From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe has produced more history than any region on earth, for bad and for good.  But where is it? And how does a critical historian write its history? Nationalists argue that nations are eternal, Connelly argues that they formed recently: in the 1780s, when the Habsburgs attempted to make their subjects German, thereby causing a panic among Hungarians and Czechs that they might disappear from history. The region's boundaries are the boundaries of a certain painful knowledge: that nations come and go, and urgently require protection.

John Connelly is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History and Director of the Institute for East European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956 (2000); From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews (2012). He has written for Commonweal, The Nation, London Review of Books, Washington Post, and The New Republic.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.