ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how the Danish historian Niels Ditlev Riegels’ (1755–1802) journalism influenced his historical writing and how Riegels maneuvered the public sphere, engaged with the Copenhagen press with different historical genres and various strategies in the late 18th century. The chapter analyzes in particular the genre designations used by Riegels which shed light on what he intended to achieve and how he understood his role as an historian in the expanding and changing public sphere of his time. In the historiographical discourse of the 18th and 19th centuries, Riegels has been perceived as a paradigmatic case of an inadequate historian. By examining more closely the case of his writings as genres in the public sphere, this chapter argues that we get a clearer understanding of the possible roles and ways of navigating the public sphere with historical writing in the late 18th century.
