Typically official school textbooks are based on the nationalist model and focus on the emergence, trials and successes of the forces of nationalism.
The sponsors of the MGH, as it is commonly known, defined German history very broadly; they edited documents concerning all territories where German-speaking people had once lived or ruled.
[7] This model of scholarship focusing on detailed historical and linguistic investigations of the origins of a nation, set by the founders of the MGH, was imitated throughout Europe.
Conversely, historical developments spanning many current countries may be ignored, or analysed from narrow parochial viewpoints[citation needed].
The efforts of these nineteenth- century historians provided the intellectual foundations for both justifying the creation of new nation states and the expansion of already existing ones.
[8] As Georg Iggers notes, these historians were often highly partisan and "went into the archives to find evidence that would support their nationalistic and class preconceptions and thus give them the aura of scientific authority".
[dubious – discuss] Then scholars such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Anthony D. Smith made attempts to step back from nationalism and view it critically.
[17]Martin Bernal's much debated book Black Athena (1987) argues that the historiography on ancient Greece has been in part influenced by nationalism and ethnocentrism.
According to the medieval historian Patrick J. Geary:[The] modern [study of] history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism.
[23] In 2004, Terence Ranger noted that "Over the past two or three years there has emerged in Zimbabwe a sustained attempt by the Mugabe regime to propagate what is called ‘patriotic history’.