STEFAN BERGER is Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History at the University of Manchester, UK, where he is one of the founding members of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Forms of Modern European Politics. He is directing a five-year European Science Foundation programme on the writing of national histories in Europe since 1800

• Introduction: Towards a Global History of National Historiographies; S.Berger The Power of National Pasts: Writing National History in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe; S.Berger Seven Narratives in North American History: Thinking the Nation in Canada, Quebec, and the United States; A.Smith The Mirror of History and Images of the Nation: The invention of a national identity in Brazil and its contrasts with similar enterprises in Mexico and Argentina; E.de Freitas Dutra Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation; M.Hearn Between Myth and History: the Construction of a National Past in Modern East Asia; Q. E.Wang Writing the Nation in India: Communalism and Historiography; R.Seshan Writing the Nation in the Arabic-speaking World; B.Schaebler Writing National and Transnational History in Africa - the Example of the 'Dakar School'; I.Thioub Select Bibliography

'This is a fine work for introducing new historians to historiography and its nuances and complexities... Writing the Nation affirms the importance of history, not simply as a field of study, but also as an act, political or otherwise, that is crucial to the rationalising of socio-political economic formation in the modern age, and possibly before.' - Maghan Keita, English Historical Review