Argentina's Partisan Past

Book excerpt: Argentina's Partisan Past is a challenging new study about the production, spread, and use of national history and identity for political purposes in twentieth-century Argentina. Based on extensive study of primary and published sources, it analyzes how nationalist views about what it meant to be Argentine were built into the country's long protracted crisis of liberal democracy from the 1930s to the 1980s. Eschewing the notion of any straightforward relationship between cultural customs and political practices, the study seeks instead to provide a more nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between politics and narratives about national history. The book is a valuable resource to both students of Argentine history and those interested in the ways in which nationalism has shaped our contemporary world.