Apparently Aby Warburg "obsessively kept" notes on antisemitic incidents on the Eastern front in his zettelkasten.

This piece looks at Warburg's Jewish identity as supported or not by the contents of his zettelkasten, thus placing it in the use of zettelkasten or card index as autobiography.

Might one's notes reflect who they were as a means of creating both their identity while alive as well as revealing it once they've passed on? Might the use of historical method provide its own historical method to be taken up on a meta basis after one's death?

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/help-me-find-world-history-textbooks

Dan Allosso is curious to look at the history of how history is taught.

The history of teaching history is a fascinating topic and is an interesting way for cultural anthropologists to look at how we look at ourselves as well as to reveal subtle ideas about who we want to become.

This is particularly interesting with respect to teaching cultural identity and its relationship to nationalism.

One could look at the history of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War to see how the South continued its cultural split from the North (or in more subtle subsections from Colin Woodard's American Nations thesis) to see how this has played out. This could also be compared to the current culture wars taking place with the rise of nationalism within the American political right and the Southern evangelicals which has come to a fervor with the rise of Donald J. Trump.

Other examples are the major shifts in nationalism after the "long 19th century" which resulted in World War I and World War II and Germany's national identity post WWII.