Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age 9780520958050

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface: Location and History
Acknowledgments
PART ONE. HISTORIOGRAPHY
1. Watersheds in Time and Place: Writing American History in Europe
PART TWO. STRUCTURES AND CONTEXT
2. Using the American Past for the Present: European Historians and the Relevance of Writing American History
3. Institutions, Careers, and the Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe
4. Straddling Intellectual Worlds: Positionality and the Writing of American History
PART THREE. INTERNATIONALIZATION(S) OF U.S. HISTORY
5. Writing American History from Europe: The Elusive Substance of the Comparative Approach
6. American Foreign Relations in European Perspectives: Geopolitics and the Writing of History
7. Location and the Conceptualization of Historical Frameworks: Early American History and Its Multiple Reconfigurations in the United States and in Europe
PART FOUR. PERSPECTIVES FROM ELSEWHERE
8. Positionality, Ambidexterity, and Global Frames
9. Reflections from Russia
10. Doing U.S. History in Australia: A Comparative Perspective
11. Viewing American History from Japan: The Potential of Comparison
12. Not Quite at Home: Writing American History in Denmark
13. American History in the Shadow of Empire: A Plea for Marginality
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Historians across Borders

This page intentionally left blank

Historians across Borders Writing American History in a Global Age

edited by

Nicolas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck, and Cécile Vidal

university of california press Berkeley

•

Los Angeles

•

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Historians across borders : writing American history in a global age / edited by Nicolas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck, and Cécile Vidal. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-27927-8 (hardback) isbn 978-0-520-27929-2 (paper) isbn 978-0-520-95805-0 (e-book) 1. United States—Historiography. 2. Historiography—Europe. 3. United States— History—Study and teaching—Europe. I. Barreyre, Nicolas, 1975–, author, editor of compilation. e175.h66 2014 973.072—dc23 2013032717 Manufactured in the United States of America 22 10

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface: Location and History

ix

Nicolas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck, and Cécile Vidal

Acknowledgments

xix

part one. historiography 1. Watersheds in Time and Place: Writing American History in Europe

3

Michael Heale, Sylvia Hilton, Halina Parafianowicz, Paul Schor, and Maurizio Vaudagna

part two. structures and context 2. Using the American Past for the Present: European Historians and the Relevance of Writing American History

37

Tibor Frank, Martin Klimke, and Stephen Tuck

3. Institutions, Careers, and the Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe Max Edling, Vincent Michelot, Jörg Nagler, Sandra Scanlon, and Irmina Wawrzyczek

56

vi

|

Contents

4. Straddling Intellectual Worlds: Positionality and the Writing of American History

75

Nicolas Barreyre, Manfred Berg, and Simon Middleton

part three. internationalization(s) of u.s. history 5. Writing American History from Europe: The Elusive Substance of the Comparative Approach

95

Susanna Delfino and Marcus Gräser

6. American Foreign Relations in European Perspectives: Geopolitics and the Writing of History

118

Hans Krabbendam, Pauline Peretz, Mario Del Pero, and Helle Porsdam

7. Location and the Conceptualization of Historical Frameworks: Early American History and Its Multiple Reconfigurations in the United States and in Europe

141

Trevor Burnard and Cécile Vidal

part four. perspectives from elsewhere 8. Positionality, Ambidexterity, and Global Frames

165

Thomas Bender

9. Reflections from Russia

174

Ivan Kurilla

10. Doing U.S. History in Australia: A Comparative Perspective

181

Ian Tyrrell

11. Viewing American History from Japan: The Potential of Comparison Natsuki Aruga

189

Contents | vii

12. Not Quite at Home: Writing American History in Denmark

198

David E. Nye

13. American History in the Shadow of Empire: A Plea for Marginality

206

François Furstenberg

Notes Selected Bibliography List of Contributors Index

215 291 295 299

This page intentionally left blank

Preface Location and History nicolas barreyre, michael heale, stephen tuck, and cécile vidal

History is all explained by geography. —Robert Penn Warren

Perhaps the most famous European observer of new worlds—and certainly the most beloved of generations of children—was Lemuel Gulliver, the crotchety old seafarer who returned to England in the early eighteenth century. His fantastical tales of the miniature people of Lilliput and the giants of Brobdingnag, the flying island of Laputa and the savage Houyhnhnms, captured the public imagination then and have never been out of print since. Jonathan Swift’s rather subversive purpose in writing Gulliver’s Travels, of course, was to use the fictional traveler’s consideration of foreign lands to critique the structure and ideological presuppositions of society more generally—an aim so subversive, in fact, that Swift took precautions to ensure that there was no evidence to prove he was the author. This book is (sadly for the reader) less subversive in its intent and (sadly for the authors) less likely to have such an enduring publication record. Even so, it takes as its departure point what soon became a standard trope after Gulliver: the outsider as privileged observer. In modern times, few countries have been more observed than the United States, and few countries have sent more observers there than those in Europe—Alexis de Tocqueville, James Bryce, Sándor Bölöni Farkas, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and numerous others have followed in Gulliver’s fictional footsteps to observe a new world that was often as imagined as it was real. Professional historians arrived in the early twentieth century, their ranks swelled dramatically in the mid- and late century, and ix

x

|

Preface

European universities now collectively employ several hundred historians of North America in permanent positions.1 No doubt each one has been asked at some point: what difference does your position as an outsider make to your scholarship? Down the years, many answers have been offered, not least by senior American academics—from the inaugural speech by the president of the American Historical Association, in 1884, warning that “disengaged and disentangled” outsiders must, “as a rule, give the maximum of labor to a minimum of result,” to the 1992 call by the editor of the Journal of American History for the incorporation of international scholarship into American historiography, with the prediction that fresh perspectives would reinvigorate the discipline at home.2 Whether positive or negative, though, all such speculation has shared the presumption that outside observers would have a distinctive approach. This proposition might look like common sense, yet it carries many unexamined assumptions about the practice of writing history—assumptions that this book seeks to deconstruct. Nationality—belonging or not to the nation whose history one writes—is not an explanation in itself. As we hope this book shows, the necessarily comparative context of writing a foreign nation’s history highlights the fact that such conditions cannot be reduced to the identity of individuals. Behind the status of “foreign” historian—with its inevitably outside perspective—are more complex, interesting, and invariably unexplored influences of audiences, institutions, and academic structures and cultures, which are often, but not always, national in scope. Thus we suggest that any investigation into the question of perspective should quickly lead to a much broader and more important epistemological issue: how do institutional and cultural factors shape the writing of history? In a collective endeavor gathering twenty-four scholars from eleven European countries, we explore this subject by examining one case study: American history as written in Europe. In other words, we borrow Swift’s device of observing a foreign society in order to investigate a broad issue in the very structure of any society—in this case, the observers are historians based in Europe, the foreign society is the North American colonies or the United States, and the broad issue is the institutional and cultural influences that shape historical writing. This is why we are not offering a state-of-the-field survey of European historiography, and even less do we attempt a report on the European contribution to American history.3 Rather, it is the role of location in the writing of history that interests us, so we have focused primarily on the work of

Preface | xi

academic historians, although—as some of the chapters note—others have published insightful American histories too.4 This investigation thus also carries implications for the writing of American history in the United States, since U.S. scholars too are conditioned by their cultural and institutional contexts. In short, this case study carries implications for the writing of history wherever it is written. Place matters. Apart from acknowledging academic debts and sharing some biographical details in a preface and hinting at the present-day implications of their work in an epilogue, most historians rarely reflect publicly on the constraints and opportunities that have shaped their scholarship. This may be because the academic and social environment that each historian works within provides the intellectual air that he or she breathes—seemingly natural, perhaps even universal, and thus easy to take for granted. It may also be reassuring for historians to see themselves as free-floating individuals, whose innovative research paths are the products of their own, purely intellectual choices. But we contend that even in a democratic age, historians float a little less freely than might be assumed. Our means of illuminating the often hidden institutional and cultural factors that shape historical production is to examine why European writing about the United States and its antecedents remains distinctive, even at a time of increased academic globalization.5 European historical writing about early North America and the United States provides a suitable case study for both its exemplarity and its peculiarities (in addition, of course, to it being our own turf). Europebased scholars of the United States are but a subset of all historians specializing in foreign nations (or, in some cases, former colonies) in a profession that still bears the heavy imprint of its national, even nationalist, past.6 Yet the United States is anything but a typical foreign country, of course, not least because of the current hegemony of the American academy.7 European historical writing has a distinctively long and entangled relationship with its U.S. counterpart.8 In the twenty-first century, most European historians of America are much more in touch with their fellow specialists in the United States than they are with one another, but while that condition favors American hegemony, it only changes rather than overturns the influence of being based in Europe. If all politics is local, so is all history, and European historians, like all historians, are conditioned not only by the time in which they write but also by the places from which they write. European writing about the United States and its antecedents also affords opportunities for comparisons within, among, and beyond

xii

|

Preface

European nations and over time. Individually, each historian of the United States in Europe is at the margins of both the U.S. academy and his or her national academy, both usually well stocked with historians studying their own nation. Even the colleagues of historians of British, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies in early North America, who should be considered historians of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain, often see them as historians of foreign countries or extraneous territories—a reminder that comparisons among the types and periods of American history matter too. Meanwhile, at the collective level, despite the uniformizing pressures of European bureaucracies and globalized scholarship, the national academies of Europe remain diverse both among and within themselves (we also recognize that the American academy is far from monolithic). The essays in this book make use of each of these comparisons to highlight the evolving structural and cultural influences that shape scholarship. American and European historians of the United States are not mutually exclusive tribes. The United States possesses the largest and bestresourced historical academy in the world, and it has recruited many European scholars, including to posts in American history. Conversely, the U.S. government and philanthropic organizations have done much to encourage the study of American history in Europe, as the following chapters acknowledge, particularly after the Second World War, and European universities have welcomed a steady flow of American historians eager to make their expertise available. Mostly these scholars have visited European universities for a semester or a year, though a few have chosen to make their careers in Europe. So although even academics who study foreign lands overwhelmingly make their careers in the particular cultures and institutions of their own countries, those circulations, which have intensified recently, are part of our daily experience too. We hope that you will find in this book a point of comparison and connection from which to consider broad questions of historical production. Considering the question of place is timely for historiographical and professional reasons. In recent years the writing of United States history has become a global preoccupation, while leading American practitioners have championed its internationalization by incorporating foreign scholarship. This has spurred voluminous discussions of American history in an international or transnational context—but virtually no discussion of the internal dimensions of historiography.9 Meanwhile,

Preface | xiii

the few, invaluable surveys on teaching and writing U.S. history in particular countries abroad often serve more as barometers of global interest in U.S. history than as analyses of their commonalities or differences.10 Additionally, broad historiographical work on U.S. history rarely addresses the fact that a minority of practitioners neither are American nor live in the United States (or the obverse, that American history is overwhelmingly written by Americans). This is true even of works that seek to address how scholars’ identities (as members of a particular minority group or gender, for instance) might affect their scholarship.11 To analyze how and why historians’ writing beyond borders might matter is really to ask what shapes their point of view. This is, at its core, a spatial way of approaching historiography, seen as a common but uneven field where all historians are located, shaped not only by intellectual endeavors but also by career demands and institutional constraints and opportunities. Studying American history written from Europe, we hope, might thus answer two questions by linking them together: How does location, or positionality in that field, shape scholarship? And how does thinking of U.S. history written in the United States relative to U.S. history written elsewhere (and vice versa) help find new, more integrated perspectives or paradigms? To explore the question of why place matters, we have chosen an analytical rather than country-by-country approach. Each chapter tackles a different aspect of a common question: why location matters to history writing, and what it tells us about the factors that shape scholarship. Each chapter is multiauthored by scholars from different European countries (with input from other scholars involved in this book, and beyond), allowing for comparisons among European contexts and between the United States and Europe. The reflections presented here are not meant to be definitive—many are open-ended and tentative. While focusing on a common question, each team of authors was free to come to their own conclusions—and did so. The authors have varied views on how their positions in Europe have made a difference (if at all) to writing about the United States and early North America. Our hope is that their observations and conclusions will be stimulating enough to (re)start a transnational discussion about the historiography of U.S. history and wide-ranging enough to join discussions of writing history across borders and reflections on historical writing more generally. With these ideas in mind, we have organized the book in four parts. The first three take the example of European academies to explore

xiv

|

Preface

specific aspects of the effect of location on writing American history. The fourth brings together reactions to these chapters from scholars of U.S. history and advocates of internationalizing history from other parts of the world, thus broadening the discussion and suggesting further routes of inquiry. Part 1 is a single, long chapter that presents an overview of the European historiography of the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is not, simply, a survey. Rather, its originality lies in teasing out common patterns across—and noting differences among—European academies. By taking the long view, it identifies some of the recurring preoccupations in this scholarship, such as the privileged position accorded to American political and constitutional history, a wariness of exceptionalist claims, and fascination with the American experience of race. European writing nonetheless has changed over time and varied according to place, and this chapter locates a number of chronological and geographical watersheds, as this historiography has taken new directions following the interaction of local circumstances with global or other pressures. The existence of totalitarian regimes in a number of major countries in the mid-twentieth century and beyond, for example, inevitably profoundly affected historical scholarship. By localizing a perspective on the historiography of the United States and by showing to what extent European and non-European historians of the United States share common historiographical grounds, this chapter demonstrates that location—in Europe—has indeed made (and continues to make) significant differences to the patterns and purposes of U.S. historical writing. Part 2 then analyzes this impact. We focus on three aspects of how local contexts might influence the kind of European scholarship produced on the United States and the colonies and territories from which it was formed: politics, institutions, and audiences. It might be expected that during the Cold War, Soviet historians of the United States would offer a different perspective from that of, say, British scholars keen to nourish the “special relationship,” but political influences also affect academic historical writing in much more subtle, and interesting, ways. Through a wide array of examples, chapter 2 explores how local political issues and the way they relate to the wider world play into the interest in U.S. history, the topics scholars study, and the approaches they use. To sustain professional and public support for their activities, for example, European historians need to find something in the American experience that touches a chord with domestic audiences, something

Preface | xv

that demonstrates relevance. This chapter shows how relating history to the present is contingent on local contexts and on traditions in national academies. Chapter 3 focuses on institutions and academic structures. It explicates some of the varying shapes that academic careers take in Europe— from the requirements of PhDs to the constraints of the job market and the expectations of professors—and the consequent effects on research and writing in order to explore the wider issue of how institutional demands, and the position of scholars of the United States in their academies, impact the scholarship they produce. It also discusses the tensions experienced by such European scholars, who have both to engage with U.S. historiography and to conduct research that makes sense to their European colleagues who are not American specialists, demands that can pull in opposite directions. The late German historian Willi Paul Adams once observed of the dilemma facing European historians of the United States that “perhaps the best solution is to think globally, act European and publish in the United States.”12 One mark of the globalization of scholarship is the very recent tendency for recognition by the American academy to be a criterion for the promotion of Americanists in some European countries. Chapter 4 takes up the theme of a variety of influences in a common field, deconstructing the outsider-insider binary by looking at the various intellectual milieus that historians of the United States deal with in their professional and daily lives. It approaches U.S. history as a field that intersects with a range of audiences, which scholars might or might not engage with, depending on their location in the field. It also reflects on a number of taken-for-granted conventions, for example in written style, for what such habits or conventions may reveal about the distinctions that shape European historians’ exercises in American history. Finally, it addresses the complex problem of language, which is a larger question than translation alone. For example, no complete American history can be written without considerable attention to race, but, as chapter 4 notes, when the word—or rather concept—is translated into European languages, it carries differing connotations, which can affect how the history is written. Moreover, though George Bernard Shaw may have been frivolous when he said that Britain and the United States are divided by a common language, even in those two countries particular usages have different meanings.13 Taken together, these three chapters confirm that individual idiosyncrasies cannot, on their own, account for historiographical trends. To

xvi

|

Preface

the contrary: these chapters offer three views of how the embeddedness of scholars in particular contexts can shape—by both constraining and providing opportunities—their scholarship. They consider oftenunacknowledged pressures and argue that if we think of U.S. history as space, then each scholar’s position in that space matters. From there, part 3 explores the ways that location (or rather, some of the political, institutional, and cultural pressures that part 2 discusses) can change perspectives on supposedly shared paradigms, often in unexpected ways. Even though the majority of European historians of the United States now work on that country’s domestic history, usually without explicit transnational or comparative elements (excepting the burgeoning field of Atlantic history), we focus here on approaches that have sought to internationalize U.S. history and thus might be presumed to be universally applicable. Yet even with decentered U.S. history, the position of the author can still matter. A historian who writes about a foreign country is necessarily engaged in a comparative exercise, even if only implicitly. Chapter 5 confronts the long traditions of comparative history, examines the distinctive trajectories of European- and U.S.-based approaches to the same transatlantic comparison, and offers explanations for the differences, which reveal something about each nation’s history. The chapter also positions comparative history as it is currently practiced in relation to the more fashionable approaches of transnational history, histoire croisée, and global history. Of all transatlantic connections, diplomacy and migrations have long most interested European historians. Chapter 6 deals with both, although it is mainly concerned with diplomatic history. It considers the impact of location differently than other chapters, arguing that the evolving geopolitical positions of Europe and the United States cannot but inform the European historiography of American foreign relations. It also demonstrates that a transatlantic divide has separated American and Europeanbased historians of American geopolitics in some intriguing ways, not least because they have not shared the same paradigm of power. American scholars tend to focus on the projection of U.S. power and its impact abroad and at home; European scholars often reflect on power’s relational dimension and how the interplay of influences between the United States and Europe can modify or transform American policies or programs. A new generation of European scholars, now well versed in U.S. historiography, have moved this approach to power away from its initial focus, on (often bilateral) transatlantic relationships, and toward the

