Sociologists and historians are not always the best of neighbours, each group tending to perceive the other in terms of the crudest of stereotypes. However, the two approaches are obviously complementary - change is structured, and structures change. Each discipline can free the other from its own kind of parochialism and the aim of this book is to bridge the gap between these tow subcultures, to give historians a more acute sense of structure and sociologists a more acute sense of change.

This work focuses on the ideological intertwining between Czech, Magyar, Polish and Slovak, and the corresponding nationalisms steeped in these languages. The analysis is set against the earlier political and ideological history of these languages, and the panorama of the emergence and political uses of other languages of the region.

The leading cultural historian Professor Peter Burke offers here several innovative approaches to cultural history.

The volume is introduced by an important autobiographical essay in which the author attempts to place his own career in its historical context.

A key topic, from which the volume derives its name, is 'secret history', a phrase that came into use in the later seventeenth century to describe a new genre of historical writing by authors who claimed to be able to go behind the scenes and tell the public the real reasons for important events.

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