The Crown in National Disguises: The Uses of Monarchy’s Historical Past in Spanish Nation-Building, 1833–1868

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
David San Narciso

Abstract The competing ideologies of nation and monarchy had a troubled beginning in the 19th century, insomuch as they derived partly from two opposing sources of legitimacy. However, from the 1830s on, their supporters achieved the establishment of an interspecific and mutually advantageous relationship. The nation gradually managed to prevail over the monarchy, justifying its presence in national terms. However, the monarchy possessed something longed for by liberal nationalists: historical legitimacy. Thus, the crown served Romantic nationalism in its search for national foundations and to generate national emotions of a collective sense of belonging. This article analyses this process by focusing on the Spanish case and using a vast range of cultural sources. I reason that the monarchy’s history was intensively used in Isabel II’s reign (1833–1868), both by the monarch herself as well as nationalist elites, to legitimate and justify their presence in the liberal world. The article is divided into three sections. The first part locates the problem into a general process that touched all the crowned heads of Europe. The second section studies the appeal of exemplary medieval monarchs in the liberal hunt for national roots. The final one focuses on the particular case of Isabel the Catholic because of the remarkable prominence it acquired.

Nordlit ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Aschim

In most Protestant countries, the Reformation was closely connected to the development of vernacular languages and literatures. In Norway under Danish rule, this was not the case. Only in the 19th century, during the nation-building period of independent Norway, a Norwegian ecclesiastical language was developed. Some authors claim that this completed the Reformation in Norway – a protracted Reformation indeed. Particularly important were the hymns of Magnus Brostrup Landstad and Elias Blix. This study examines the role of Luther in the Norwegian 19th century national discourse, suggesting a three-phase development: Luther as text, as inspiration, and as argument. The full-blown use of Luther as argument was taken up by proponents of a nynorsk ecclesiastical language only during the final years of the Swedish-Norwegian union, just before its dissolution in 1905.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felipe Dias

This article seeks to explain how economic and local political structures shaped the ways in which public officials articulated ideas of race and labor in the nineteenth century Brazil. Employing a comparative historical method, this work advances the literature in two ways. First, it suggests that what we have come to view as a positive valuation of blackness has roots in the economic development prior to the centralized nation-building processes. Second, the findings of this study point to the effects of intra-national factors, such as economic structures and patterns of labor incorporation, in shaping how regional public officials articulated notions of “race,” labor, and progress.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-10
Author(s):  
Andrei Cușco ◽  
Petru Negură

Since the second half of the 19th century, Romania has asserted itself, along with other European states, as a “modern mobilizational state”, which aimed to profoundly transform its population and the mass of its citizens through extensive mobilizing and social engineering projects. Public education has played a central role in this ambitious process of social transformation, being an essential tool of state formation and nation-building.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 583-607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Hillström,

It has become commonplace to assert that museums embody, perform and negotiate national identities. Many researches in museum history have stressed a close relationship between nation building and the origin and formation of the modern public museum. Museums, it is argued, contributes to the construction and representation of the ethnical and historical distinctiveness of the nation’s self’. This article explores the ambiguities of the concept when applied to the establishment of cultural history museums in Sweden and Norway during the latter half of the 19th century. It shows that the relation between nation building and early museum building in the Scandinavian context was more intricate than earlier has been assumed. Museum founders like Artur Hazelius, who opened the Scandinavian-Ethnographic Collection in 1873 (renamed Nordiska museet 1880), was deeply influenced by Scandinavianism, a strong cultural and political force during the 19th century. Union politics played an important role for museum politics, as did the transitions of the concepts of “ethnography” and “nation”. At the very end of the 19th century the original concept of “nation” meaning people and culture gradually was subordinated to the concept of “nation” as state and political territory. In early 20th century museum ideology cultural history museums were strongly connected with “nations” in the modern sense. Consequently, efforts to “nationalise” the folk-culture museum were made both in Norway and Sweden. A contributory force was, naturally, the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union in 1905.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-117
Author(s):  
Danielle Bainbridge

The public autopsies of 19th-century enfreaked performers remains a central issue in studies of 19th-century enslavement. While previously black performance studies focused on the instability of the historical past tense, the study of freak shows and enslavement dictates a reckoning with the future perfect tense, which sheds light on the history of the future by asking “what will have been” rather than “what was” or “what could have been.”


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2 (461)) ◽  
pp. 13-27
Author(s):  
Øystein Rian

In contrast to the prevailing in the 70s, 80s and 90s concepts on nation-building and national consciousness, the author develops the idea of the Norwegian national identity being present in the Middle Ages, modified and strengthened in the period of the union with Denmark (16th–18th centuries), and during the union with Sweden in the 19th century. In this time, the national identity grew into a political programme of regaining independence and building a national culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-25
Author(s):  
Jerzy Achmatowicz

The present article is trying to find and link the work of the 19th‑century Mexican historiography with the emergence of the national identity of the society of Mexico. Contextualizing this process, the paper recalls the main events of the political scene of a newly independent and sovereign country, also involved in a whole series of international conflicts. The purpose is to find, in the works of Teresa de Mier, Bustamante, Ramírez, Icazbalceta, Paso and Troncoso, Alemán, Orozco and Berra, those contributions that had a relevant impact on the vision of the historical past related to both the independence process and the pre‑Hispanic period, that is, Mesoamerican and colonial history. These contributions are perceived mainly in the rescue of the masterpiece of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and the confrontation with the foundational narration of both the Creole culture and the indigenous culture that was formed after the conquest, i.e. the miraculous appearance of the Virgin from Guadalupe.


2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-123
Author(s):  
Tomasz Grzegorz Grosse

The aim of the article is to show the centuries-old tradition of Polish elites working for nation-building and nation-preserving purposes. It dates back to at least the 18th century. The nation-preserving formula was developed in the 19th century, that is, during the partitions, when the Polish nation did not have its own statehood. In the first part of the article, I describe the specificity of Poles’ historical experiences, primarily after the partitions that took place at the end of the 18th century. I try to indicate three main approaches to nation-building (and nation-preserving) activities during this period. In the next part of the article, I try to show that this tradition lasted during the period of political transformation and European integration. While the nation-building approach, related to the reconstruction of sovereign statehood, democracy and a political nation, was dominant in the first case, the nation-preserving policy was observed more often, especially among the right-wing elites, after joining the EU, primarily due to the experiences of subsequent European crises.


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