Preface | xvii

more international or transnational relationships of which both the United States and Europe are parts. This attraction to all sorts of transnational and global history is also the subject of chapter 7. It looks at “early American history” and its multiple reconfigurations from the 1960s to analyze the impact of location on the conceptualization of historical frameworks. It argues that, because of location, U.S.-based early North Americanists have a tendency to privilege Atlantic over imperial history, while the imperial rather than the Atlantic turn more often tempts their European colleagues. However, the impact of location comes from multiple factors, such as local institutional constraints, academic cultures, and power relationships among academic systems that are increasingly connected and can have complementary or contradictory effects. This leaves room for historians to make individual choices, develop alternative strategies according to audiences, and multiply historiographical experimentations. After these analyses of various aspects of and influences on European scholarship, part 4 opens up the debate by inviting prominent scholars from a variety of other regions of the world to reflect on some of the elements thus put on the table. Most of them have also long advocated the internationalization of U.S. history, notably Thomas Bender in the United States, Ivan Kurilla in Russia, Ian Tyrrell in Australia, and Natsuki Aruga in Japan. Scholars with instructive transnational experiences offer other perspectives: David Nye, an American long resident in Denmark, and François Furstenberg, a dual U.S.-French citizen who has been making his career in Canada. With their authors in very different locations, not just geographical but in historiography and the American academy, the essays in part 4 broaden the earlier comparisons and thus extend their analysis and suggest further topics for investigation. So as, like Gulliver, you embark on the journey of the following chapters, we bid you bon voyage in the hope that the musings of the travelers you will encounter in these pages will help to forge a discussion on our common endeavor of writing history, whether American or some other kind, and on the often hidden factors that shape our scholarship. We also hope that these reflections will contribute to the common goal of renewing the historiography of the United States (and the colonies and territories that formed it).

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

Not surprisingly, given the long duration and breadth of this project, there are many people whom the editors would like to thank. Jean-Frédéric Schaub and François Weil helped conceive of the project. Simon Newman, Jörg Nagler, and Manfred Berg gave important advice at an early stage, and the American history centers at their universities (Glasgow, Jena, and Heidelberg, respectively) joined with the Centre d’études nord-américaines (CENA) of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris and the Oxford Centre for Research in United States History (OxCRUSH) in establishing a network of researchers. The Maison Française in Oxford helped finance the initial activities, and the Leverhulme Trust kindly funded the fully fledged network. The Leverhulme grant allowed us to hire the incomparable Eleanor Thompson, to whom the Oxford history faculty gave a base. No mean historian in her own right, Eleanor combined unfailing cheerfulness and efficient administration. Steve Tuffnell graciously took up the reins from Eleanor when another job took her elsewhere, and did excellent work pulling the remaining strands together. Ian Tyrrell, Ivan Kurilla, and Akira Iriye gave their time and insight nearer the end. The indefatigable Maurizio Vaudagna hosted a workshop in Trento for the Italian Centro Interuniversitario di Storia e Politica Euro-Americana (CISPEA), and Carole Du Bois put together a panel at the American Historical Association’s annual conference in Chicago, xix

xx

| Acknowledgments

where we trialed some of our findings and received generous feedback. Special thanks to Ferdinando Fasce, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jeremi Suri for their comments at those events. Niels Hooper at University of California Press was an enthusiastic supporter as soon as he saw the manuscript, and his team have worked hard and thoroughly to ensure that an unusual project with notes in many languages pulled together coherently and accurately. Finally, our thanks to our coauthors, who hail from a variety of countries, backgrounds, and areas of expertise. Our gratitude as well to Isabel Soto, Simon Newman, and Susan-Marie Grant, who joined the project with their energy and talent but could not be part of this book. This has been a wonderful experience for us—new friendships, great conversations, and fruitful research. In Paris especially, good food and wine too. That the project worked so well, and was so enjoyable, is down to the patience, commitment, and flexibility of these scholars, who were prepared to devote much time and thought to an entirely new subject, which for many years seemed to have little likelihood of turning into a book. For their sake, above all, we are delighted it has. Nicolas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck, and Cécile Vidal Columbus Day, 2013

part one

Historiography

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

Watersheds in Time and Place Writing American History in Europe michael heale, sylvia hilton, halina parafianowicz, paul schor, and maurizio vaudagna

Promoting American history in Europe has been a thankless and even dangerous business. Charles Kingsley as regius professor of modern history at Cambridge in 1866 endorsed a proposal that Harvard send someone to lecture on American history every other year, but was angrily rebuffed by dons who feared for the monarchy and the Church of England, one thundering that “we shall be favored with a biennial flash of Transatlantic darkness.” For somewhat similar reasons, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia prohibited the teaching of comparative constitutional law in universities. The king of Naples jailed a professor in 1858 for citing George Washington favorably, and even if that story is apocryphal, its circulation hardly encouraged the open study of American history.1 But, sometimes nourished, sometimes abused, American history did struggle to life in European universities. Its emergence and local trajectories were uneven, since Europe was far from a homogeneous entity. Today Europe comprises some fifty countries, and any attempt to map the course of academic interest in American history in them is necessarily tentative. This chapter offers a broad chronological analysis of European historiography of the United States. It locates major watersheds at the end of the nineteenth century, shortly after World War II, in the mid1970s, and following the fall of the Berlin Wall. While the Cold War significantly boosted the study of American history in Europe, its end ironically marked an even more rapid expansion of the field. This chap3

4

|

Chapter 1

ter also charts regional and national variations, including the differing experiences of writing American history in western and eastern Europe and the distinctive case of the Iberian Peninsula. It matters where history is written. In recent years, global and other influences have promoted some convergence in the practices and perspectives of professional historians, but national cultures remain resilient enough to sustain the discrete characteristics of the European academies.2 The recurring preoccupations of European Americanists reflect the influence of place. It hardly needs to be said that the diverse connections between the American and European continents have long commanded attention, as scholars have examined the bilateral relationships between their home countries and the United States. Colonial expansion, migration, diplomatic relations, wars, trade, and transatlantic cultural interactions are all topics susceptible to scholarly research in European archives and have often been seen as extensions of European history. When the Polish scholar Michal Rozbicki first taught in a U.S. university, his students were bemused by his treatment of New England Puritanism as a continuation of the European Reformation rather than as a “new chapter,” with the focus on migrants who could not “escape” their culture.3 Once American history in this Atlantic perspective was well established in a particular country, though, its practitioners tended to diversify into other areas. The very distance of Europe from the American continent may also condition what scholars choose to see, as illustrated by a long-standing interest in the American experience with race. Well before the publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s The American Dilemma (1944), and especially since the 1960s, European scholars have written extensively on American slavery and race, intrigued by the looming presence in American history of a phenomenon so at odds with the values enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Lately European interest in racial and ethnic themes has sharpened as several European countries have themselves become immigrant destinations. Location has also played a role in the marked growth in recent decades of the U.S. cultural and social history fields, for while this is partly a reflection of modern historiographical trends, it is also a product of the academic structures in Continental Europe, where American history is often housed in English or American studies departments: a prerequisite of its study is the English language. The influence of location largely explains one of the most persisting European interests in American history—that is, political and constitutional history—which until recent decades have often seemed almost to

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

5

crowd out other kinds. The American Revolution early inspired some Europeans; wars and convulsions in Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that state building was constantly beginning anew; and the ingenuity of the American way of government invited study. American federalism was of some interest to the political classes in such countries as Germany and Poland.4 The intellectual competition among European nations occasionally focused attention on the U.S. polity, as in the famous Boutmy-Jellinek controversy of 1902 over the origins of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789.5 The rise of the United States to world-power status and its commanding global role since the Second World War in particular meant that it could hardly be denied a place in modern European curricula, and with the end of the Cold War, several European countries had to begin political reconstruction yet again. When some U.S. historians began to fear for the survival of political history toward the end of the twentieth century, their European counterparts, only too aware of the hand of the state, had no need “to bring the state back in” and sometimes strained to understand what was new about the “new political history” that U.S. practitioners advanced. Political agendas were often closely associated with another lasting characteristic of European approaches to writing American history: duality. These studies were being composed in societies where favorable or at least evenhanded views coexisted with strong anti-American sentiments, which politically and culturally influential groups often manifested.6 Positive and negative images of the United States competed in the media and a range of other cultural forms, of which historical scholarship was no exception. In Communist countries, scholars countered to some degree the anti-U.S. projections in studies enjoined by the state by looking for ideologically safe topics, such as early American-Russian relations. In recent decades, anti-Americanism has been associated mainly with the Left, but in earlier periods there were also powerful conservative critics of the American experiment. When a Cambridge postgraduate expressed an interest in an American research topic in the 1950s, his adviser sniffed, “American history is not a fit subject for a gentleman.”7 The disapprobation of the United States, expressed with varying degrees of intensity by people on both the left and the right throughout much of Europe, meant that where pro-American scholarly publications appeared, they often had a missionary air. Whether sympathetic or unsympathetic to the American cause, these political messages were being conveyed to domestic audiences. But there were not many

6

|

Chapter 1

academic historical studies of either kind. The most important consequence of this pervasive disregard was that until recently, American history was simply not practiced in Europe in any serious way. Even today there are countries where it is difficult to identify a single university post expressly dedicated to American history. The “European tragedy” haunted historical writing on the Continent in the twentieth century, one reason for the limited and often distorted attention to U.S. history. For decades, dictatorship, war, huge losses of life and liberty, and sometimes racism and genocide overshadowed the promotion of humane values. The Third Reich and Stalinism loom large in European memory. While it might be expected that nineteenthcentury autocracies would repress academic disciplines that encouraged egalitarian ideas, for large parts of the twentieth century too there was little freedom of expression in some major countries. Location could mean that American history was simply not written or severely circumscribed if it was. Official ideology conditioned much of the history written in the Soviet Union and its satellites, and interwar Italy and the authoritarian regimes of Spain and Portugal throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century were hardly more receptive to balanced approaches to the United States. Scholars in democratic countries too, although not directly subject to state supervision, were exposed to ideological influences arising from their own political cultures.

the image of the new world, 1776–1898 Although European interest in American history exploded after the Cold War, this is not to suggest that Europeans of an earlier age were uninterested in the United States, which after all was being shaped by the huge waves of migrants who crossed the Atlantic. European intellectuals in large numbers looked to the remarkable American example with the future of their own countries in mind. Alexis de Tocqueville’s examination of American democracy, which was profoundly influential across Europe, was just one of the publications that fostered perceptions of the United States as an uncommon country.8 Such eloquent studies, the work of travelers, journalists, and literary and other public figures, were often designed to further political causes at home and were doubtless more influential than those of academic historians, which were slow to appear.9 In the nineteenth century, professional historians in Europe kept their sights firmly on the histories of their own countries and empires, as

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

7

befitted an age of nationalism. American history could be regarded simply as a somewhat dubious and recent by-product of European history, an aspect of the European diaspora, hardly worth further attention. Germany was something of an exception. Enlightenment ideas had penetrated universities in the eighteenth century, and professorial interest in American matters was early personified by Christoph Ebeling, who between 1793 and 1816 offered seven volumes on the land he called the “Mother Country of Liberty.”10 German educational reforms developed the PhD degree, based in part on original research in primary sources, and from the mid-nineteenth century the kind of historical methodology associated with Leopold von Ranke, with its reputed scientific empiricism, attracted many visiting American scholars. Hermann von Holst wrote his multivolume Constitutional History of the United States in Germany before returning to the United States in 1892.11 Academic historians elsewhere very occasionally engaged with American history. In France, Édouard de Laboulaye, a sympathizer of the Union cause, published a political history of the United States; also showing an interest in the American liberal experiment was the Russian constitutional historian Maxim M. Kovalevskii, who was rewarded with dismissal from the University of Moscow in 1887.12 But the promise of America was a promise about the future, not the past, and it was really political and social scientists who pioneered serious scholarship of American matters.13 In Spain from the 1870s the Havana-born political scientist Rafael María de Labra published several works on the United States. James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth appeared in 1888, and the Russian political scientist Moisey Ostrogorski (then living in France) offered Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties in 1902. A few years later, Werner Sombart asked his celebrated question “Why is there no socialism in the United States?,” inviting subsequent European historians to consider applying a class analysis to the country.14

american power and the european tragedy, 1898–1945 A rather grudging academic interest in American history emerged in Europe, not entirely coincidentally, as a more ominous image of the United States began to challenge that of the liberal dreamland. The Spanish-American War of 1898 had an impact well beyond Spain.15 If the United States could take colonies from one European country, why

8

|

Chapter 1

not from others? Such anxieties promoted a debate about the nature of U.S. imperialism. In France, for example, the few doctoral dissertations on the United States before 1898 had almost invariably focused on the American Revolution and U.S. constitutional history; now some probed the threat that the United States might represent for the French West Indies, with one concluding by asking whether Guadeloupe or Martinique would be next.16 This reflected a more general awareness in Europe of the United States as a rising power, an awareness that was also an interrogation of the relative positions of European nations in what seemed to be an emerging and unclear new world order. The First World War powerfully reinforced the perception of the United States as a major power. In Germany the war boosted demand for “foreign studies,” a distinctive example of the importance of positionality in promoting scholarship, Germany’s defeat sometimes being attributed to its failure to understand the nation that had delivered victory to the Allies. An important dimension of foreign studies, according to Friedrich Schönemann at the time, should be Amerikakunde, an integrated study of American civilization drawing on the social sciences (though this at first made little progress).17 Woodrow Wilson’s sensitivity toward self-determination keenly burnished the American image in eastern and central European countries looking for the reassurance of friendship from a “sister republic,” as did Herbert Hoover’s role in the American Relief Administration. In Poland and Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s there was popular fascination with the apparent moral, economic, and cultural superiority of the United States, which could be cast as a kind of reproof of established regimes (including the Soviet Union, with its uncomfortable proximity). The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace donated a library of Americana to Pázmány Péter University in Budapest in 1928 (as it also gave American books to other universities), and an attempt to create an American Institute in Prague eventually succeeded in 1931. American economic might now commanded considerable attention, not least because of the uncertain economic times in Europe, and if professional historians were still barely deigning to glance across the Atlantic, economists and other social scientists were probing both the reasons for American success and its human costs. Indeed, the United States as the exemplar of modernity triggered widespread unease among intellectual elites. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, in his 1918 and 1927 books, admired American strength but worried about mechanization and mass society and their implications for Europe’s future. The

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

9

American mind, it seemed, had little sense of history.18 Where Sombart had encouraged his fellow European scholars to think of the United States in terms of class, Huizinga favored an analysis of mass society. In 1929 Antonio Gramsci embarked on Americanism and Fordism, positing a “perfect” American capitalism poised against the remnants of European feudalism, which would also influence the approaches to the United States of European historians.19 Roman Dyboski, one of Poland’s leading academics, was another who examined what the United States had to offer.20 There had long been ambiguity and confusion in Europe about the United States, and political and cultural currents often pulled in opposing directions. This ambivalence continued to characterize the Depression years. In Britain the first chair of American history (other than for visiting Americans) was established at University College, London, in 1930, though its occupant, H. Hale Bellot, had never been to the United States, from which he kept a safe and disapproving distance by concentrating on historiography.21 (Late in his career Bellot did visit the United States but did not like it.) On the Continent, the European tragedy played itself out. In the interwar years, democratic elements in Austria and Czechoslovakia made some attempts to develop American history, which Nazi might snuffed out. American power provoked some admiration in the Third Reich, though the emerging genre of Amerikakunde offered a highly nationalistic depiction of U.S. history. In Eduard Baumgarten’s Die geistigen Grundlagen des amerikanischen Gemeinwesens, American pragmatism took on National Socialist characteristics.22 Friedrich Schönemann, who in 1936 was appointed to the first chair of American cultural and literary history in Germany, sometimes wrote for the Nazi party’s newspaper and was still championing foreign studies, which could be seen as a form of “political reconnaissance” for the Nazi state. Some “politically compromised” professors had their careers cut short after the war.23 In other countries too, circumstances could put scholars on the wrong side of ideological lines. In France the prominent historian Bernard Faÿ (a friend of Gertrude Stein) wrote warmly in Roosevelt and His America (1933) of a United States that was “still young and attractive” but later excoriated the New Deal as a communist creation and became a Nazi apologist.24 During the war he associated with the Vichy regime and after it was convicted of collaboration and sent to prison (from which Alice B. Toklas helped him escape). Another intriguing career was that of the Italian Gennaro Mondaini, who wrote about the

