From the end of the eighteenth century until the beginning of the age of nationalities, the history of museums is linked to the history of the patriotic constructions. The appeal to the popular nationalism emphasized the formation of collections able to return to the collective origins of the imagined community. The history museum is willing to serve as a workshop to the historians and as a mirror to a disappeared world that needs to be claimed and that needs to be embodied convincingly. The contradictions between these objectives and approaches became evident during the twentieth century, nurturing from the opposites interpretations of the role of the museum as a place of manipulation of patrimony.
patrimony; museum; History; memory; national heritage