John Alexander Armstrong dating history

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"My first publications on nationalism contained extended references to religion ... Subsequent familiarity with the impressive sociological work by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann enabled me to show more clearly how nationalism, as a type of identity, 'shelters the individual from ultimate terror', that is, death as 'the most terrifying breakdown of identity' ... In general, I share this consensus, while stipulating that nations, but no particular nation of the modern type, and certainly not nationalism existed before the 16th century. Such issues of timing and agency are very important to my theory, for my methodological preference is for intensive employment of historical data over the longue durée ... The pre-modern social formations that I treat in Nations before Nationalism (1982) and elsewhere ... require a national idea. Fundamental themes are myth, symbol, and communication, especially as they relate to boundary mechanisms of a psychological rather than territorial nature."