10

|

Chapter 1

American colonies in a socialist vein before aligning himself with fascism; on one occasion Mussolini instructed him not to teach a course on U.S. economic history at the University of Rome.25 In the early years of fascist Italy there was a notion that the “reborn” country could make common cause with the United States as another “young nation” poised against the decaying regimes of old Europe, but by the 1930s this illusion was abandoned as the regime turned its official narrative to the praise of Italian antiquity, especially the Roman Empire. Several young Italian writers, among them Elio Vittorini, turned to American authors, particularly those who aspired to speak to the events of everyday life, as a refuge from the heavy rhetoric of regime discourse and so constituting “a powerful secret weapon against the hollowness of fascism.”26 Meanwhile, a handful of reform-minded modernizers in Spain openly admired the United States, but after the civil war (1936–39), Spanish universities lost many such intellectual leaders, who were forced into exile.27 In the Soviet Union the first doctorate in American history was awarded in 1938, to Vladimirovitch Aleksei Efimov for a dissertation titled “Concerning the History of Capitalism in the U.S.”28 American history had never been well established in Europe as an academic discipline. The European tragedy did little to enhance the topic; rather, as another world war loomed, it was either severely compromised or nonexistent in many countries.

cold warriors and strange bedfellows, 1945–1975 It was the Second World War, followed closely by the Cold War, that transformed the prospects for American history in Europe. The gifts of American popular and consumer culture, of course, had been showering on Europe since at least the 1920s, subtly shaping perceptions and raising expectations, but now the U.S. state was in Europe to stay. A political invasion had begun, with U.S. ambassadors, cultural attachés, businessmen, GIs, and philanthropic foundations each playing a part. The Marshall Program, launched in 1947, made western Europe the beneficiary of awesome largesse. This American presence in the quarter century after 1945 was against a background of economic expansion, which meant that a new generation grew up in an increasingly affluent culture suffused with American music, film, soft drinks, and other products. The term Coca-Colonization made an early appearance in the French Communist press in 1949. (French conservatives were also

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

11

uneasy about the implications of American influence for “the whole panorama and morale of French civilization.”)29 The “shock and awe” of American hard and soft power after 1945 had a profound impact on European academia. The United States was relevant to European life as never before—and knew it, a recognition underlined by the conscious effort on the part of U.S. diplomacy to redesign the public image of the United States as a progressive country challenging European elitisms and cultural pretensions. The Fulbright Program, promoting educational exchanges, was signed into law in 1946, and other forms of educational aid were soon on offer, such as financial assistance to European groups that championed American studies and to university libraries for acquiring American resources. Such succor slowly helped to advance the place of American history in European curricula.30 Nonetheless, the U.S. cultural offensive was not without its problems. In West Germany, scarred by the Nazi experience, academics were wary of succumbing to another governmental creed. According to the German historian Eike Wolgast, they wittingly cultivated an apolitical stance. U.S. cultural missionaries seized on the academic multidiscipline of “American studies” as a way of promoting the distinctiveness and virtues of American life, but the term had unfortunate connotations in Germany, where it had been associated with attempts by those close to the Third Reich to refashion academic approaches to the United States.31 Scandinavian countries, reflecting an impulse to find a neutral middle way between East and West, were hesitant about developing American subjects; the onset of the Cold War, according to a Norwegian scholar, served “to impede rather than further the study . . . of U.S. history at the University of Oslo.”32 The indefatigable efforts of the American studies enthusiast Sigmund Skard ensured the presence of American subjects in Norway, though in Sweden there proved to be “a general indisposition” among historians to research non-European topics and a reluctance to adopt area studies programs.33 In Italy and France, large Communist parties were hostile to American overtures, and there were influential Catholic elements in Italy and Spain that had little faith in U.S.-style modernization. The peoples of many countries of western Europe had been living amicably enough with their Communist fellow citizens for years and found it hard to recognize the demons of U.S. propaganda. “After all,” as the Dutch historian Doeko Bosscher has written, “the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the Nazi aggression and had suffered

12

|

Chapter 1

enormously doing the right thing.”34 Whatever the temptations of American popular culture, European academic and political elites were not always keen to embrace the U.S. agenda. Anti-Americanism (leftand right-wing, clerical and cultural) was pervasive. Italy had western Europe’s largest Communist party, but when one of its members betrayed some sympathy for American matters in his cultural review Il Politecnico in 1947, it was closed down. General Franco may have allowed U.S. military bases in Spain (intensifying the anti-Americanism of the Spanish Left), but he resisted the introduction of U.S. cultural influences and did not admit the Fulbright Program until 1958.35 The cultural Cold War had its counterpoint in the Soviet Union, where—in contrast to Continental western Europe—studies of American history quickened. It is tempting, though perhaps a pardonable simplification, to suggest that there were three broad approaches to American history in Europe between the Second World War and the mid-1970s, as time and place came together to shape scholarship.36 In Britain, then and later, historians could engage with the trends of U.S. history writing in the United States (while advancing their own agenda) courtesy of a common language, a “special relationship,” and, increasingly, a common publishing market. The socialist world—that is, the Soviet Union and its European allies—composed a vigorous if institutionalized and bureaucratized Marxist approach, featuring a version of U.S. foreign policy and histories of U.S. capitalism and the working class. Able Soviet scholars diligently studied the United States just as U.S. scholars studied the Soviet Union, each fashioning images of the other, even if the former were more conscious of the heavy hand of government. In Continental western Europe, somewhat less subject to Cold War imperatives, public questions that emerged in those countries largely conditioned historical writing about the United States, and there was little engagement with U.S. historiography. Indeed, Americanist historians there were not only very few but also isolated from the historical academic communities of both the United States and (often) their own countries. In the quarter century after 1945, Great Britain was much the most receptive to the academic nurturing of American history (as it was also now somewhat more receptive to other non-European history). In 1945 there was just one British chair in the subject (tenable by a Briton) and perhaps half a dozen lecturers; by 1970 more than ninety people were teaching American history in British universities, many seeing themselves as part of an Anglo-American academic community rather than

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

13

as Europeans.37 The Institute for United States Studies was founded in London in 1965. In contrast to the Continent, historians rather than literature specialists tended to lead the way in American studies in Great Britain. The close wartime alliance, a convenient language, and American financial lubrication help to explain this expansion, but more important were the peculiar circumstances in Britain. Whatever the interest of British political leaders in promoting the special relationship, a conservative academic establishment still saw little merit in American subjects. There were visiting chairs for U.S. historians at Oxford and Cambridge, but such short-term stays did little to encourage graduate studies, and in terms of posts the subject advanced somewhat more readily in other universities. (Something similar obtained in France, where Daniel Boorstin’s unhappy year at the Sorbonne in 1962–63 seemed to undermine the possibility of ever creating a chair of American history in the country.)38 Frank Thistlethwaite, the first chair of the British Association for American Studies, noted that “the founding generation of British Americanists were often from the unfashionable North, or of ‘trade’ or otherwise non-Establishment background.”39 But these lowborn pioneers, often returning from war with warm memories of U.S. allies, had some advantages. One was a liberal impulse in British life that was impatient with traditional class distinctions but was no more enamored of communist totalitarianism. The American liberal tradition, not to mention the enticing expansiveness of American life, seemed to offer lessons for a straitened Britain. In examining American liberal success, recently exemplified by the New Deal, these scholars could write about American subjects while advancing a political agenda at home. Further, they were well placed to explore the nature of the special relationship and arguably its indispensability to western security. In this, however, while serving their demands for U.S. history posts, they risked offending their potential colleagues on the Continent. When H. C. Allen, who succeeded Bellot in the London chair, wrote with evident sincerity that “the history of Anglo-American relations” was “the most important [topic], as well as the most relevant, to the future of Western civilization,” many Continental Europeans saw only another example of ethnocentric Anglo-Saxonism.40 (It did not help the cause of American history in Continental Europe that the cultures of the Anglophone world were often examined together, so Britain could still crowd out the United States.)41 The rapid postwar expansion of American history in Britain was not paralleled on the Continent except in the Soviet Union, as we shall see.

14

|

Chapter 1

There was some interest in promoting the subject, as reflected in the creation of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin in 1963 and the establishment of a chair in American history at the Sorbonne in 1967. But posts appeared only occasionally and slowly, and many countries remained barren of dedicated positions. Nonetheless, as in Britain, there were glimpses of liberal, progressive, or social-democratic currents. Europe was rebuilding its political institutions, an opportunity for the American constitutional model to make its mark. The European scholars of these years, on the Continent and in the United Kingdom, were writing in the heyday of consensus history in the United States. They might reflect on the distinctive characteristics of U.S. politics and society but were not always convinced by claims of American exceptionalism, and the liberal tradition rather than its consensual corollary seemed to draw them.42 The wars and convulsions that had often enough torn apart their own countries underlined to Europeans the precarious nature of political societies, especially as new constitutions were being written and governments reconstructed.43 Postwar Italian scholars, perhaps less nervous of U.S. influence than West Germans, were quickly at work studying the ideas of the American founders, their publications beginning to appear in the mid-1950s.44 Tiziano Bonazzi has written that this generation had in mind the recent creation of the Italian republic and “set out to make a thorough study of the founding period of the United States to provide support for their pluralist and secular view of contemporary Italy.”45 American political and constitutional history was also the preoccupation of some French historians, such as André Tunc. By the 1960s, young German scholars such as Dirk Hoerder and Willi Paul Adams were researching the era of the American Revolution, and their works reached print in the 1970s.46 If these various studies of the young republic and U.S. constitutional history suggested a progressive agenda in an era of political change, liberal sympathies could also be discerned in works on Franklin Roosevelt, who was something of a hero to many, including Ingrid Semmingsen of Norway, whose The Creation of a World Power: A History of the United States appeared in 1946.47 FDR was the subject of generally admiring studies in Britain, West Germany, Italy, and elsewhere.48 The prominent intellectual and journalist Raymond Aron spoke for a form of anticommunist liberalism in France, where André Siegfried was also writing in the liberal tradition, as he had been doing for decades.49 Some of the scholars who took up American history in postwar West Germany,

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

15

Adams once noted, chose topics that reflected “an understandable desire to reconnect with the failed democratic liberal tradition in Germany.”50 The attention to American labor in some countries suggested much the same orientation.51 Certainly the labor historians, a significant contingent and some still preoccupied with Sombart’s question, probed the role of class antagonisms in the United States. The Briton Henry Pelling, for example, was somewhat unusual in his day, compared with his U.S. counterparts, in highlighting the violence that punctuated the history of American labor.52 The interest in the classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers, in Franklin Roosevelt, and in American labor history carried an implication that postwar Europe might find something to its benefit in the American liberal-reform or progressive tradition. Other studies that were occasionally published in these early years, such as on the American Civil War or African Americans, also highlight divisions rather than cohesion in the American story.53 These scholars may have read Richard Hofstadter and Louis Hartz, but their recent study of American history had also introduced them to Progressive-era historians such as Charles Beard, Frederick L. Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner, Walter P. Webb, Claude Bowers, and Vernon Parrington, whose books were available not only in English but also sometimes in European translations. When Norwegian historians of that generation reflected on the consensus debate, Geir Lundestad has observed, their “writings about the U.S. have to be seen as progressive.”54 The Soviet authorities finally decided in the early 1960s that it was safe to introduce their citizens to U.S. historians, but it was Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought that was translated into Russian, while Poland got a translation of Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization.55 The American studies movement in the United States prompted some Europeans to participate in the quest for the “American character,” but ironically, insofar as both U.S. cultural diplomacy and consensus history were occasioned by the Cold War, consensus history as such did not win many recruits among contemporary European Americanists.56 Exceptionalist theory, in the view of Michal Rozbicki, was a “rejection of the past.”57 Often introduced to American history through progressive historians, European scholars scarcely had time to register consensus history before it was overtaken by New Left history, which many keenly embraced from the late 1960s, often seeming to empathize with liberal or reform traditions that acknowledged the depth and embattled nature of domestic divisions.

16

|

Chapter 1

Somewhat similar conclusions could be drawn from the studies of connections, which burgeoned in the 1950s and 1960s. Thistlethwaite, in probing “the Anglo-American connection,” did not find the United States characterized by consensual values, but he did emphasize the mutual affinities between British and American reformers.58 A major reason why European historians examined connections of many kinds— commercial, demographic, diplomatic, intellectual—is quite simply that they were not U.S. history specialists, for which positions generally did not exist. As practitioners of German, French, or Norwegian history they could operate from secure posts that allowed them to explore relationships across the Atlantic and use their own archives in the process. American scholars might be interested in their findings, but they primarily addressed academic audiences in their own countries. The scholarship of connections (together with studies of U.S. foreign policy) was the primary focus of European historians of the United States between the Second World War and the early 1970s. Their publications provided a base for the later development of American history in Europe as their pupils were able to become more specialized and sometimes find fulltime Americanist posts. The focus on connections, of course, reflected the new role of the United States in the world, particularly as the defender of “Western civilization,” and those countries receiving Marshall Aid or being invited to host U.S. bases could hardly ignore their historical relationships with the American colossus. Bilateral relations with the United States have consistently been a staple of European historiography, and historians in postwar France, West Germany, and elsewhere were soon writing of the relationship of their own country with the United States.59 There was considerable attention to Atlantic migration in Britain, and Scandinavian scholars were early contributors to this genre, notably Semmingsen in Norway and Lars Ljungmark in Sweden.60 A Migration Research Project was established at Uppsala University in Sweden in 1962, from which several publications flowed.61 European scholars complemented the work of U.S. historians by paying more attention to the origins of emigrants. Economic history had an established position in these years, and some historians traced commercial and financial relationships across the Atlantic.62 North American colonial history received increasing attention from British, French, and Spanish scholars as they explored their countries’ respective settlements.63 If an important function of the first generation of scholars after 1945 was to open doors for their protégés to delve deeper into U.S. history, another was

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

17

to raise further questions about consensus history. The exploration of connections pointed up variations and affinities rather than profound differences; the United States may have been extraordinarily powerful but otherwise did not always seem so exceptional. By the late 1960s there were further reasons to doubt American exceptionalism, and U.S. scholars themselves were now among the most vociferous critics of consensus history. Race riots and the deepening war in Vietnam undermined faith in the American cause both at home and abroad (and impeded the development of American history in at least some countries, as David Nye notes of northern Europe in chapter 12).64 The événements of May 1968 and their counterparts elsewhere shook more than just the political world. A young generation of U.S. historians stormed academic barricades with New Left history, broadly defined, including studies of the poor, black and native Americans, women, protest and repression, and questionable American interventions in the affairs of other countries. This coincided with the emergence of a postwar generation in Europe, steeped in American culture, that was making its way into finally expanding universities. The holds of the old conservative and Communist orthodoxies were slipping, and while young European scholars often embraced anti-Americanism of a kind, it was directed at the American state and at corporate capitalism (and sometimes, rather more ambiguously, at popular culture). Umberto Eco spoke of the anti-Americanism of an Americanized generation. AntiAmericanism now permitted these scholars to empathize with the apparent or forgotten victims of American power, domestic and foreign. In a sense, the spread of American history in the European academies was yet another sixties protest against the old establishments. Throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s, New Left history in its liberating variety expanded its influence and soon advanced the analytical triad of class, race, and gender. The growth of American social history in West Germany in these years was attributed in part to “the radical commitment of a number of younger scholars directing their interest to some of the more vulnerable points of U.S. capitalism and democracy.”65 The new history arguably had a greater impact in Europe than in the United States, because American history was still very little practiced on the Continent, and as it grew, studies of “the other America” became almost the new orthodoxy. Nonetheless, European historians could be selective about what they took from U.S. writing. For example, the works of David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman, with their vision of shop-floor militancy and cultural autonomy, became

