![]() | Race, Science, and the Nation: Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany Subjects: Humanities; History; European History; Modern History 1750-1945; History of Science & Technology; Intellectual History; Social & Cultural History; Across the nineteenth century, scholars in Britain, France and the German lands sought to understand their earliest ancestors: the Germanic and Celtic tribes known from classical antiquity, and the newly discovered peoples of prehistory. New fields - philology, archeology and anthropology - interacted, breaking down languages, unearthing artifacts, measuring skulls and recording the customs of "savage" analogues. This was a decidedly national process: disciplines institutionalized on national levels, and their findings seen to have deep implications for the origins of the nation and its "racial composition." However, this operated within broader currents. The wide spread of material and novelty of the methods meant that these approaches formed connections across Europe and beyond, even while national rivalries threatened to tear these networks apart. Chris Manias is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manchester. |
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