The Transformation of Nationalized Academic Historiography: A Comparative Perspective on the United States and Germany in the Twentieth Century

History as academic discipline in the 20th century, particularly in Western Europe and the United States but also in other areas of the world, is commonly described as strongly linked to the nation-state and its need for suiting historical representations of the past. Alternative topical and conceptual approaches are made out, if at all, largely for the last two decades of that century. This paper seeks to argue in contrast that the influence of intensified global interaction, exchange and entanglements has much sooner shaped and changed the institutional structures, the curricula and the research agendas. Reconstructing these developments, understood as reaction of historians to social and political demands of a ‘global age’ (Michael Geyer), offers thus insights into the overall transformation of the ‘nation’ and the ‘national’ as dominant territorial framework for social action, i.e. the periodization of this process, its concrete forms and the conflicts that arose from it. The paper will present the results of an analysis of the development of history curricula, the organization of research on larger historical entities, as can be observed in the sub-disciplines of ‘extra-European history’ or ‘world history’ – both in its intellectual and institutional dimensions. To do so it will concentrate on changing demarcations, and thus historical master narratives, in the treatment of modern history. The comparative view on U.S. and Germany will shed light on differences in the slow broadening of nationalized historical frameworks and explain them particularly with the different historical geopolitical positions, needs and ambitions of the two countries.