Institutions, networks and communities "standardized" the historical
discipline and profession in the nineteenth and twentieth century, in
both the old and the new European nation states. This collection of
essays focuses on the growth of the infrastructure of historiography:
the archives, the journals, the biographical dictionaries and the
historical museums. It presents the places where historians met one
another: sometimes in a formal context, sometimes informally; sometimes
in a strictly organised entity, sometimes in looser associations;
sometimes with a clear scientific purpose, sometimes for more
light-hearted reasons. Finally, it presents the diversity of the writers
of history: the university professors working in the hauts lieux of the
new historiography, but also less obvious groups such as the clergy, the
nobility, women and the exiled historians who continually evoked the
past of their abandoned and lost countries.