Race, Nation, History

Oded Y. Steinberg ‘proposes a novel thesis as to how historical periodization converged with racial, national, and religious themes’ (p. 2) in the historical writing and thought of a coterie of influential British and German scholars active in the second half of the nineteenth century: a ‘Gemeinschaft of scholars’ (p. 50) that includes Edward Augustus Freeman, James Bryce, C.C.J. von Bunsen and Friedrich Max Müller. This was the period in which history sought to establish itself as a discipline through the creation of dedicated journals and that boundary-work by which a self-proclaimed ‘science of history’ sought to define itself and resist incursions by predecessors and rivals, dismissed or gently patronised as either ‘picturesque’ or ‘literary’ historical writing. Several of Steinberg’s key figures are familiar from accounts of the professionalisation of history by Leslie Howsam, Philippa Levine and Ian Hesketh. But Steinberg’s focus is more intellectual, centred on the concept of the ‘unity of history’, advanced by the Rev. Thomas Arnold, Regius professor of history at Oxford in 1841–2

Archaeology · Genealogy · German · Race (biology · Sociology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Gender Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices