In 1891, when U.S. realtors attempted to establish their first national professional organization, the National Real Estate Association (NREA), they turned to history to provide a shared intellectual foundation to justify collective organization. Though the NREA was only in operation for a short period, the ways its members invoked history illuminate how key assumptions about race, property, and citizenship became central to a nascent national real estate industry, predating the more well-known real estate professionalization projects of the twentieth century. History united members from different regions with little in common who were skeptical of the need to form a national institution. They used history in three ways to sustain the organization: repeating narratives, theorizing historical change, and constructing historical subjects. They infused each of these with an imperial worldview fashioned from competing lines of thought in circulation at the time. Among these were sectional reconciliation, manifest destiny, and narratives of civilizational progress. Through their actions, they embedded white supremacist Gilded Age and Progressive Era formulations of history into real estate via the new institution.

This article seeks to provide further insights into understanding the construction of Chinese identity by bringing the West/white into the picture of Afro-Sino racial relationships. It contends that the Chinese have internalized Western/white superiority through a long historical process, starting with the Western invasion in the 19th century and continuing with the construction of the contemporary historical narrative of the “century of humiliation.” This internalization and its ramifications can be observed in Chinese public discourses as well as diplomatic practices. Together with Western/white superiority, the Chinese also adopted a social Darwinist, competitive world view, using Western modernity as the yardstick by which to rank different peoples and societies in a racial hierarchy. Chinese racism against Africans is thus a projection of a harsh self-judgement. Unlike white supremacy in Western racial thinking, “Chinese supremacy” is often coupled with an inferiority complex.

This article focuses on the role of textbooks in the construction of national identity by analyzing state-approved versions of national identity and history in Kazakhstan. By doing so, this project seeks to highlight what understanding of identity prevails in the history textbooks of Kazakhstan, what narratives regarding the key historic events are promoted, particularly with respect to the Dzhungar wars, annexation of Kazakh Khanate by the Russian Empire, and the Soviet era. Finally, this article compares the main narratives in the textbooks published in Kazakh and Russian languages to illustrate differences and various understandings of identity in the two linguistic realms of Kazakhstan. The article argues that Kazakhstan’s textbooks combine new, independence-focused narratives with the old approaches and partial reproduction of the Soviet symbolic discourse.

This article analyzes the trauma of war present in the collective memory of the inhabitants of the village of Bojszowy. It may transform into a cultural trauma that significantly determines the community’s identity. Combining four strands of literature—memory studies, nationalist studies, historical studies, and psychological studies—the authors argue that in the community under study, the trauma connected with Upper Silesians’ service in the Wehrmacht during World War II constitutes such a collective cultural trauma. Based on the study of the collective memory of the Silesian community and interviews with the Silesian intellectual elite, the article analyzes in detail how the memory of these events has changed the identity of the Upper Silesian community in recent years. This does not mean that we underestimate the importance of the other elements that make up the Upper Silesian tragedy. A combination of local circumstances meant that the service of Silesians in the Wehrmacht was crucial to the occurrence of cultural trauma (in J. Alexander’s terms).

For more than six years, Ukrainian society has been constantly searching for ideas as to how to write a new “national biography.” In a society divided by armed conflict, the so-called decommunization process is considered to be an idea capable of uniting a nation. This process started back in 2015, with the passing of a specific law that required not only the deconstruction of Soviet-time monuments in public spaces, but also a huge decommunization of place names. The article will explore the main practices of place (re-)naming during the different stages of the decommunization (but not de-ideologization) of spaces, as well as describing the problems that may emerge in society as a result of a rapid transition from one narrative to another. Based on a case study of spatial identities of internally displaced people, I am going to answer the question of how people perceive renamed spaces, and how they reclaim and re-appropriate these spaces in the midst of an identity crisis.

This article investigates the role of 1918, the end of the First World War, and the establishment of the Yugoslav state in public memories of post-communist Croatia and Serbia. Analysing history schoolbooks within the context of major works of history and public discussion, the authors trace the developments of public memory of the end of the war and 1918. Drawing on the concepts of public memory and historical narrative, the authors focus on the ways in which history textbooks create historical narratives and on the types of lessons from the past that can be extracted from these narratives. While Serbia and Croatia have rather different patterns of First World War memory, the authors argue that both states have abandoned the Yugoslav communist narrative and now publicly commemorate 1918 as a loss of national statehood. This is somehow paradoxical, since the establishment of the South Slav State in 1918 was supposedly an outcome of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. In Serbia, the story of loss is packed in a fatalistic narrative of heroism and victimhood, while in Croatia the story of loss is embedded in a tale of necessary evils, which nevertheless had a positive outcome in a sovereign Croatian state.

