Nation and History. Historical Justification and Interpretation of Nations towards the End of the 19th Century and the First Half of the 20th Century

The purpose of this text is to provide the reader with an overview of the relationship between nation and history in the debates that were generated by historians and other scholars in the field of social sciences in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. The main idea that is proposed here is to study and then show how modern nations were subject to a process of political redefinition in the intellectual landscape of the social sciences -and particularly of historians- while, at the same time, a set of debates and works was emerging, which was trying to question and place under scrutiny the relations that were sought to be established between nation and history as an element that justified them.