The modern nation-state needs a usable past that anchors a country into a legitimizing historical framework. The challenge of constructing this kind of framework is formidable in Lebanon, whose present-day geography and demography were marginal to earlier mainstream narratives of Lebanon's Ottoman past. Much Lebanese historiography has focused on the Ma'ani/Shihabi Emirate (17th-19th centuries) whose geographic core was Mount Lebanon, and in this historiography the Emirate with its major populations of Druze and Maronites was presented as the historical precursor of modern Lebanon. But today most Lebanese live in and around the coastal towns of Sidon, Tripoli and especially Beirut. None of these were centers of the Mountain Emirate or of the subsequent Mutasarrifiyya. Moreover, these coastal towns' populations were predominantly (Sunni) Muslim for much or all of the Ottoman period. Therefore the role of these cities and their populations in retrospective Lebanese historiography since the 1970s can offer a window into debates and conflicts regarding constructions and understandings of national identity. The architects of the Ta'if Agreement (1989) that ended the Lebanese civil conflicts of the 1970s and 80s called for the creation of a unified national history. Historiography of Lebanon's Ottoman coast published from the 1970s onward is thus a good test of the challenges and possibilities of creating of a hegemonic national narrative that potentially would be more inclusive, useful, and persuasive than the older models. This paper will look at selected studies from recent decades -- written by Lebanese and published mostly in Arabic for "national" audiences -- that treat the Ottoman-era coastal towns. The paper will ask: 1) who are the highlighted historical actors or protagonists, 2) who and what are identified as the forces of historical change, and 3) how these localities and forces relate to a notional idea of "Lebanon" or (possibly) to other adumbrations of national or proto-national identity The paper's conclusion will relate this specific material to more general propositions regarding the relationships among history, historiography, and modern national and nation-state projects.