The vast body of inquiry into nationalism has traditionally seen Europe as a main center for the emergence of nationalism, but scholars of “national indifference” have countered with the idea that nationalism may not matter much at all as a motive for most people. The concept of national indifference calls into question the power of nationalism as a motive for action and the mass appeal of nationalism. Studies of national indifference have constructed an alternative non-national narrative, but face particular challenges accounting for major themes and episodes of discrimination and violence. At its core, national indifference paradoxically both rejects and accepts binary notions of identity and incorporates binary assumptions about motives. It is tempting to resolve the contest between parallel accounts of pervasive, powerful nationalism and national indifference by choosing a victor, but this contrast between models shows the fluidity and dynamism of nationalism. The debate between the now classic accounts of nationalism and the alternative of national indifference points to the importance of often overlooked variables: frames and sense of time.

This article revisits the debate on the modernity of nations considering recent critical approaches to national phenomena. It proposes an alternative model that addresses the existence of empirical evidence about nations before the 19th century without erasing key changes in the history of nationhood, such as the rise of the principle of national sovereignty. The model draws on existing literature and a corpus of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese ego-documents from the Age of Revolutions. The study of patterns of usage of national languages in these life narratives supports the abandonment of the premodern/modern antinomy and the implementation of a more complex account. The proposal distinguishes republican, genetic, nonpoliticized ethnotypical, politicized ethnotypical, liberal, romantic, biological, cultural, and democratic forms of nationhood. It then develops the genetic and the ethnotypical forms using source materials and readdresses the issue of “modernity” in the light of this evidence.

From the early 1990s through the 2008 “Russo-Georgian war,” waves of armed conflicts in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia/Tskhinvali regions of Georgia forced thousands of residents, mainly ethnic Georgians, to leave their homes. More than two decades of protracted internal displacement, marked by tough economic and social problems, led this vulnerable community to a common trap in reckoning with the past: an overwhelming sense of the fundamental ruptures between the idealized past and current, miserable reality. Failures of the displacement policy and “side effects” of numerous humanitarian aid projects hinder internally displaced persons’ social integration and leave them on the margins of Georgian society with almost a singular option: to constantly recall meaningful life in the lost homeland, which they remember as free of ethnic phobias and economic problems. In this article, we suggest that for persons who are internally displaced, memories are defined not only by their past lived experiences and present hardships, but also by the official historical narratives that argue that Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-Ossetian “endemic” unity and cohabitation was destroyed by Russian imperial politics. Living in constant pain also narrows the future expectations of the internally displaced persons. However, it is the past and the memories that are supposed to be useful in achieving the utopian dream of a return.

This Opinion Note is a reflection on the challenges faced by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in emerging countries that want to be heard in the humanitarian world without being major donors. The author underlines the importance of the feeling of humiliation that can be seen in the narratives of these countries. After listing some of the specific activities that can be developed in such contexts, he refers to the concept of strategic anchoring developed by the ICRC in order to work more effectively in a world that is becoming increasingly multipolar.

This article demonstrates that historical narrative in the Zuo zhuan is founded on the concept of “timeliness,” that is, on the understanding of time as being endowed with moral qualities. The choice between a “timely” (shi 時) or “untimely” (bu shi 不時) course of action determines the success or failure of the person involved in it. The origins of the ideas of time that shape the historical narrative of Zuo zhuan can be traced to mantic literature of the same period, such as almanacs.

Early Chinese writers of history—like diviners—strove to explain the past in order to predict the future. Seen in this light, “knowing history” implies understanding and mastering the mechanisms that drive it; and looking into the past is tantamount to “knowing” the future.

Capital cities play an integral role in the construction of national identity. This is particularly true when the capital is the country's only major urban center. Over the course of its history, Mongolia's capital of Ulaanbaatar has been periodically reshaped to reflect competing trajectories of national culture. This article examines the evolving symbolism of architecture, urban design, and public space in Ulaanbaatar as a means of exploring Mongolia's complex negotiation between its traditional culture (mobile pastoralism and Shamanism/Buddhism), its socialist legacy, and globalization. Amidst the rampant social change of the last two decades, rather ambiguous national narratives have emerged in Mongolia. Like the capital's cityscape, these narratives reflect aspects of both recent and distant pasts, as well as contemporary economic, political, and social realities. This article reveals how increasingly palpable global economic and cultural practices are fomenting material change in the current phase of Ulaanbaatar's evolution. A combination of secondary source research and observations drawn from several months of fieldwork provide the basis for a discussion of the city's role as a forum for cultural contestation and national reform.