| Summary: | After exhibiting one of the "hottest" instances of ethno-national related violence in all post-socialist transitions, early 90s Romanian society seemed to have "cooled" down in terms identitarian conflicts, hence making it even more surprising why an apparently small-scale debate concerning history textbooks quickly spiraled to the point of becoming a fully-fledged public scandal against a Government dubbed as "Anti-Romanian". The aim of this paper is thus to contribute to the overarching research question: Why did nationalism remain such a powerful force despite the fall of the Ceausescu regime? To provide a comprehensive answer the article looks at two, tightly interwoven, sides of cultural reproduction: the politics of history-teaching in Romanian high-schools and its more general background -historians' debates on nationalism. The conclusion reached through this analysis is that a conservation of ethno-centered nationalistic thinking about history was generated by a distorted understanding of professionalization of history qua science.
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