twenty-nine annual volumes beginning in 1851, accompanied by numerous

monographs. Rather like Ranke, he had a vision of history as a unified and continuous story of

organic development. In the following generation Kliuchevskii, Soloviev’s pupil and successor, assigned

a new prominence to the analysis of economic and social history, which would establish

the groundwork for post-revolutionary Marxist historiography.

In North America, the British colonies diverged historiographically following the American

Revolution. The northern colonies—the future Canada—remained firmly within the British imperial

orb (despite the existence of a distinctive Francophone Catholic majority within the colony

of Lower Canada, subsequently Quebec). A consciousness of Canada as a nation, historically, did

not begin to mature until Confederation (1867) brought political unity and semiautonomous status

within the empire, and even then Francophone historiography remained apart from its Anglophone

counterpart, with recurrent sovereignty movements still building today on the belief in

a historically separate Quebecois nation awaiting its rightful autonomy. To the south, the experience

was very different. The prototype for a nationalist historiography had been established in

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New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lvii

colonial-era writings that acknowledged the colonies’ place in the empire but also celebrated aspects

of their differences—for instance, in Puritan writings marking New England colonists as reformed

“saints” who had voluntarily separated themselves from the ungodliness of the Old World.

A distinctive nationalist historiography (admittedly fragmented by ideological and sectional differences

for a century or more) thus emerged quite quickly following the independence of the new

United States. Early postindependence American historians such as Mercy Otis Warren

(1728–1814) provided a history of the Revolution emphasizing democratic values, while the biographers

of major figures such as George Washington helped establish a pantheon of national

heroes. Historical novels on the model of Britain’s Sir Walter Scott were emulated by the likes of

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851). Both American and world history were enormously popular

among readers during the first half of the nineteenth century, but their writing remained the

domain of gentlemen of leisure (and the occasional woman like Warren) or of journalists. Famous

examples (both blind through most of their careers) include William Prescott (1796–1859), narrator

of the Latin American conquests, and Francis Parkman (1823–1893), historian of the frontier.

Internationally, the most widely recognized American historian was George Bancroft (1800–

1891), a former professor turned diplomat and one of the first of his country to earn a Ph.D.

from a German university, a trend that would increase in the second half of the century.

In Latin America, there had been a steady flow of historical writing in both Spanish and Portuguese

areas since the conquests of the sixteenth century, a good deal of it by expatriate Spaniards

such as the Jesuit historian of Paraguay, Pedro Lozano (1697–1752). The liberal values of the late

Enlightenment dominated the writing of history during the nineteenth century, first in the form

of constitutionalist historians who focused on the European-inherited legal institutions underlying

independence, and later in a more independent and romantic kind of writing that, following

Herder and Michelet, emphasized instead the importance of the spirit of the people itself in establishing

well-functioning new societies in a postcolonial era: the Chilean Literary Society of the

1830s, for instance, had regular meetings in which selections from Herder and other eighteenthcentury

historians were read. A third and later group emulated the positivism of writers like

Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862), and Herbert Spencer

(1820–1903) to advocate a history that demonstrated the economic and scientific progress of the

region along European industrial lines—knowledge of the past, said Vicente Fidel López in the

1840s, would allow planning for the future. The Chilean José Victorino Lastarria, who did not

read Comte until the 1860s, nonetheless found in the Frenchman an endorsement of his own

ideas from two decades earlier.

In Mexico, conquistadors and missionaries had documented the past since the sixteenth century,

including the precolonial histories of the subjugated peoples, derived from native codices and

oral information: the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún (d. 1590) presented his own survey in

both Spanish and the Aztec Nahuatl tongue. Following independence from Spain in 1810, and

during the political vicissitudes of the next hundred years, distinctive nationalist and liberal schools

of history emerged. Portuguese Brazil, a nation of multiple ethnic groups, followed a similar pattern,

as independence in 1822 produced a need for a national history. Early feeble efforts in this

direction were transformed in 1838 by the foundation of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico

Brasileiro, which staged a competition in 1840 on the theme of how best to write a Brazilian history—

a contest ironically won by the German naturalist Karl Friedrich Philip von Martius. The

acknowledged founder of modern Brazilian history during this period was Francisco Adolfo de

Varnhagen (1816–1878). Author of both a General History of Brazil and a history of Brazilian independence,

Varnhagen made pioneering use of documents in European archives and opened up

unstudied new subject areas, such as the relationship between Portuguese and native populations.

Elsewhere in South America, as Allen Woll has shown, an intense debate concerning the proper

method of history-writing followed the publication of Claude Gay’s (1800–1873) political history

of Chile. Gay, a French botanist, was commissioned by the Chilean government to write this

work, and despite its endorsement by the respected Latin American academic and man of letters

Andrès Bello, younger writers (including Bello’s own one-time pupil, Lastarria) found its recitation

of facts without a search for meaning unsatisfactory. Finally, there were those who sought

meaning and instruction in the patriots of the South American past, drawing literary inspiration

from across the Atlantic. Bartolomé Mitre (1821–1906), for instance, was initially enamored of

H. T. Buckle’s erudition. In the end, he gravitated toward Thomas Carlyle’s “great man” interpretation

of history, and Mitre’s account of Argentine independence focused on the careers of its

leaders, the revolutionary heroes Manuel Belgrano and José de San Martín.

HISTORIOGRAPHY