Serbian historiography

Serbian historiography (Serbian: Srpska istoriografija) refers to the historiography (methodology of history studies) of the Serb people since the founding of Serbian statehood. The development can be divided into four main stages: traditional historiography, Ruvarac's critical school, Communist–Marxist legacy, and the renewed Serbian national movement.^[1]

Jovan Rajić (1726–1801) was the forerunner to modern Serbian historiography,^[2] and has been compared to the importance of Nikolay Karamzin to Russian historiography.^[3] Ilarion Ruvarac (1832–1905) is regarded the founder of the critical school of Serbian historiography.^[4][5] Ruvarac's school clashed with that of Panta Srećković (1834–1903).^[6] Serbian historiography was mostly focused on national issues during the Society of Serbian Scholarship and Serbian Learned Society (1841–1886).^[7]

Patriotic historiography viewed the Serbs as liberators from foreign oppression of their South Slavic brothers in the Balkan Wars and World War I. In Communist historiography, Serbs were transformed into oppressors, the Chetniks of World War II branded as collaborationist as the Ustaše, and the massacres of Serbs were downplayed.^[8]

See also

• Encyclopedia of Serbian Historiography (1997)
• Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

References

1. Woolf 2014, p. 825.
2. Lucian Boia (1 January 1989). Great Historians from Antiquity to 1800: An International Dictionary. Greenwood Press. p. 343. ISBN 978-0-313-24517-6.
3. University of Colorado (1956). Journal of Central European Affairs. 16. Boulder, Colorado: University of Colorado. p. 23.
4. Serbian Studies. 45. North American Society for Serbian Studies. 1986. p. 180. Among these historians he points out the significance of Jovan Rajic (1726-1801) and Ilarion Ruvarac (1832-1905). The former indeed "stood on the threshold between the enlightenment and the age of romanticism" and later, as the principal representative and founder of the critical school of Serbian historiography, took "the first relatively objective look at ...
5. Matthew Anthony Fitzsimons; Alfred George Pundt; Charles E. Nowell (1967). The development of historiography. Kennikat Press. p. 348. Ruvarac (1832-1905) belonged to the rigidly scientific, relentlessly analytic school of historiography which held that the ... the school of Ruvarac triumphed in the end, and by the early 1880's Serbian historiography was definitely founded in ...
6. Philip Lawrence Harriman; Massimo Salvadori (1953). Contemporary Social Science. Stackpole Company. p. 255.
7. Paul Stephenson (20 December 2010). The Byzantine World. Routledge. pp. 482–. ISBN 978-1-136-72787-0.
8. A. Pavkovic (8 January 2016). The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans. Springer. pp. 88–. ISBN 978-0-230-28584-2.

Sources

• Woolf, D.R. (2014). A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing. Routledge. pp. 825–. ISBN 978-1-134-81998-0.

Further reading

Books

• Sima M. Ćirković; Rade Mihaljčić (1997). Encyclopedia of Serbian historiography. Knowledge.
• Mile Bjelajac; Gordana Krivokapić-Jović (2011). Prilozi iz naučne kritike - srpska istoriografija i svet: (uticaj jugoslovenske krize na stranu i domaću istoriografiju). Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije. ISBN 978-86-7005-093-8.

Journals

• Ković Miloš (2012). "Imagining the Serbs revisionism in the recent historiography of nineteenth-century Serbian history" (PDF). Balcanica. 43: 325–346.