History has been a crucial element in underpinning national identities across the globe for a very long time. Each construction of national identity is incorporating a sense of a long, proud and preferably unbroken history. This book brings together experts on national history writing from all five continents to discuss the role of history in the making of national identities in a transnational and comparative way. The institutionalization and professionalisation of history writing is analysed in the context of history's increasing nationalization in the course of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The narrative construction of nation and its interrelationship with other 'master' narratives, such as class, religion, race and gender are discussed, and many of the contributions also reveal to what extent spatial definitions of the nation were linked to both local/regional as well as transnational history writing.