Nationalization of history
It is also very important to take in consideration that the 18th century was in the Age of Enlightenment when people's activities, both on individual and social level, were determined with desire to follow rational scientific judgment while changing the society, which released them from restraints of customs and arbitrary authorities based on faith, superstition, or revelation and backed up by religion or tradition.
[5] All these circumstances provided suitable surroundings for development of universalistic, liberal and rational global perspectives in studies of society and its past and writing historical texts.
In his Essay on customs (1756) Voltaire studied development of civilization in the world with universal perspective, rejecting tradition, Christian and national frames.
The emerging of modern historiography is connected with German universities in the 19th century and the significant influence of Leopold von Ranke who insisted on objectivity and systematic use of historical documents in the form of authentic primary sources; his credo was to perform reconstruction of the past "as it was".
[7] Though nationalization of history could probably be traced from the earliest phases of creating historical works, it was in the period after the French Revolution that creating of historical works started to be strongly influenced by national perspectives, and that perspective gradually became globally dominant with its culmination during the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century.
With the emerging of national states, a global universal approach to writing history lost ground to the nation-state and was very much captured by it even in a significant part of the 20th century.
Canada is an example of an attempt at nationalization of history to create a shared, historically rooted identity for English and French Canadians.
A shortcut to production of national mythologies that proves ancient origins of modern nations, providing them with a respectable past, was forgery of historical documents, literature and historical works that were lost for some time, and then suddenly rediscovered to the approval of an astonished grateful public.
Authors of such rediscovered treasures that were in a quest for success and glory did not suspect that they were in fact builders of as yet nonexistent modern nations.
[24] At the end of the 20th century were extreme nationalistic interpretations of Balkan and Caucasus history, which became powerful weapons in ethno-territorial conflicts and accelerated disintegration of multinational states like Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
