Nationalism From Below in the East European and Soviet Borderlands : Popular Responses to Nation-Building, 1900-1940

This book features contributions that examine the responses of local populations to nationalizing and state-building projects in the first half of the twentieth century.Focusing on bottom-up, peripheral, and marginal reactions to top-down nation-building efforts, the volume covers border regions of Romania, Austria-Hungary (before 1918), Poland, Finland, the Russian Empire, and the USSR between 1900 and 1940. Historiography continues to privilege top-down approaches, focused on elites, institutions, and official policies.Despite previous notable works on this topic, in-depth studies of bottom-up perspectives on these regions remain rare.This volume seeks to redress the imbalance by emphasizing the perceptions, discourses, and everyday practices of ordinary people confronted with (often repressive) nation- and state-building agendas.It also addresses multiple levels of social interaction (combining perspectives from above, from below, and from the middle), involving several categories o