18

|

Chapter 1

popular with radical young Italian academics restive under the top-down traditions of Italian Communist historians; similarly, George Rawick’s work on the slave community, with its emphasis on slaves’ agency, enjoyed a better reception than Eugene Genovese’s The World the Slaveholders Made.66 Translations of Gutman and Rawick thus made possible a kind of hybridization of scholarship, as U.S. historiography interacted with local preoccupations. By this time it was also relatively easy for scholars in at least some European countries to make research visits to the United States, and the radicalized among them often came to appreciate the value of archival research and the experimental method. Such visits opened up topics outside the framework of Atlantic connections, in publications that came more fully to the fore a little later, as the next section notes. As the passions of 1968 subsided and the prospects of political revolution receded, scholarly radicals settled for academic careers in which they joined the handful of liberal elders in promoting American history. Many became scholars “in between,” registering U.S. historiographical trends while trying to speak to their own academic communities; their approaches often reflected the merging of European historical schools with a substantial dose of the pragmatism and experimentalism associated with U.S. practice. At least this was the case in western Europe. Eastern Europe was different. In 1992, the Russian historian Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov acknowledged that some 90 percent of Soviet Americanists had been “priests of the Marxist parish.” It was not so much doctrinaire Marxism, he commented, as political propaganda that had seriously damaged historical studies.67 There was also institutional disruption. In East Germany and Poland, in contrast to the western European experience, English departments were closed in the ten years after 1945 because of political suspicions of an “imperialist language,” removing potential bases for American subjects. With the passing of the Stalinist era, English was rehabilitated and American history became better established.68 In 1967, Georgiy Arbatov helped found the influential Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which emphasized foreign policy and defense studies. Eastern European scholars generally worked within a Marxist framework, though their studies often rested more on self-censorship than political direction, so that, as an East German scholar slyly put it, “the more complicated and sophisticated the subject matter, the better.”69 By the 1960s, Russian historians  were paying attention not only to the class struggle but also to

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

19

American democratic movements, leading to debate on the somewhat heretical notion that a capitalist state could initiate large-scale social reform.70 A systematic analysis of this Soviet historiography, which saw the emergence of serious monographs in the 1950s, is not yet available, though Soviet scholars can claim to have written about the inequalities suffered by African Americans before revisionist U.S. historians took up the theme in a substantial way. Soviet scholars necessarily approached American studies through the prism of the Cold War, thus giving a higher profile than European countries with strong literary-cultural interests to international relations and political, economic, and historical studies.71 In examining the evolution of American capitalism, scholars probed the implications of Turner’s frontier thesis and the role of religion and surveyed the class struggle as exemplified by labor history. The American Civil War received considerable attention, as did slavery and abolitionism. A few Americanist scholars consciously avoided what might be called enemy studies, inevitably largely twentieth-century history, perhaps seeking safety in earlier eras. Bolkhovitinov himself won an international reputation for work on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including studies of early Russian-American relations that also appeared in U.S. editions.72 There were also tentative investigations of American matters elsewhere in eastern Europe. Scholars in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary sometimes explored such topics as emigration and the American experiences of their ethnic groups.73 Sympathies for the New World could not be entirely erased in these countries, and as in the Soviet Union, some scholars sought “safe” topics.74 Nonetheless, the procedures for securing degrees and promotion and the state ownership of publishers functioned as powerful constraints on studying American history.75 In some countries, such as in the Balkans, the safest strategy seemed to be to ignore it.

atlantic crossings and expanding scholarship, 1975–1990 The excitements of the sixties were critical in stimulating the study of American history in western Europe (as they also reshaped historical studies in the United States). But the larger environment changed again, in ways that affected the standing of the United States and attitudes toward it. If 1945 was one watershed for American history in Europe,

20

|

Chapter 1

the mid-1970s was another. The transformations of these years can be seen in a context of declining public trust in government in western societies, the apparent bankruptcy of Keynesianism, faltering economic growth, the wasting away of manufacturing, or “smokestack,” industries and of labor unions, and the shortage of energy. The sense that the old world was disappearing was reinforced by the rise of new issues promoted by antipoverty, consumerist, environmental, youth, and women’s movements. What Eric Hobsbawm has called “the golden age” was apparently over for the developed capitalist world.76 The Vietnam War had considerably deepened the anti-Americanism of sections of the European population, and the fall of Saigon in 1975 marked an extraordinary humiliation of the United States. American power was limited; perhaps the twentieth century was not to be the American century after all. As the leading Dutch scholar Rob Kroes put it, the United States was “losing its magnetism” for Europeans.77 It was not yet just another country, but Europeans could feel that they were no longer obliged to choose between it and the Soviet Union. The erosion of images of a bipolar world was also associated with détente diplomacy, reflected in the Helsinki Accords of 1975. The missionary and partisan edge that had characterized some of the writing of American history in the early Cold War faded even as the subject gained firmer ground in Europe. The Soviet regime somewhat relaxed its ideological supervision of teaching and research. Moscow State University inaugurated annual conferences on American literature and culture in 1974, and in the same year the Fulbright Program was extended to the Soviet Union, where David Cronon lectured on American social reform.78 A few years later, as a visiting professor, Robert Kelley found that while Soviet historians worked within the framework of historical materialism, the “days of Stalinist hacks grinding out mindless trash” seemed to be over.79 In 1976 the American Studies Center was created at Warsaw University, where Andrzej Bartnicki pioneered research efforts and sought links with U.S. universities. By the 1980s, American history specialists in Poland outnumbered those in American literature.80 The subject was given a boost in Romania in the second half of the 1970s when Romanian and U.S. historians met regularly in seminars and other professional gatherings.81 Even in East Germany, where the practice of history remained firmly grounded in “the fundamental ideals of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,” by the 1980s it was possible to discuss different opinions than the “one truth” of the Cold

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

21

War years, and western Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci were accorded a hearing.82 Elsewhere, conditions were perhaps less encouraging. Bulgarian students were subjected to translations of approved Soviet Americanists and of such American authors as the Marxist historian Herbert W. Aptheker and the leading Communist William Z. Foster (who had written an outline political history of the Americas).83 The American bicentennial celebrations caught the attention of intellectuals in both eastern and western Europe (one eventual product was Lewis Hanke’s formidable Guide to the Study of United States History outside the U.S., 1945–1980).84 The bicentennial was duly commemorated on the Iberian Peninsula, where right-wing regimes had just crumbled, in Portugal in 1974 and Spain in 1975. (Greece also returned to democracy in 1974–75, after a long period of turbulence culminating in seven years of military rule.)85 As these countries moved toward openness and democratization, accompanied perhaps by a sense of optimism that contrasted with the somber mood elsewhere in western Europe, American subjects crept more fully into the curricula and pertinent archives became more accessible. The Spanish Association for Anglo– North American Studies was founded in 1976, albeit with a largely literary-linguistic focus. For their part, Spanish historians continued to view North American history within their traditional framework of the Americas, which tended to emphasize colonial, revolutionary period, and Atlantic history, in those areas once part of the Spanish empire (including Puerto Rico), but as their horizons expanded they also began to explore topics in U.S. foreign policy.86 At much the same time, demographic and political pressures were transforming higher education across much of Europe, East and West. The growth and restructuring of universities took place at different times in different countries, but the commitment of many governments to expanded higher education sectors starting in the 1960s allowed some opportunity for new subjects to develop.87 Occasionally there was a strong institutional commitment, as with the creation of the Centre d’études nord-américaines at Paris’s elite École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1980. American history was hardly a priority in European higher education, but it now had some supporters in established posts, American cultural diplomacy remained a force, and, perhaps most important, there was growing student demand for it (in eastern and western Europe).88 On the Continent, where American subjects were often taught in English departments, which might hire historians as necessary, American studies programs developed, fitting neatly with

22

|

Chapter 1

the agenda of cultural diplomats. (Some members of political science departments also practiced American history.) Anglophone studies not only hosted history specialists but also turned some students into recognized historians. The tendency for American history to be located in what in effect were area studies units or groupings served to promote literary history and cultural studies. Such centers were receptive to the thrust of New Left history and ready to accommodate investigations into women’s history, film, and popular culture. Increasing pluralism in the choice of research subjects thus characterized the quarter century after 1975. Social and cultural history in its rich variety, including exercises in American studies, won adherents, and if the attention of sixties-style militants had tended to be directed toward twentieth-century topics, earlier periods now received more attention. The colonial era remained important, but the nineteenth century now gained a higher profile. European scholars were used to teaching across the whole span of American history, and several produced broad syntheses for their domestic audiences, which often had a dimension of at least implicit comparison with their home country. Whether they were more sensitive to the nuances of longue durée history than their U.S. counterparts is not easily established.89 The Cold War may have assumed new configurations, but it was not going away, and countries in the forefront of Cold War alignments gave particular attention to their relationships with the United States.90 The role of the United States as a superpower ensured a growing and substantial scholarship on its foreign policy, by historians, political scientists, and international relations experts.91 But the old focus on connections remained vital. Russian scholars wrote on Russian America and on early Russian-American relations.92 Migration history boomed in West Germany, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere in the 1970s and 1980s, and countless British scholars explored AngloAmerican relations.93 European countries that had once possessed North American colonies renovated the history of those dimensions or of continuing connections.94 (As earlier, much of this scholarship was not translated into English, making it relatively inaccessible to academics outside those countries.) Comparative history began to win practitioners, such as Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer on welfare states and Jürgen Kocka on white-collar workers.95 A comparative perspective also informed the work of other German and Italian scholars, who advanced such concepts as organized capitalism and corporatism in attempts to explain the response of American industrial capitalism to

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

23

crisis, as during the New Deal; implicit in some of this is the question of why the United States did not succumb to fascism during the 1930s.96 But studies of “pure” American history were multiplying too, ranging from examinations of Jacksonian politics in Ohio and of party politics in early twentieth-century Wisconsin through the nomadism of the American working class and FDR’s designs on the Supreme Court to American agriculture during World War II and McCarthyism in Hollywood.97 The Italian scholars Raimondo Luraghi and Valeria Gennaro Lerda published innovative studies of the American South.98 Such examples illustrate the degree to which European scholars were now escaping the connections framework and demonstrating a greater capacity and willingness to speak to an American audience. Nonetheless, the popularity of American political and constitutional history, an interest in labor history, and proliferating studies focused on race reflected continuing European predilections. Yet American history specialists were still parvenus among European academics.99 Wolfgang Helbich in 1985 compared the marginal existence of American history in the West German academy to that of Sanskrit and Egyptology.100

internationalization and globalization, 1990 to the present By 1990 the geopolitical environment was again changing dramatically. The watersheds of 1945 and 1975 were being succeeded by another, which in particular suddenly transformed prospects for American history in eastern Europe. But it was not exclusively the countries of the old Soviet empire that felt the reverberations of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Historians on both sides of the Atlantic struggled to cast off the straitjacket of the Cold War. Indeed, the disintegration of such bipolar dichotomies as East and West and capitalism and communism surely eased the reformulation and vibrant growth of the distinctive field of Atlantic history, for example. New international networks brought new life to certain kinds of history, such as women’s history. Transatlantic travel was now a commonplace, new electronic modes of communication were knitting the world together, and information of all kinds could be accessed from libraries and increasingly from home computers. The new technology powerfully reinforced the status of English as the modern lingua franca, giving scholars on the Continent greater incentive to master it and furthering both the teaching and the research of American history. In this context, David Thelen at the

24

|

Chapter 1

Journal of American History championed “the internationalization of American history,” and Thomas Bender summoned scholars from around the world to Villa La Pietra in Florence to embark on “rethinking American history in a global age.”101 A few years later President Barack Obama in his Cairo address stressed the global roots of the American nation. One study that exemplifies this vision is Francesca Viano’s global history of the Statue of Liberty.102 Location meant that the initiatives associated with Thelen and Bender were welcomed in Europe simply because European scholars had long engaged in what could be seen as forms of internationalizing American history. Frank Thistlethwaite’s celebrated essay of 1960 on European migration had been in effect a call for what was later known as transnational history.103 European scholars were happy to move with the spirit of the times, and those in eastern Europe were happy to receive the aid and encouragement coming from the United States, though some were wary that the new U.S. initiatives could further American hegemony. Publications on American history exploded in the 1990s and 2000s. In his 1985 Guide, Lewis Hanke listed more than three thousand books, articles, and dissertations on American history produced outside the United States between 1945 and 1980, the greater part of them in Europe. There is no army like the one Hanke mobilized available to establish an inventory of pertinent European publications since 1980 or 1990, but such a volume would be many times greater, as is the number of American specialists. We can attempt only a few cursory and selective observations on this scholarship.104 There were changes in institutional contexts. While some countries, such as France and Norway, were able to maintain the interdisciplinary focus on American civilization, the original postwar connection between literature and history tended to weaken in others. Poland, Italy, Russia, and the newly reunited Germany, with their need to strengthen or rebuild liberal institutions, again accorded much attention to constitutional history and the history of political institutions and political thought. The Russian historian V. O. Pechatnov, for example, examined the Democratic Party’s approach to the electorate.105 Historians in a few countries, though not abandoning American studies groups, have sought separate forums in which to pursue their discipline.106 Since 1993 there have been biennial conferences of European historians of the United States at Middelburg, in the Netherlands, courtesy of the hospitality of the Roosevelt Study Center there. In Germany and Poland, separate American history conferences began to meet on a regular basis. In the United Kingdom,

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

25

two new, respective associations on nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history were established, along with a less formal early American history group.107 On the other hand, more associations and centers of American studies (as opposed to American history) have appeared in the eastern European countries.108 If there was no divorce between political history and cultural studies, there was at least a measure of distancing. A range of forces combined to underline the relevance of American history. In some countries, in keeping with the times, neoconservative historians emerged, emphasizing the virtues of the American capitalist economy or the centrality of the Atlantic tie for all Europeans.109 The interdependence between European public issues and American research and teaching subjects has remained vital. The young Polish historian Renata Nowaczewska points to the interest among her fellows in such subjects as migration history (now that Poland has become an immigrant country) and the political history of youth (reflecting their opposition to the former Communist regime).110 In Russia, as Ivan I. Kurilla and Victoria I. Zhuravleva have argued, the taste of scholars and students for Russian-U.S. comparative topics seems to derive from the status and problems of contemporary Russia as an international power. With the spread of the teaching of American history (and its growing student enrollments across Europe), student expectations have perhaps come to exert a greater impact on teaching and research agendas. As Sabine N. Meyer at Münster found, letting her students examine texts in American racial, ethnic, and immigration history gave them a sense of the salience of immigration and race issues in contemporary Germany; comparative approaches furthered not merely their fremdverstehen (understanding of the other) but also their selbstverstehen (understanding of themselves). Similarly, Paul Quigley, a British specialist on the American Civil War era teaching in Scotland, noted how the students’ sensitivity to the cause of Scottish independence can stimulate discussion of the war, as they compare the confrontation between North and South with their own political situation.111 The constraints of language have sometimes reinforced this self-reflective characteristic of European writing and teaching. Eastern Europeans in particular could not expect that studies written in their languages, and often untranslated, would be read by western scholars. The status of American history in eastern and east central Europe had changed dramatically, if not without difficulty. American studies, including history, grew in most former socialist countries, which sometimes used the arena of scholarship to signal regime change. Americanists were

26

|

Chapter 1

given important institutional positions in universities on occasion, on the apparent assumption that the U.S. academic model offered a way of liberalizing and modernizing scholarship (though the course of U.S. foreign policy ultimately served to cool this enthusiasm). Fulbright Programs had previously reached some eastern European countries—Poland as early as 1960, the Soviet Union in 1974, and Hungary in 1978—and when former Soviet countries became independent they sometimes secured one of their own, as Ukraine did in 1992. In Russia, although governmental financial support for U.S. history declined with the loss of its political salience, professional associations were formed and private sponsors sought, one product being the Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation for the Study of U.S. History, established at Moscow University in 1998.112 Nonetheless, these were problematic times, not least because the harsh economic conditions in Russia encouraged an anti-Americanism stoked by the shock therapy demanded by the International Monetary Fund and U.S. advisers. Rather than focusing specifically on U.S. history, some Russian universities developed area or regional studies, of which American civilization formed a part. The Russian Association for the Study of the United States was founded in 1996 and soon published the proceedings of its annual conferences, on such themes as “the United States and the outer world” (1996) and “conflict and consensus in American society” (2003).113 U.S. history took firmer institutional form elsewhere in eastern Europe. In the immediate post–Cold War years, American democratic forms and material culture could evoke a certain admiration (though such attitudes soon retreated before renewed anti-Americanism). In Poland there had been a growing corpus of American studies scholars since the mid-1970s, but access to scholarships and research archives greatly expanded after the 1990 founding of the Polish Association for American Studies. Poles became one of the larger research contingents at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin, and books and articles followed. There was also a form of hybridization—in the mid-1990s, prominent U.S. and Polish academics jointly edited a five-volume history of the United States in Polish.114 Poland helped to pioneer such studies in the former Communist bloc but was not alone. The Hungarian Association for American Studies appeared in 1992. In Romania, American studies took off in a modest way after the collapse of the Communist regime, but student enthusiasm was strong, encouraging Rodica Mihaila to publish a textbook on American civilization in 1994.115 The convention in some eastern

