The study focuses on the 1990s when the well-organised community of Baltic educational historians faced the challenges of changing political system. Researchers who have worked under the strict authoritarian rule to date had to accomplish three tasks: 1) create a new narrative of the history of education of Baltic States, emancipated from Soviet ideology and able to explain sources available in the newly opened archives; 2) learn to "sell" (at conferences and via publications) their local stories to a foreign audience of historians; 3) involve in the global community of educational historians, learning its "great narratives", specific language and communication etiquette. Our research questions ask: 1) How in the course of emancipation, educational historians from the Baltic States found their way to the global community of historians of education? 2) What feedback (reaction) did local communities show regarding their members' efforts to integrate into the global community of education historians? To answer the first question of our study, we used the monographs on the history of education published during the 1990s and 41 doctoral theses developed in the 1990s in the Baltic States. These sources were confronted with academic studies by internationally recognised scholars from different regions characterising global trends in the current history of education (e.g. Finkelstein, Tröhler, MacCulloch, Depaepe, Sani, Hofstetter). We developed a model according to their approaches and analysed how the supply of the Baltic states complied with the global trends in the history of education. We will answer the second research question analysing the documents of the Baltic Association of Historians of Pedagogy. The first results of our study demonstrate that efforts to convert local narratives into a transnational perspective created new national myths that replaced the old Soviet stories. Recent history was politicized and its interpretation depended on the collective memory of various social groups (national communities, generations and political associations). Efforts to tell the like-minded local story determine the selection of “comfortable” foreign audience. Acknowledgment: The presentation is part of the project funded by the Research Council of Latvia (lzp-2020/2-0282).

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