AHR Forum
Bringing Regionalism Back to History

Regionalism has once again emerged as a critical issue among historians. And thus so too have questions of meaning and method, which have always accompanied interest in regions as subjects of historical inquiry. Equally important if perhaps ironic, the new interest in the region has also underscored the persistent importance of the nation as a crucial unit of analysis and imagination. The essays by Celia Applegate and Kären Wigen contribute insightful assessments of recent substantive and theoretical work on Europe and East Asia to the emerging debate about regionalist history. Their essays also suggest some of the implications of this emerging scholarship for nation-state histories. Michael O'Brien and Vicente L. Rafael bring their struggles with regional history in other parts of the world to their comments. Their perspectives enlarge the discussion in a number of ways, most notably by arguing that the regionalist idea itself warrants closer scrutiny and that the agency of individual scholars must be examined as well. The essays and the comments offer historians a compelling means of understanding the resurgence of regionalism in historical scholarship.

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