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

27

European countries during the Cold War of largely disregarding U.S. history did not make its introduction easy. An Italian scholar teaching in Bulgaria found that his students, drawn from a range of Balkan countries, did not recognize the name of General George Custer. Born in the late 1980s or early 1990s, they possessed “little if no basic knowledge of American history[’s] major facts: the United States remains a sort of unknown planet, except for some stereotyped notions.”116 The dominant global role of the United States, and its implications for Europe, of course guaranteed the continued high profile of American foreign policy. In some former socialist countries, such as Hungary and Poland, scholars made concerted efforts to offer publications (sometimes in English) specifically designed to correct the one-sided picture of U.S. relations with eastern and central Europe.117 Russian scholars also took advantage of post–Cold War conditions to examine U.S. foreign policy and Russian-American relations afresh.118 Indeed, a high proportion of the recent Americanist scholarship in the former Communist countries has focused on the connections of the United States with those countries, replicating the pattern noted in western Europe in the immediate post–World War II decades. There was a parallel on the Iberian Peninsula, where the rhythms of historiographical development often seemed closer to those of eastern Europe than of, say, Britain and Germany. This most recent period saw an explosion of Spanish publications on bilateral relations with the United States.119 Scholars in other parts of Europe may have been less preoccupied with such direct relationships, but they wrote extensively on the United States’ role in the world. This tendency of foreign policy history to develop as part of international relations was illustrated by the Norwegian scholar Odd Arne Westad at the London School of Economics, who won the Bancroft Prize in American History in 2006 for The Global Cold War, one of many books that have helped to correct U.S.-centered analyses of world affairs.120 The growth of such scholarship has countered the tendency of some U.S. academics to cast their history from the perspective of the “only superpower” (or what the authors of chapter 6 call “U.S. power as projection”). While American political history has lost its former dominance among European scholars, circumstances have ensured that it is no less vital. The reunification of Germany, the reconstruction of political regimes in eastern Europe, and the uncertain course of the European Community have all reinforced the relevance of the political. In a

28

|

Chapter 1

curious way, European scholars have been more receptive than U.S. historians at home to the renewal of political history that some U.S. scholars have recently advanced (rather as the preceding European generation was particularly receptive to New Left history), and much of their work has remained state-centered.121 Traditional disciplinary boundaries may be less firm in Europe, where scholars sometimes migrate among history, politics, and international relations posts, and while historians may retain a strong sense of professional identity, they are often exposed to a range of methodological influences; the American studies programs also keep the borders open. A glance at the websites of European universities suggests the prominence of collaborative research projects, often drawing on people from different disciplines. Such conditions favor the interdisciplinarity associated with the American political development approach, discussed in chapter 3, and, as chapter 5 notes, the very context of European scholars, who can be expected to have some familiarity with their own country as well as with the United States, helps to promote comparative studies. Exercises in comparative history have continued to expand in recent years in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere.122 The recent “crisis of the welfare state” has also sparked its own historical scholarship, again illustrating European historians’ readiness to undertake comparative studies and their frequent state-centered focus.123 If European scholars were fairly naturally drawn to political and comparative history, their institutional contexts could also point them in other directions. In the years after 1990 the embedding of American history in area studies or American civilization programs, together with the rise of cultural history in the United States, facilitated the marked expansion of cultural and intellectual studies. Books and articles focusing on memory, images, film, consumption, and American studies itself appeared in goodly number.124 National historiographical traditions also left their mark. As Volker Depkat has pointed out, the influential historicist tradition in Germany meant that the “cultural turn” there generated rather abstract and theoretical debates, in contrast to the kind of cultural history written in the United States, which was conditioned by identity politics and culture wars.125 The cultural turn also drew attention to the medium of language, as in the recent Spanish scholarship on the Spanish language and Hispanic communities in the United States.126 Also since around 1990, American and international historiographical trends, such as transnational and global history, have rather unex-

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

29

pectedly given new impetus to the historiography of connections that the earlier generation of European scholars pioneered.127 One important product has been the remarkable revival of Atlantic history, once championed in rather narrow form by the advocates of the Atlantic connection in the 1950s but now extensively reconceptualized and buoyed by the new interest in transnational themes.128 The old Atlantic history reflects the Churchillian notion of “the community of English-speaking peoples,” but the new version, in theory, is the study of the Atlantic as a whole, of the four continents that its waters wash, the peoples that inhabit them, and the multiple networks they fashioned from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. One implication is that colonial history is not so much about European expansion as about a wider circulation of goods, ideas, and peoples around the Atlantic world. Cold War lenses now seem anachronistic. Russian excursions in the study of the North Pacific frontier have counterpointed the rise of Atlantic history.129 Migration studies have also intensified as several European countries have experienced substantial immigration and racial tensions; studies of diasporas have flourished and been reconceptualized.130 A stress on the sense of commonality based on the link with the old home and the continued contact of different sorts with it has distinguished diasporic history: ethnic groups looked to the old country for families and spouses, news, money, favorite foods, and psychological sustenance. The explosion in the United States of books dealing with Asian and Latino immigration obliged European historians of emigration to reconsider their frame of reference. The phenomenon of Asian and Latin American migrants has prompted the concept of European immigrants—rather than a focus on migrants from particular European countries—susceptible of being compared with those from other parts of the world. In some studies of ethnic communities, an unanticipated hierarchy has emerged: Polish, Russian, and Italian immigrants, who were once frequently painted as the exploited in the new country, needing superhuman effort to lift themselves from marginality, can seem positively advantaged when placed against Latinos and some Asians, perhaps as ethnic businessmen exploiting the poorest newcomers and relatively well placed to “become white.”131 Emigration to the United States is interpreted differently when seen as part of a worldwide circulation of peoples.132 Contemporary ethnic tensions in Europe have also sustained and intensified interest in the history of American race relations. Long a

30

|

Chapter 1

constant in European historiography, the interest of European historians in such topics as civil rights, slavery, the South, the Civil War, and other aspects of race and ethnicity in North America has only grown. It was less the alleged absence of class struggles than the conspicuous presence of black slavery and Jim Crow laws that made the United States “exceptional” or distinctive, or so much European scholarship has implied.133 Globalization, together with the thrust of cultural studies, served vividly to direct interest to the phenomenon of Americanization, an interest inseparable from renewed debate among some intellectuals on the idea that the United States and Europe are culturally profoundly different. After the turn of the century the backdrop to these studies was a pervasive anti-Americanism centered on (but not confined to) the foreign policy of George W. Bush.134 European authors in the past had often condemned or promoted Americanism, as when offering the United States as a model for a pluralist and democratic society. Later, when the United States became a major European power, Americanization supplanted Americanism in European discourse.135 In recent decades it has been apparent that American ways are in Europe to stay and are actively penetrating and changing European society, for better or for worse—increasingly, some thought, for worse. American models are now suspect. Americanization suggests an irresistible empire that allows for only limited bargaining space at the receiving end. Along with the linked topic of a new American imperialism, it has inevitably spawned considerable scholarship in Europe.136 A more hybrid historiography has argued instead for the idea of Westernization, insisting on a busy two-way street of influences moving to and fro across the Atlantic.137 Nonetheless, as European historians of the United States have become more specialized and better able to interact with the American academy, they have embraced topics made salient by the course of U.S. historiography rather than by the particular promptings of the European context. This convergence of the U.S. and European academies is perhaps best illustrated by the increasing attention accorded to women’s history. Its sharply enhanced importance since about 1990 owed something to the spread of international women’s movements. As a recent study put it, “The post–Cold War emergence of transnational feminism as a new global subject has been one of the instrumental forces in rethinking women’s history.”138 Progress in Europe has been uneven, and chairs of women’s or gender history have been slow to appear,

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

31

possibly reflecting a reluctance to institutionalize it, but the growing number of women in the profession has helped the cause. Raffaella Baritono and Elisabetta Vezzosi complained in 2003 of the inadequate attention to American gender and women’s history in Italy, although it is now significant there and in Germany and has made notable advances in Britain and Poland and modest progress in Spain, where it is cultivated mainly by scholars in English studies.139 In France the subject has seemed to make slower progress. Yet in seizing on this major strand of contemporary U.S. historiography, its practitioners in Europe have rendered a signal service to their Americanist colleagues. European scholars of American history had long felt marginal to their national academies, but the expansion of women’s history, together with its transnational and interdisciplinary attributes, has done something to extricate them from this situation. In recent decades something akin to a global community of historians of America has been created, in which members are subject to common historiographical influences and methodological standards. But geographical location and distance from the subject matter do make a difference. Issues in U.S. society and politics, which may have little relevance to Europeans, often shape U.S. historiographical debates. Detachment of a kind survives, partly because of the need of European scholars to address their own audiences, often in their own language. They are conditioned too by their own methodological traditions and academic and institutional environments, as discussed elsewhere in this volume. Some national academies, for example, place great emphasis on the careful formulation of research questions and the testing of hypotheses through extensive documentary analysis, so much so that one northern European scholar has jokingly remarked that his colleagues’ view of U.S. historians is that “there is little to distinguish their work from historical fiction.”140 Historiographical traditions vary, of course, and some early European writing about America approached the polemical and hardly looked like impartial scholarship; more recently, antiAmerican bias has often colored historiographical interpretations of U.S. foreign policy. Europe reveals something about itself in the way that its historians write about the United States. Virtually from the beginning of the American republic, its constitutional forms commanded attention, their relevance constantly reasserted with successive recastings of European governments throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Europeans

32

|

Chapter 1

were deeply intrigued too by the role of race in the American experience, whether seen as a contradiction of the country’s professed ideals, a consoling defect in an enviable story, or, more recently, a guide as certain European societies became multiracial and multiethnic. When Europeans first began writing American history, they addressed their publications primarily to their domestic audiences. Much of the early post–World War II scholarship focused on connections, and authors also offered their countrymen syntheses or historiographical guides based on the work of U.S. scholars. The pattern changed strikingly in the final quarter of the twentieth century. As American history became established in European universities and research visits to the United States became more viable, studies of domestic, or “pure,” American history increasingly appeared, and its practitioners sought a wider audience, one very much including U.S. scholars. But in engaging with U.S. scholarship, these scholars also offered a perspective reflective of their location.141 Among the characteristics that can be found in European exercises in American history since the Second World War are a degree of detachment from and selective use of U.S. historiographical debates, some skepticism of notions of American exceptionalism, and an attention to comparative history. At times, liberal or neoprogressive values have informed the scholarship in western Europe, an orientation that an engagement with the variegated forms of New Left history reinforced. This characteristic, like the Marxism of scholarship in eastern Europe, spoke to the domestic contexts of European authors who were often pursuing political agendas of their own. But the sense of mission associated with the liberals of the 1950s and the radicals of the 1960s eventually faded into the past, and the imperatives of Soviet ideology have disappeared too. With the end of the Cold War, historians in both eastern and western Europe, like those in the United States, were no longer obliged to defend or condemn the world in which they were born. Europeans are now somewhat less beholden to the United States than they were in the immediate postwar period, and indeed in the first decade of the twentyfirst century anti-American sentiment was as strong as it has ever been. A greater European self-consciousness has slowly surfaced, perhaps a compound of the imperatives for a stronger European Union and disenchantment with the United States, but there is no less interest in the academic practice of American history, which is flourishing. Whether a kind of pan-European perspective will emerge in this scholarship to

Watersheds in Time and Place

|

33

temper the multiple local perspectives that have thus far characterized it remains to be seen. But in a global age, European and U.S. historians, and indeed historians from every continent, may together be able to develop a fresh and more contextualized vision of American history, one informed by insights rooted in a diversity of geographical and cultural locations.

This page intentionally left blank

part two

Structures and Context

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2

Using the American Past for the Present European Historians and the Relevance of Writing American History tibor frank, martin klimke, and stephen tuck

That writing about the past is interwoven with the demands of the present is something of a truism. But how each historian seeks to make, or not make, the connection, and how, in turn, this affects her or his research interests and writing style clearly varies—and seemingly marks one of the more significant differences between U.S. historians from the United States and their counterparts in Europe. To the eyes of many European scholars (of the United States), the American style is the openness and frequency with which historians make explicit links between past and present. By contrast, European writing on the United States might seem, at first glance, more detached. There is not, and never has been, a simple contrast between politicized historians based in the United States and dispassionate historians in Europe.1 The heat in controversies over identity-related pasts in some of the so-called tragic countries of twentieth-century Europe, such as Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Hungary, has more than matched that in controversies in the United States over topics such as the Founding Fathers, slavery, and Western settlement. Moreover, leading historians in Italy, for example, are recognized as public intellectuals entitled to comment on contemporary issues in ways that their U.S. counterparts can only dream of and, for that matter, many U.K. historians cannot relate to. Indeed, the difference in approaches to making use of the past may be greater between historians in European nations than between those in Europe and in the United States. For example, 37

38

|

Chapter 2

when Joyce Appleby, a past president of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, presented a historians’ petition to members of Congress in 2002 urging them to “assume their constitutional responsibility” to vote on the issue of war against Iraq, she was doing something that, to British or Dutch historians, might seem alien—and yet was familiar to French historians.2 Where the difference in historical studies on the two continents is pronounced, though, is between U.S. and European historians of the United States. Obviously for the latter, the past is literally a foreign country (to adapt the British novelist L. P. Hartley’s famous opening line), whereas in the United States, the historian’s personal investment in the story he or she is telling today often reinforces the tradition of using the history of “our country” to help make the case for future action.3 But again, it is not simply a contrast between engaged, U.S.-based historians and detached, outside observers of U.S. history from Europe. Indeed, studying the history of a different nation can be a political statement in itself and, at times, quite a bold one, especially when the nation in question is a Cold War superpower and then the preeminent global power. Rather, it is the nature of the engagement that differs. The implicit comparison with one’s own country and continent and their sociopolitical constellations at a given historical point has made any European reflections on America, whether driven by criticism or praise, “self-perception from a distance.”4 There has not been a single European approach to using the American past—motivations for and methods of choosing American history have varied across time and place, reflecting the connections, and relative standing, of the United States and Europe.5 In the generation following World War II, some European intellectuals attempted to educate European audiences about U.S. history while trying to import a model of U.S. history (in the case of western Europeans) or criticizing it (in the case of Eastern Europe). From the late 1960s, European historians sought to share in American dissent too—in both history and historiography. More recently, with the rise of transnational approaches and because of America’s perceived role as a trendsetter, European historians have also turned to U.S. history to help make sense of contemporary domestic European concerns and to reassert Europe’s place in post–World War II global history. In other words, in recent years, many European historians too have found a personal stake in the stories they are telling. This chapter explores various uses of American history: as selfperception, as a model to embrace or reject, for educating Europe about

Using the American Past for the Present

|

39

the United States, for reasserting Europe’s place in world history, and for illuminating contemporary challenges in European life. To survey wider trends, it makes use of scholarship from across Europe. But in order to explore in more depth how political concerns have affected European historical writing about the United States, it also presents case studies from Hungary, Germany, and Great Britain on the respective themes of self-perception, reclaiming Europe’s place in global history, and using American history to understand the present. Historians’ texts invariably don’t mention and recent surveys of U.S. historical writing have rarely interrogated the various institutional and cultural factors that influence the ways in which historians try to make history relevant—such as inherited traditions in the academy, popular expectations, personal investment, and contemporary political imperatives.6 Therefore investigating how European historians look to the U.S. past for present-day purposes also provides an ideal way to reveal some of the often hidden factors that shape the perceived contemporary relevance, and thus the production, of historical scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic.

european self-perception through perceptions of the united states: the case of hungary Considerations of the United States and its history often reflect national self-perception. National and international stereotypes are mutually dependent. Describing another nation or group contributes to the understanding of the self—particularly in the case of Europe and America, because their histories are so deeply intertwined and the American image looms so large in Europe.7 The case of Hungary, where there has been an overwhelming interest in the United States, shows that observing America as a means of selfperception has a long history in Europe. This was most understandable in a country striving to regain its constitutional rights and national independence from (or within) the Hapsburg Empire throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Prince Klemens von Metternich’s pre-1848 Hungary, the motif of America became part of the political agenda.8 From early on, influential Hungarians traveled to the United States to determine what had gone wrong in their own country and seek ways to put it right. Sándor Bölöni Farkas (1795–1842), for example, analyzed Jacksonian democracy in explicit contrast to Metternich’s oppressive regime in his Útazás Észak Amerikában

