Ranging across different countries and cultural domains (museums, opera, literature, history-writing), this collection explores the romantic-historicist complexities at the root of the modern nation-state: how the past became both colourfully exotic and a matter of national identification and public interest.

Throughout Europe, nostalgia and modernization embraced around 1800: the rise of historicism coincided with the emergence of the modern nation-state. Poetical, cultural changes intersected with political, institutional ones: a Romantic taste for medieval or tribal antiquity benefited from a modernization-driven transfer of cultural relics into the public sphere. This process involved the establishment of museums, libraries, archives and university institutes, as well as the dissemination of historical knowledge through text editions, philological studies, historical novels, plays, operas and paintings, monuments and restorations. Antiquaries, philologists and historians produced a new past and rendered history a matter of public, national interest and collective identification. This international and interdisciplinary collection explores the romantic-historicist complexities at the root of the modern nation-state. Contributors are Ellinoor Bergvelt, Eveline G. Bouwers, Peter Fritzsche, Paula Henrikson, Sharon Ann Holt, Lotte Jensen, Krisztina Lajosi, Joep Leerssen, Susanne Legêne, Marita Mathijsen, Mathias Meirlaen, Peter Rietbergen, Anne-Marie Thiesse, and Robert Verhoogt.

The 1980s and early 1990s have seen a marked increase in public interest in our historic environment. The museum and heritage industry has expanded as the past is exploited for commercial profit. In The Representation of the Past, Kevin Walsh examines this international trend and questions the packaging of history which serves only to distance people from their own heritage. A superficial, unquestioning portrayal of the past, he feels, separates us from an understanding of our cultural and political present. Here, Walsh suggests a number of ways in which the museum can fulfill its potential - by facilitating our comprehension of cultural identity.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This important study of how new attitudes and techniques of history affected the Church will interest documentalists and general readers as well as ecclesiastical and general historians.

Issues for Oct. 1927 and Oct. 1930 contain sections of a serial article by John C. Honeyman on the history of Zion, St. Paul and other early Lutheran churches in New Jersey.