40

|

Chapter 2

(Journey in North America), published in 1834, a year before Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America) appeared.9 Just as Tocqueville conceived Democracy with France in mind, Farkas wrote his work focusing on the possibilities for Hungary. “To a foreigner,” he noted in his Journey, “the contrast between European and American laws and institutions is so striking that he attempts to attribute it to a unique historical accident. But a closer study of the Revolutionary era and constitutional history convinces him that America’s uniqueness is not accidental.”10 The secret of American success, according to Farkas, was that people had control over their own lives. For a Hungarian from the Hapsburg Empire of the Holy Alliance era, this meant a completely different and most attractive world. When visiting a tea party in Boston, Farkas was asked by his hosts about the state of affairs in Hungary. “Suddenly and crushingly I felt, under the weight of these questions, the tremendous contrast between my country and America. . . . The memory of my embarrassment at the tea party tormented me endlessly. How painful it was to reflect on the country’s condition, survey its literary, scientific, and cultural accomplishments, the prejudices and lack of knowledge about us abroad.”11 The Hapsburg government understood the message quite clearly: the censor’s watchful scissors cut out some of Farkas’s most provocative passages. Even Tocqueville was censored in Hungary: translated and published shortly after the original edition, his Hungarian text appeared with several important omissions.12 Anti-American censorship in Hungary under the Nazis and the Communists had a long prehistory to look back to. Other travelers and observations followed Farkas.13 The rich and enthusiastic literature on America pre–March 1848 was thinly veiled criticism directed against socially and economically backward Hungary. The Constitution of the United States was “the greatest example of such institutions” for the revolutionaries of 1848 and provided a welcome opportunity for those trying to change Hungary into a republic to criticize monarchical government and the Hapsburg house.14 “Look at America,” a pamphlet argued at the end of 1848, “there the Republic, and popular government, is 60 years old, and this 60-year-old popular government is more successful than the kings of Europe ever were: though they [have] rule[d] from their sovereign thrones since the beginning of the world, their lustre was derived from the tears of their subjects.”15 The Hungarian Declaration of Independence, drafted during the Hungarian War of Independence in 1849, clearly followed

Using the American Past for the Present

|

41

the American model.16 The emphasis was even more markedly on the parallels of fighting for independence in America and Hungary during the 1851–52 U.S. trip of the Hungarian national leader Lajos Kossuth.17 The Hungarian image of the United States underwent significant changes after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.18 With the mass migrations to the United States from Austria-Hungary in 1880– 1914, the image of the other became more tangible and less abstract, and daily experiences replaced idealized stereotypes. When the Hungarian government sent Emil Zerkowitz to the St. Louis Universal Exposition of 1904, he was reminded of the feudal conditions of turnof-the-century Hungary, again revealing the mirroring qualities of reflections on another country. His coded references to Hungarian conditions are obvious throughout the book he published in 1905.19 Even as late as 1928, when Kossuth’s statue was erected and unveiled on Riverside Drive in New York City, the Hungarian traveler Zoltán Biró focused on how the American social experience strikingly contrasted with the surviving symbols of an antiquated feudal hierarchy in Hungary. He concluded his 1929 book Amerika: Magyarok a modern csodák országában (America: Hungarians in the land of modern wonders) by pointing out that the United States of America represented a paragon for the future, a model for Europeans to follow.20 In one of the last pre–World War II Hungarian books on the United States, published in 1942, Géza Zsoldos emphasized the American work ethic, shedding some light on the basic differences between Hungary and the United States.21 As these few Hungarian examples demonstrate, the images of another country are almost always the products of comparative efforts, conscious or subconscious, that measure the differences and similarities between “them” and “us.” In Hungary, this long tradition of selfperception through observation provided a foundation for historical scholarship on America, which has grown rapidly over the decades, especially since the country has been free from Soviet domination.22 What is true of Hungary has been true of European scholarship more generally. In Italy, for example, the 150th anniversary of national unity encouraged studies of American-Italian relations during the Risorgimento and the American Civil War. A notion is emerging that the Civil War was a sort of ideal parallel to the European risorgimentos and that the victory of the North also helped European liberations from monarchical authoritarianism. American history is therefore itself seen as a battle between the principles of equal rights and slavery.23

42

|

Chapter 2

Imagology has become an increasingly major field of inquiry, leading to a better appreciation of the attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudices that govern international relations and cultural studies. In the Netherlands, Rodolpi Editions launched a productive series of “Amsterdam studies on cultural identity” called Studia Imagologica, whose editors, Hugo Dyserinck and Joep Leerssen, have noted that “the necessity for a textual and historical analysis of their typology, their discursive expression and dissemination, is being recognized by historians and literary scholars.”24 In the latest volume, Imagology Revisited, the Vienna University professor Waldemar Zacharasiewicz discusses the theory and methods of imagology on the basis of broad transatlantic material, including the reciprocity of influences in the search of both sides for an American national identity.25 Comparative studies of the United States and Europe also came alive in the mid-1990s in Italy, where the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana organized the first major international conference on the methodology of studies in American history and the social sciences, in Rome in 1993, and published its findings in 1996.26

using or rejecting american history from world war ii through the cold war Studying U.S. history as an exercise in self-perception has informed European scholarship in each generation since the country’s founding. Nonetheless, the particular ways in which European historians of the United States have sought to use U.S. history have varied over time and between countries and regions. Nowhere has the difference been more evident than between eastern and western Europe during the Cold War. The general pattern was that many historians in western Europe first saw the United States as a model after World War II before celebrating its internal dissent from the late 1960s. In Eastern Europe, by and large the process was reversed. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the legacies of these years lingered. In the first generation after World War II (ca. 1945 to ca. 1965–70), particularly in western Europe, studying U.S. history often meant looking for a directly “usable past”—America was not simply a “promised land” but was hoped to be a universally “reproducible model.”27 Americanists in western European nations, notably in West Germany, studied U.S. history in search of valuable lessons: for the embattled postwar European societies, for their shattered economies, and for their polarized polities. The exceptional United States that the U.S.-based

Using the American Past for the Present

|

43

historians presented (and represented) offered a template for a new (and then already uniting) Western Europe, a template that needed to be studied, translated, and propagated to be effectively used.28 National politics here went hand in hand with geopolitics. The Cold War induced the United States to launch a massive program of cultural diplomacy, of which the diffusion of American studies and values abroad was part and parcel. It met with some, though not total, success. U.S. history in western Europe after 1945 was also partly based on U.S. military presence in that area (again, notably in West Germany), following denazification, the spread of English as a second language, and the evergrowing influence of Hollywood and other American popular culture. In Continental western Europe, U.S. history was often approached within the broader framework of American studies, pursued by twenty-one member organizations from twenty-seven countries and headed by the European Association for American Studies (EAAS), founded at the American Seminar at Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria, in 1954.29 Thanks to the Fulbright Program, many western European historians were able to study in the United States and bring their discovery of the country and its history back home.30 By contrast, during the early Cold War, even the name of the United States was anathema in a thoroughly Sovietized Eastern Europe. There was little historical scholarship on the United States outside a rigid Marxist-Leninist framework, much of it politicized and tendentious.31 It was the negative history of the “other America,” of the exploited masses and minorities and especially of slavery, that held particular significance. In these years a major source on U.S. history was a standard Soviet handbook on world history with chapters on the United States— a politically charged survey translated into several East European languages and used as a reference work. Other sources of American history were not available in local languages, and Soviet governments seldom allowed American or West European books on American history in English into Eastern Europe or permitted ordinary readers to consult them in libraries—provided that such books were available there in the first place.32 This led to a serious lack of knowledge on U.S. history in most of East Central Europe, whose citizens could not visit the United States for several decades after 1945. Moreover, the study of German before the war and especially the (forced) study of Russian afterward were far more widespread than the study of English. There were few or no documentary or feature films on American historical topics on show in the cinema. Television did not start in Eastern Europe until the late

44

|

Chapter 2

1950s, and radio programs originating in the United States or broadcast from U.S.-sponsored radio stations in West Germany were heavily jammed and thus had no influence. American studies programs were nonexistent at East Central European universities until the 1980s. Drawing a simple East-Wide divide can oversimplify matters, though. For the poorer countries and peoples of Eastern, Central, and southern Europe, the United States also seemed to be a promised land, with unlimited, mostly financial, opportunities.33 Thus much of what was written of the United States in East Central Europe traditionally focused on emigration, particularly from the former Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires. Meanwhile, some Spanish historians served the patriotic present with a focus on Spanish colonies and the taking of civilization to the New World.34 Over time, the marriage between politics and geopolitics dissolved, initially in western Europe. From the 1960s, discovering the United States and bringing it back home ceased to imply belief in a uniform, let alone usable, American past. As chapter 1 documents, anti-Americanism became as much a feature of West European life and scholarship as the interest in America as a reproducible model had been after World War II. The pluralism of post-1960s American historiography meant that many American pasts were now on display and could be invoked. (Multiple histories of other countries, such as Germany, France, and Britain, emerged too, partly under the influence of developments in the United States.) Political passions did not abate, though: if anything, they intensified. Just like their U.S. counterparts, European Americanists could use the many American pasts against their countries’ orthodox and official contemporary arguments. More important, these could be juxtaposed to national historical narratives that were deemed unable to replicate the pluralism and diversity of U.S. historiography.35 In Eastern Europe during the late Cold War, the officially sanctioned version of U.S. history, boosted in the case of East Germany through an extraordinary amount of academic and popular narratives, was still advanced as a political weapon against “the West.”36 Yet in a way that would have delighted the U.S. State Department, the political weapon often turned into something of a boomerang. Under the lengthy (1967– 95) leadership of Georgiy Arkadievich Arbatov, the Institute of United States and Canada Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences provided models for writing American history for both the Soviet Union and its East Central European empire. Arbatov sought to avoid confrontation, and his institute became, before the end of the Cold War, a center of the

Using the American Past for the Present

|

45

Soviet Union’s “new thinking.”37 But before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States became a much-desired land for political dissenters, who chose it as a topic to express dissatisfaction or even hatred toward the Soviets and a strong longing for a land of fantasy and imagination. Meanwhile, Hungary came to be recognized as a relatively liberal country, and the EAAS held its first nonwestern all-European conference there, with six hundred participants, in 1986. (One EAAS official, based in the Netherlands, smuggled in U.S. dollars to help pay the costs.)38 After the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, the legacy of these politics of history lingered in public consciousness in eastern Europe. The United States was eventually viewed a lot more critically and lost its position as a much-admired beacon of democracy.39 In some instances, the argument in historical debates was increasingly anti-American. But the anti-American turn in Eastern European scholarship was challenged by a comprehensive U.S. cultural diplomacy effort and by the substantial popularity of another great emancipator—not Abraham Lincoln, but Ronald Reagan. It was also dented by a new generation of academics, who sought to transcend the ideological battle lines of the past.40 In any case, anti-Americanism was by no means ubiquitous in public sentiment. Post-Communist Poland, for instance, remained consistently pro-American, although the once well-established American dream was losing its appeal and credibility in the public imagination. Not surprisingly, in the new political and military contexts of the twenty-first century, the research topics of Polish historians of America have visibly encroached on the field of political science (American foreign policy toward the Middle East and toward China, the antiterrorist policy of G. W. Bush, and American oil policy are the topics of doctoral dissertations in progress).41

educating european publics about the united states for less overt political purposes While political passions raged, in western Europe some historians ostensibly sought to avoid the political message of celebrating a usable past and embarked instead on an educational mission to introduce the public in their respective countries to the history and culture of their transatlantic partner. Such writing could be framed in many ways: for instance, as explanation of America’s ascendancy (and thus threat to Europe) or, increasingly, an investigation of its decay (and thus

46

|

Chapter 2

European opportunities). In France in 1967, Jean-Jacques ServanSchreiber (1924–2006) published his Le Défi Américain (The American Challenge), a vision of Europe’s potential economic defeat by the United States.42 This book presents a silent economic war between the United States and Europe and was one of the ideological foundations of the European Union, using the American threat to draw attention to the importance of cooperation in Europe. It became an international best seller (six hundred thousand copies in France alone), was translated into fifteen languages, and continued to be a point of reference for journalists and politicians in discussions of the effects of American capitalism in Europe through the end of the century.43 Even more popular was Alastair Cooke’s America: A Personal History of the United States, which the BBC first broadcast in 1972. Similar educational efforts were made in de-Sovietizing East Central Europe, not so much to escape political entanglement as to fill the gap in knowledge of American history and historiography that the decades of isolation had produced. One milestone project, of mapping the field, was initiated in Poland in the 1990s and resulted in a celebrated five-volume history of the United States consisting of survey essays commissioned from thirty-five American and eleven Polish authors (Andrzej Bartnicki, Donald Critchlow, and Walter Nugent, eds., Historia Stanów Zjednoczonych Ameryki [Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1995]). Ultimately, however, the public-educational impact of (western and eastern) European historians of the United States was limited by the power of a popular version of history, discussed below, that included the United States, and the greater capacity of the public to approach the United States directly, without the need of historians as cultural mediators. Although their educational mission clearly had implications for the present, such authors-as-educators positioned themselves as detached scholars, free from explicit partisanship. Even so, this supposedly detached presentation of the past served to deepen political alliances. In the case of West Germany, it was also part of a U.S.-induced democratization of science and scholarship that helped to inscribe the post–World War II development of the country into a larger history of the “free world.”44 In the aftermath of 1945, the emergence of the discipline of U.S. history, including a subfield that concentrated on transatlantic relations, was thus a by-product of Cold War politics, and its development became entangled with the state of transatlantic relations. U.S. government–sponsored high school and academic exchange projects,

Using the American Past for the Present

|

47

such as the Fulbright Program; the various activities of the Amerika Hauses throughout the Federal Republic of Germany; and the efforts of several private entities, such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, heavily supported it.45 The transatlantic experiences that these programs fostered exercised a profound influence on a whole generation of historians who were now directly exposed to the country they had chosen to study, via extended stays at U.S. universities, research in local archives, and interactions with their Americans peers on both sides of the Atlantic.46 These experiences also bred a genre of American travel reports and other literature.47 In consequence, journalists have started to act as nonprofessional historians, producing a wide variety of U.S.-related books, articles, and TV and radio programs based on little or no original historical research.48 References to U.S. history derived from these popular works have often played a major role in the published statements of politicians, who use them to enhance comparative arguments on matters European. Similar developments were taking place in some still-Communist East European countries, although on a much smaller scale. As soon as the détente between the United States and the USSR after 1975 created a more favorable climate for advancing American studies east of the Iron Curtain, Poland established its first American Studies Center, at Warsaw University in 1976, with generous support from the United States Information Agency. Significantly, the center’s founder, Andrzej Bartnicki, was a historian, and he made it an incubator for a new generation of Polish historians of the United States.

reclaiming global history: german historians and westernization In addition to American history, European historians of the United States have made use of the American academy’s way of doing history. For example, from the 1960s, for many European historians, studying U.S. history increasingly meant discovering a variety of sub- and interdisciplinary fields and alternative methods of historical inquiry. For some, it was tantamount to being in the vanguard of an intense transatlantic dialogue on historical approaches and concepts.49 One such dialogue was the much-trumpeted campaign to globalize the study of U.S. history—which, under the leadership of Lewis Hanke, saw U.S. historical associations explicitly target non-U.S. Americanists.50

48

|

Chapter 2

Yet the result was not simply a deparochialized, less nation-centered way of studying U.S. history but also a further diffusion of U.S. history, thus building, unintentionally, on the earlier ambitions of European historians (and the U.S. State Department) to make America better known. When U.S. scholars started in earnest to shift their attention to the global dimensions of U.S. history at the end of the twentieth century, European historians of the United States welcomed their efforts.51 These dovetailed with the work of many well-established scholars who had already laid out the complex and multidimensional processes of Americanization with respective to their societies.52 In the second half of the 1990s, the close alliance between West Germany and the United States, as well as West Germany’s preeminent role in American foreign policy during the Cold War, came under intense scrutiny with regard to the extent, meaning, and effect of American influence after World War II. In an attempt to come to terms with the history of postwar superpower confrontation and its legacies, German scholars employed terms such as Westernization and Americanization, often synonymously and with contradictory meanings.53 Analyses that situated themselves under the theoretical umbrella of Westernization offered a long-term perspective on intercultural transfers in the European-American relationship over the previous two centuries. Focusing on the gradual evolution of a common set of values in the Atlantic societies since the eighteenth century, they examined this “intellectual transfer construed as an ongoing exchange” whose “trademark [was] the continuous recycling of ideas: from Europe to America, and back again.”54 In this constellation, they defined Westernization as “the emergence of a shared value framework in the societies straddling the North Atlantic.”55 This circulatory cultural exchange was marked by periods of a predominantly European influence on the United States, succeeded by phases of strong American influence on Europe. Americanization thus became a subcategory in a larger historical framework of exchange on an equal footing, in which American influence could be considerable at times but was by no means exclusive, and which could be juxtaposed to ideas of modernization, democratization, and liberalization. Other scholars tied the phenomenon of increased American influence to a general process of cultural globalization, looking at “the way in which the country has projected itself as a force affecting the lives of many people across the globe, in the course of what became known as the American Century.”56 As a result of this process, a variety of imaginative

Using the American Past for the Present

|

49

“offshore Americas” emerged, reflecting the inextricable link between the United States’ rise as a superpower in the twentieth century and the forces of globalization that helped spread its image even farther across the globe.57 But here too the change of perspective was on the receiving end,58 where constructions of the self and the “other” were being renegotiated in a “sign war” of images and references to “Americanness” for various purposes.59 As such, this approach was equally part of domestic and international power politics, in which political and economic factors, for example, determined local perceptions. As the German cultural historian Kaspar Maase argued, “Americanizing oneself was not a purely willful act. It was the utilization of an objectively given constellation, and in this respect it depended on the dynamics of Cold War politics and the world economy. . . . ‘America’ provided physical, ideational and symbolic materials, arguments, and examples which were being utilized (and increasingly had to be utilized) in the old world in order to articulate and strengthen different interests.”60 It is hard not to view these academic debates at the end of the 1990s in the context of the end of the Cold War, a comprehensive reassessment of transatlantic relations on the political level, and the alleged unipolar moment in international relations. They inspired a whole new generation of western Europe–based historians of the United States, who, drawing on the methodological approaches described above, were able to inscribe Europe and its contribution in a global version of American history. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this new generation was often appalled (as indeed were many established scholars) by the political direction the United States was taking under George W. Bush.61 Indeed, the recent boom in transnational studies of U.S. history stands in the context of Robert Kagan’s assertion that “Europeans are from Venus, Americans are from Mars” and the Bush administration’s division of Europe into New and Old.62 Moreover, due to their partial political and cultural socialization on the other side of the Atlantic, these younger European historians share not only a language but also a certain personal investment in U.S. history with their American counterparts. As opposed to comparing and contrasting their societies with the American example, they too have begun to write (and indeed helped shape the writing of) transnational history, thereby expanding the perspective to new actors and issues that have influenced both U.S. history and the histories of their own countries.63 Italian historians of foreign policy, for example, have focused on the framing in the late 1940s of

50

|

Chapter 2

the notion of the Atlantic community and, recently, on the history of energy, especially oil, and its economic and monetary implications.64 Thus, in writing transnational history that encompasses the United States, European historians find themselves writing “our history” after all, and indeed some adopt the American style of making clear their personal investment and the present-day relevance of the subject at hand.65 But this new approach, including the fragmentation of the nation-state as the dominant historical category, is more than simply a reflection of a vibrant transatlantic (political) community, the greater convergence of academic cultures in Europe and the United States, and the rise of a European Union that has challenged the primacy of national history. It can also be an effort to reclaim ownership of the past from U.S. historians. The European Science Foundation (ESF), established in 1974, is one of the relatively new institutional sponsors of history writing in Europe and supports huge multinational projects in English. With its projected eight volumes, the Writing the Nation series is an excellent example of an ESF venture laying the international foundations of national histories in Europe.66 This reclaiming of history is perhaps most apparent in the writing of the more triumphal aspects of late twentieth-century history—notably the rise of human rights and the fall of Communist regimes (see chapter 6). Future research will undoubtedly complicate the still-dominant triumphalist narrative of the end of the Cold War, currently centered around American power and people such as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in many works of U.S.-based historians, in favor of a more balanced view that credits grassroots developments on the national and transnational levels.67 Some historians, especially in East Central Europe, have sought to reclaim the European national heritages of the United States. In particular, they have studied emigration to the United States in great, local detail.68 Differences between European and U.S. scholars should not be overstated—indeed, the study of migration could be the poster child for the internationalization of history and transnational history projects.69 Nevertheless, European scholars have clearly played a pioneering role in bringing U.S. immigration into a pattern of global migrations—the Institut für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, under the leadership of Klaus Bade, was pivotal in transforming what was once the study of only U.S. immigration into a broadly conceived research area in European migrations with contemporary global implications.70 In Italy, a new generation of scholars has taken

Using the American Past for the Present

|

51

into account the globalizing effects of recent emigration history, especially of Latin American and Asian immigrants.71 In addition, European scholars have explored other forms of transatlantic connections, such as diplomacy and the transfer of European culture to the United States in its early history, in an effort to portray the latter as a “European country.” This of course has far-reaching political implications on both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans have also participated in some of the major historical undertakings of recent decades, such as the building of the multimillion-dollar Ellis Island database (ellisisland.org), initiated and headed by Ira A. Glazier, and the subsequent publishing of the Ellis Island series.72 The long-term impact of this scholarly shift to the study of transnationalism, international exchange, and “America in the world” on European Americanists and the transatlantic dialogue in American studies has been poignantly summarized by the German literary scholar Winfried Fluck, who argues that “transnationalism has been good to me and other American studies scholars from outside the United States. Before, when we came to the United States, we were poor relatives; now we are sought-after messengers from another world who seem to possess the magical power of leading Americans into a new age of cosmopolitanism.”73

using american history to interpret contemporary domestic european concerns: british scholarship on the american civil rights movement Somewhat ironically, given how long U.S. history was understood to be exceptional, it is striking just how many aspects of recent American history have had their counterparts in Europe—especially in relation to social movements. Struggles over immigration, the environment, urban development, racial equality, women’s rights, and workplace justice have been key themes of late twentieth-century life on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus with America’s rise to preeminence, especially as a supposed global trendsetter, its past can have direct implications for the European present and future—perhaps not as directly as for American scholars, but powerfully nonetheless. This is rarely acknowledged explicitly. With the rise of globalization and the ascendancy of the American academy, increasing numbers of European historians of domestic American history have ostensibly moved beyond using it for contemporary European purposes. Instead, they

52

|

Chapter 2

have both had the opportunity and felt the pressure to follow the agenda and style of their American counterparts. Seeking to publish with American presses and in American journals for American audiences, European historians of the United States have also had a disincentive to proclaim a domestic agenda of their own. Rather, such historians have positioned themselves, in the words of the Cambridge professor Tony Badger’s self-description, as historians of America “who happened to live elsewhere”—none more so than Badger’s fellow scholars who happen to live in the United Kingdom, sometimes called the fifty-first state. Their work and its relevance are thus framed in American terms. Badger, for example, remembers that he set out on his doctorate to explore the New Deal in North Carolina in “the context of a clearly defined American historiographical problem” rather than to explain, use, reframe, or reclaim it for domestic purposes.74 Even so, the parallels and connections between recent domestic American and European history clearly provide opportunities for self-analysis, following in the long tradition of European scholarship of the United States—even in the case of British historians of modern domestic U.S. history. Reading their work, what is striking is how few explicit connections they make between major themes in the Southern past and contemporary European concerns. Indeed, Badger recalls that he was so successful in shedding his British predispositions that one leading Southern reviewer of his Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), noted that the only interest group of the 1930s that Badger had failed to investigate was the British buyers.75 In other words, national location (outside the United States) in this case seemed to preclude writing about the American past for contemporary purposes. Nevertheless, the fact that a disproportionate number of British historians focus on the African American civil rights movement (and almost none on Native American studies) suggests that such historians have sought to use the South to engage with present-day concerns.76 Between 1984 and 2005, twenty-one British historians of America worked on the modern civil rights movement (the second-most-popular topic among British Americanists, after American foreign relations). Of course, U.S. historians were also drawn to the civil rights movement (and slavery) in large numbers, but not remotely on this disproportionate scale. Increased British interest in Southern race relations clearly reflects a particular moment in British social history.77 Late twentieth-century urban Britain

Using the American Past for the Present

|

53

was fast becoming multicultural, and uneasily so. Race riots in the early 1980s unsettled British sensibilities, leading to anti-immigration slogans taking center stage in British elections. Thus the tumultuous story of Southern race relations resonated, while the triumphant narrative of a powerful civil rights movement provided lessons to learn. (By contrast, the absence of an equivalent native minority group in the United Kingdom meant that the story of Native Americans did not resonate there.) One reason that British historians turned to the American South to ponder and learn about race was the absence of a well-known British story. Black British activists and their allies had a fascinating story to tell—it’s just that much of British academia was not listening in the late twentieth century. Hence the presumed need for younger scholars to look abroad. The appointment of British scholars of U.S. race to chairs, notably at Cambridge, further institutionalized and fostered this interest. Of course, British scholars interested in race could also, and did, turn to imperial and commonwealth history. But the U.S. South held particular attraction because it seemed analogous to the contemporary domestic story of race—a subjugated racial minority in a country professing equality. In other words, “America’s dilemma” was also Britain’s, as British sociologists of the 1960s had suggested.78 The prominence that the British media gave to the American civil rights movement—with gripping images beamed across the Atlantic on new satellite technology to fill the newly expanded schedule of British television—meant that the American story came to be familiar in Britain (and much more familiar than the British one). In the 1980s, cultural and literary scholars such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy powerfully interpreted British riots in the light of Black Power struggles and cultural politics in the United States.79 Thus for British historians, the act of studying the U.S. South—though framed in terms of American historiographical debates and written about for American audiences, with no explicit connections drawn or agenda imposed—was also an exercise in making sense of home (even as some made their home temporarily or permanently in the United States).80 What is true for British scholars is also true for many of the other (albeit fewer) European historians of American race. German historians, for example, have recently focused on race, in important works such as Simon Wendt’s The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010) and Manfred Berg’s Popular Justice: A History of Lynching

54

|

Chapter 2

in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011).81 More broadly, European historians’ interest in American multiculturalism can be understood in terms of the need to grasp a concept that was both new to Europe and clearly American in origin. In a 1913 book, Francis E. Clark (1851– 1927) made an early effort to compare Hungary and the United States: “The cosmopolitan make-up of the [Hungarian] people is like America. The Magyars themselves, the true Hungarians, are a mixed race like our own, and the nation has inherited the best blood of many peoples. . . . In their assimilative powers, too, the Hungarians have shown their likeness to America.”82 Such comparisons worked both ways. The influential Hungarian American social scientist Oscar Jászi (1875–1957) suggested in 1929 that the supranational “experiment of the Habsburgs would have signified a higher and more promising principle of evolution, not only compared with the old national states but also with the English and American kind of confederative state. For the British Empire and the United States are in reality a continuation of the old national type.”83 He also believed that “in the United States the unity of the Anglo-Saxon culture and hegemony is uncontested.”84 He did not live long enough to see the time of contest coming.

conclusion The overarching themes of European use of American history—for selfperception, to reclaim Europe’s place in global history, and to study issues that resonate with contemporary challenges at home—have recently led many Europeans to focus mostly on recent or contemporary U.S. history. (The exception is historians of colonial America and American foreign policy, who already focus on areas of connection between Europe and America.) With continued American dominance in an ever-globalizing world, such political uses for European purposes seem set to continue. Yet the influence of globalization and the preeminent, or even hegemonic, position of the American academy also mean that ever more European historians may increasingly adopt American styles and agendas to earn a hearing in the U.S. academy—and thus refrain from staking out an explicit position for their use of U.S. history. Moreover, the rise of transnational history, with the growing acknowledgement on both sides of the Atlantic that “our past” is shared, may further narrow differences in how academics from different nations use the U.S. past for present-day purposes. So too will increasing academic interchange

Using the American Past for the Present

|

55

(in both directions) and acquaintance with U.S. news, which will mean that European historians can develop a personal investment in U.S. history. Interchange can also lead not so much to the Americanizing of European Americanists as to fruitful cooperation from different yet intertwined political perspectives.85 Nevertheless, the fact that the United States retains a dominant, distinct, polarizing role in global politics and remains the repository for so many European dreams and frustrations—not to mention the tenacious influence of national traditions and the controversial impact of the European Union on European scholarship—suggests that the writing of U.S. history will continue to play different political roles (both explicit and, increasingly, hidden) in the United States and Europe for some time.

Chapter 3

Institutions, Careers, and the Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe max edling, vincent michelot, jörg nagler, sandra scanlon, and irmina wawrzyczek

Do institutions shape historical scholarship? Insofar as there are collective trends in the history scholars write, to what extent do the institutional settings they work in influence their path? When we talk about historiography, we generally approach historical work as an individual pursuit—which it is for a large part. Collective trends are explored as a matter of intellectual fashions, historical schools and traditions, or political movements. All these we acknowledge readily as the main stuff of our profession. Yet in this essay we would like to explore beyond those purely intellectual dimensions of the historical craft and examine the more practical and mundane factors, such as career prospects and access to resources, that shape research agendas and publication patterns. Few would deny the importance of such aspects of the historical profession, yet generally they are part of discussions separate from the higher-minded pursuits of scholarship itself. So this chapter focuses on these often forgotten sides of the historian’s craft. It takes the example of European historians of colonial North America and the United States to explore the significance of the institutional settings in which scholars work, including the many ways they can influence writing. Charles de Gaulle once quipped that it was impossible to govern a country with 258 varieties of cheese. In much the same way, it is impossible to give a full account of American history as currently practiced in Europe. Different national academic traditions and rapid institutional change, in part driven by political initiatives of the European Union to 56

The Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe

|

57

standardize the continent’s systems of higher education, have created an academic landscape not only diverse but also shifting. In addition to the variation between countries, there is also variation between institutions in each country. Just like the United States, most European countries have different types of institutions of higher learning. Some are more research oriented, whereas others are geared mainly toward the instruction of a locally recruited student population. There is a world of difference between the London School of Economics and London Metropolitan University, between the universities of Lund and Kristianstad, and between Charles University in Prague and Silesian University in Opava. If only for this reason, there will be no attempt here to provide an exhaustive survey of either American history in Europe or the systems of higher education on the continent.1 Our aim, rather, is to bring out distinctive features of and allow for comparisons within the heterogeneous world of European higher education. We do put together hard-tofind information, however, so we hope that the following pages will help the reader make sense of the professional conditions of historians of the United States throughout Europe. But we offer this information primarily to shed light on some of the factors that, in our view, bear the most heavily on the paths historians take. We are not advocating any deterministic view, yet we do think that institutions have an influence on the historian’s trade, although the precise impact will vary not only between institutional settings but also between one individual and the next. To make sense of this diversity, and keeping in mind that career demands are the locus where institutions meet scholars, we have organized this chapter around the three major stages of the profession: the initial training of graduate students; the postdoctoral entry into the profession as a junior scholar; and the ascent to full professor, an institutional position at the heart of most systems. The PhD is the foundation of an academic career. It is also the stage where institutional constraints and opportunities are most apparent. The importance of this phase makes it all the more crucial to consider closely. Across Europe, the organization and requirements of PhD programs vary greatly, despite attempts to streamline university systems and promote mobility. With a few exceptions—such as the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, where North American history has never been a priority—the institutions that maintain academic cultures and organize the historical profession remain national rather than

58

|

Chapter 3

continental. Three factors seem to be especially important in how the institutional framework shapes scholarship at this level: the number of Americanists working in the nation’s university system, the resources available to graduate students, and the formal requirements of the PhD degree. In relatively small academies, numbers matter: the existence, or not, of a real milieu of Americanists can greatly impact both the possibilities of undertaking a PhD in U.S. history and the type of dissertation produced. This starts before the graduate level: on the other side of the Atlantic, it is not always appreciated that the history of North America is sometimes not taught at all in many history departments in Europe outside Britain and Ireland. In part this is due to the power of tradition to shape the curriculum, but it is also the effect of numbers. These factors are interdependent. With American historians thin on the ground in many countries, there is little pressure to reform the curriculum. But without such reform, career opportunities for American historians will remain limited and their numbers will stay low. Figures are uncertain, but our attempt to count practicing American historians around the continent suggests that there are around two hundred in the United Kingdom, some sixty each in France and Germany, around thirty in Italy, half that number in each of Ireland, the Netherlands, and Poland, and single digits elsewhere. In a few countries, such as Sweden, there is not a single position in American history at any of the nation’s universities. These figures have consequences. They touch on the education of undergraduate students, who rarely have the opportunity to develop close familiarity with U.S. history and historiography, since few people teach it. At the graduate level, only a handful of institutions across the continent offer masters programs dedicated to American colonial and United States history, such as the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in France, the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and University College Dublin in Ireland. The main exception is the United Kingdom, which has specialized programs at Cambridge, East Anglia, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield, and University College London. The United States is also a main subject of graduate programs in international relations throughout Europe, although it makes for a specific (and often institutionally disconnected) part of U.S. history as a field: see, for instance, the MA in strategic studies and foreign relations at University College Cork in Ireland or the MA in transatlantic studies at Jagiellonian University in Poland.2

The Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe

|

59

Programs in American studies are much more prevalent across the continent, and they form a more available path to the study of the United States. Many universities have formed specific programs for American studies: in Germany there are currently twelve such programs at the MA level; in the United Kingdom, forty-five universities offer specific BAs in American studies and many MAs as well; other examples abound, as in Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Scandinavia.3 But whether a dedicated program exists or not, most universities across the continent offer American studies in their English Departments, which generally opened to the field in the 1960s and 1970s. Typically these programs bring together, to varying degrees, American literature, culture, history, and politics. Only rarely do they allow students to fully immerse themselves in American history, but where numbers are strong they can allow for a distinctive interdisciplinary approach. The North American MA program at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany, for instance, brings together in equal parts cultural studies, history, and political science. It exemplifies what could be a distinctive trait of American studies in Europe: the place of political science in the mix, which accounts for a continued affinity with studying politics in historical perspective—and has engaged European Americanists with American political development, a subfield that remains relatively marginal in both history and political science in the United States. The institutional structure of undergraduate and graduate studies in U.S. history in Europe has several consequences. First, it means that PhD students in history have a different background than their American peers. Typically they embark on their dissertation projects with solid methodological grounding in the historical discipline, a strong knowledge of their national history, and a good, though lesser, foundation of European history. But their knowledge of the history of other parts of the world, including North America, is much shallower. Perhaps most important, they have been much more exposed to European than to American historiography. This background affects the questions European students ask and the theoretical concepts and methodological approaches they employ. Second, this institutional makeup goes far in shaping the intellectual environment of budding American historians. Whereas European academic milieus can be just as stimulating as North American ones, the institutions that can provide the critical mass of faculty members and graduate students necessary to maintain a research seminar and graduate courses in American history are few in Europe. In most European

60

|

Chapter 3

graduate programs, American history is a peripheral subject. Students are therefore restricted to seminars and courses where they continue their engagement with the national and European historiography they encountered as undergraduates. Only a few places in Europe have a significant concentration of graduate students and faculty in American history. In the United Kingdom, the University of Cambridge runs the most important program and was responsible for one-third of the total PhDs in American history awarded by the so-called Russell Group universities in 2001–11.4 Other institutions, however, also bring together a number of scholars and students large enough to reach a critical mass of specialists. One could cite the Rothermere American Institute in Oxford or the American seminar at the Institute for Historical Research in London (where historians from several universities of the capital meet). In France, the sheer weight of Paris in the university system makes it a bustling place for American history: three-quarters of the French dissertations in the field were defended there in the past decade. A few institutions with dedicated programs stand out—EHESS and the University of Paris PanthéonSorbonne in history and the universities of Sorbonne Nouvelle and Paris-Diderot in American studies—but a total of ten French schools awarded PhDs on any aspect of U.S. history in 2001–12.5 In most European countries, the critical mass of scholars and students in American history is thus concentrated in a few points, sometimes in one institution, such as the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, which awarded fifteen of the thirty-eight Polish PhDs in U.S. history in 2001–12; Heidelberg University and the Free University of Berlin, where respectively eighteen and twelve of the eighty-eight German dissertations in the subject were defended in 2008–12; and Lund University, with seven of the fifteen PhDs in the field completed in Sweden in the two decades between 1976 and 2005 (although today it does not train students in American history).6 In some countries, there has been a conscious pooling of the resources of several institutions to create an intellectual milieu in U.S. history when numbers would be too low and scattered otherwise. Thus the Roosevelt Center in Middelburg, the Netherlands, regularly hosts a seminar for all the PhD students in U.S. history in the country. In Italy, several universities have brought together their American historians in the Centro Interuniversitario di Storia e Politica Euro-Americana (CISPEA). The number and deployment of American historians in a nation’s university system are important, as they dictate where students can

The Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe

|

61

more systematically engage with American historiography of the United States, through both European historians and American guests. They also affect what is perhaps the most important resource to a graduate student: a knowledgeable supervisor in good standing in the profession. In a small country such as Sweden, it is hardly surprising that few dissertations in American history are written: not only are graduate programs small in general, but there are very few experts on U.S. history in the potential pool of supervisors. In most countries the situation is not this extreme, but the limited range of potential supervisors unavoidably structures the field. To a large degree this is the result of tradition and specifically of the origins of American history in Europe. The small number of experts and the concentration of graduate students in a few institutions mean that the impact of individual professors is potentially significant. With few centers of American history in Europe, professors at these institutions come to train a considerable share of a nation’s American history experts. Thus in Sweden, Göran Rystad, who had a personal chair in American history before retiring in 1991, was by far the most important supervisor. In the United Kingdom, Anthony Badger, at the University of Cambridge, has supervised at least ten dissertations defended in the past decade, a figure that can be compared to the fourteen dissertations supervised by the entire American history faculty at Oxford University in the same period. In Poland the record belongs to Andrzej Mania, a political scientist and historian at the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora at Jagiellonian University, who between 1993 and 2012 supervised fifteen dissertations at the intersection of those two fields, devoted to the political and military history of the United States and various aspects of American foreign relations from the War of 1812 through World War II to the twenty-first century. In France in the past decade, François Weil supervised ten of the sixtysix dissertations on the United States that came out of history departments. Both because historians of the United States are few and because only full professors can officially advise PhD students, a few scholars often become key figures. The extent to which individual professors shape the range of topics that a nation’s Americanists address is difficult to gauge, however. Graduate students seek out leading experts and generally choose their own topics. Most professors in countries where few historians of the United States are available also see it as a professional obligation to supervise projects that fall beyond their immediate specialization.

62

|

Chapter 3

Rystad’s students worked on twentieth-century foreign policy, his field, but also on topics such as Native Americans and the image of the United States in Sweden. Weil supervised dissertations on themes as diverse as the creation of the New York Police Department, Afrocentrism, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the death penalty in California, and Native American veterans of World War I. This willingness to accept PhD students in a broad range of topics is true everywhere in Europe, even in the United Kingdom, where historians of the United States are much more numerous: at Cambridge, most of Badger’s students work on his field, civil rights and Southern history, but others have examined the Harlem Renaissance, Native American education during the New Deal, anticommunism in the 1930s, varied political and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and U.S. foreign policy—areas far beyond his immediate research interests. Yet it remains true everywhere in Europe that professors of American history being few, they train large portions of their nation’s U.S. historians—and thus have an outsize influence compared to those to other fields. These patterns help explain, to a certain extent, clusters in topics and approaches, and in particular why a good number of dissertations on U.S. history deal with subjects that directly relate to the writer’s national history. This is a long-standing tradition: in most European countries, the first generation of Americanists—the scholars who entered the field in the decades after the Second World War—turned either to the historical relationship between their own country and America or to the history of United States foreign policy and relations. In the first category the focus was often on outmigration to the United States and on the integration of migrants into American society. A crude but useful categorization of dissertation topics shows that these trends continue.7 In Britain, of the 150 history dissertations that were submitted at Russell Group universities between 2001 and 2011, twenty dealt with bilateral relations in one form or another, sixty-three with the history of American foreign affairs, and sixty-seven with a diverse range of other topics. In 2005–12, the vast majority of American history dissertations completed at University College Cork and University College Dublin considered some aspect of U.S. foreign policy or bilateral relations, ranging from studies of the Anti-Imperialist League, Anglo-American relations in the 1960s and 1970s, and U.S.Japanese relations to examinations of Irish revolutionaries’ experiences in America. Figures converge for all the countries for which we have data: twenty-two of the thirty-eight Polish dissertations in U.S. history

The Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe

|

63

defended in 2001–12 dealt with foreign policy; twenty-nine of the 121 French dissertations in the field from the same period also did, while thirty-two dealt with French-American topics; of Sweden’s fifteen dissertations on U.S. history in 1976–2005, eight treated bilateral relations, five American foreign affairs, and only two subjects in the “other topics” category. Yet in recent decades European historians have increasingly directly engaged with U.S. historiography, a trend reflected in the growing number of dissertations involving the United States more centrally. This came about earlier in the United Kingdom, where “from the 1970s about two-thirds of publications have been on American domestic history or at least on topics not connected with the Atlantic relationship.”8 Many other European countries also exhibit this tendency. A closer look at France shows that in the main programs dedicated to U.S. history, the large majority of dissertations today deal with topics centered on the United States, while dissertations on international relations are done under the supervision of specialists of the field rather than Americanists, and bilateral studies on France and the United States are conducted with professors scattered across a wide range of universities, who often are not U.S. specialists per se. Efforts to send more graduate students to spend long periods in American universities and archives have facilitated the trend toward more integration with U.S. historiography. Financial resources do not abound, but across Europe initiatives have opened opportunities for PhD students. Common are Fulbright Programs, bilateral agreements for academic and educational cooperation between the United States and each country, which have funded the research of many a doctoral student. Other sources of funding are more specific to each nation: the Georges Lurcy Trust for France, for instance, or the German Historical Institute for Germany.9 The governments of some countries have initiated schemes to facilitate international postdocs. The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education has a generous program of this kind.10 The Irish Research Council sponsors the Government of Ireland ELEVATE Fellowships, which provide funding for postdoctoral scholars to spend two years at an international university before returning to their home institution for one year.11 The recent Europe-wide emphasis on the need to publish internationally, which tends to mean publication in English-language journals and with English-language presses, is another factor. To make successful careers, graduate students need to choose topics that will allow them to engage

64

|

Chapter 3

with historiographical trends in the United States and to publish in American history journals and with American presses. If increasing international exchanges and publication and the digitization of data serve to make U.S. history in Europe and in the United States converge, the formal requirements of the PhD dissertation tend to perpetuate differences. The most obvious consideration is language. In non-English-speaking countries, history dissertations often are not, and sometimes cannot be, written in English. In France, the law requires that they be written in French; special permission from the university board must be sought otherwise. The situation is similar in Poland, where, although such permission is not difficult to obtain, only two of the aforementioned thirty-eight dissertations on American history were written in English. In Germany, most dissertations are written in German. This of course has important implications for the impact of European scholarship on American history, where English is the lingua franca: as a rule, only works in English tend to get noticed in the United States. Having to write in at least two languages carries burdens, especially in intensifying intellectual exchange across the Atlantic, but it also opens opportunities.12 Aside from language, the style of dissertations in Europe can be very different from American ideals. When the Journal of American History ran a review of a Swedish dissertation on the United States’ seizure of the Panama Canal Zone, it was severely critical. This was a dissertation that clearly should never have been written. “The editors ought to be ashamed,” and the “author and those who trained him and supervised this dissertation have embarrassed themselves with a manuscript that ought not to be acceptable in an undergraduate class.” It had “no redeeming value” and was nothing short of “a humiliation.” “It certainly will not encourage American diplomatic historians to consider seriously foreign perspectives on American history.” Another dissertation was described as “an exhaustive and exhausting book” put together with “a dragnet approach— everything is swept up, with little discernment of importance or relevance.”13 Yet these two dissertations, which were submitted at a renowned university, were regarded as well researched and serious contributions to historical scholarship in Sweden. Both authors went on to have successful careers. It was hardly the case that the reviewers were simply put off by poor English, as an American wrote the first dissertation. Instead it can be argued that the American reviewers failed to appreciate the specific stylistic demands that other university systems impose on doctoral candidates.

The Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe

|

65

The requirements surrounding the defense of dissertations partly explain the continuing gap in what they look like. In some countries, committees are small, while in others (such as France, Poland, and Switzerland), they tend to be larger (with up to five or six professors, at least half of whom are always external examiners). Because of numbers, cost, and language, these committees rarely entirely comprise specialists of the specific topic of the dissertation. Situations vary across Europe, but this state of affairs combined with other institutional demands and pragmatic assessments of national job markets make it necessary for PhD students to bear in mind that they must also address non–U.S. specialists in most countries, with a few exceptions. However, the perceptible movement away from the national tropes of diplomatic history and bilateral relations with the United States in the past couple of decades has made this pressure less felt. Changes in European university systems and the globalization of academia are factors in this trend. Yet topics selected and dissertations written bear—sometimes strikingly, as we have seen—the imprint of the university systems in which the PhDs were pursued. After the PhD, prospects for doctors in American history vary dramatically from country to country. Being very open-ended, and sometimes very uncertain, this stage of the career displays how much institutions can affect scholarship for scholarship’s sake. Academics need to adapt to the demands of their university system if they want to find a position in it, and some places do not have anything below full professorships. Here we would like to emphasize the impact of the job market on research. By job market, we mean the number of positions available but also their type, the prospects they offer a young scholar, and the support system to which they give access. In the United States, the ideal first rung of the career ladder after the PhD is a tenure-track position. As an assistant professor, the young historian is expected to teach and to revise her or his dissertation for publication, to develop new research projects, and to publish articles in professional journals. After a period of five to seven years, a peer group assesses the research and teaching record of the assistant professor. It is really only after passing this review that a historian becomes a full member of the profession, typically as an associate professor. Admittedly, a difficult job market and the growing number of untenured faculty mean that far from everyone is fortunate enough to experience such a straightforward career. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that this expected

66

|

Chapter 3

path into the profession still structures the behavior of junior faculty at American universities. It is much harder to establish a standard career path for Europe. Diversity rather than similarity stands out. Perhaps the best strategy is to use the American academy as a benchmark to contrast how the differing demands of European university systems shape the publishing and research strategies of young historians of the United States. These demands are currently changing all over Europe as pressure mounts to publish internationally (which means, in bureaucratic speak, to publish in English in American journals). Sometimes such encouragement takes the form of highly structured and centralized demands. In the United Kingdom the government intermittently evaluates the quality of all research “output” with a mandatory, rigid points system. The rather puerile nomenclature defines “four star” works as “world leading” articles or books; three and two stars respectively denote “internationally excellent” and “internationally recognized,” whereas one-star works are merely “nationally recognized.” This Research Excellence Framework provides unambiguous directions on how to shape a successful career. In Sweden, in contrast, the pressure to publish internationally comes from the hiring policies of universities and recommendations from influential bodies such as the Swedish Research Council. But it coexists with traditional demands that the newly minted PhD concentrate not on publishing the dissertation but on broadening his or her scholarly interests and initiating new research projects.14 In Poland, the highest recognition of a dissertation’s excellence is a recommendation from its reviewers to get it published as a book after the suggested revisions, yet without insisting on translation into English to increase its potential international impact. In Germany, the PhD degree is awarded only once the dissertation is published, which means that university presses often print them as is so that the now doctor can move on to her or his next project. So while the trend in the United Kingdom is for junior American historians to publish their dissertations as monographs in the United States and to place articles with American history journals, these practices are less pronounced, if growing, in many other European countries. Of the fifty PhD candidates who defended their dissertations at Cambridge University between 2001 and 2011, fifteen held an academic position in the United Kingdom in the summer of 2011. Of these, nine had published their revised dissertations in the United States, although not always with a university press. Several others were in the process of

The Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe

|

67

doing so. Almost all listed some American publications.15 This is only a small sample, of course, but the publication strategy of this group suggests that success as an American historian in the United Kingdom hinges on the ability to publish in the United States, something only possible by engaging with American historiography. To a certain extent, British and American publishing patterns appear fairly similar. However, the five-year REF cycle means that British historians are under pressure to publish more works faster than their North American colleagues. On the Continent, scholars traditionally do not spend years revising their dissertations for publication. In France, where associate professorships are tenured after one year but difficult to obtain, the tendency is to publish the dissertation quickly, to improve the chances of getting a position, and then move on to the next project. Incentives for all historians to publish in the United States, for reasons of both professional prestige and institutional pressure, are generally more evident for the second book, as more Americanists now publish these directly in English, with American presses. For different reasons, historians in Germany also move on immediately from the PhD to a new project, as they need to write a second dissertation, the Habilitationsschrift, to be eligible for full professorships, the only type of permanent position in their academic system. Junior German historians are hired on fixed-term contracts with the obligation to write such a second major book (often in a different field) in a relatively short period. There is therefore much pressure on junior faculty to develop new research projects and to build a substantial publication record quickly. Many northern and eastern European countries have systems based on the German one. They provide a roughly ten-year window in which a young historian can qualify for a full professorship. Failure to do so might end a career. In other countries, such as France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, where there are permanent positions that combine teaching and research for junior faculty, there is more flexibility. The equivalent of associate professors can afford to take longer to attain positions as full professors, even though continent-wide reform impulses aimed at the system of higher education tend to put pressure on scholars to pursue activities that can be measured quantitatively. Where junior faculty end up after their PhD and the terms and conditions of their positions also affect research interests and output. Here we are less concerned with the differences that arise from universities being research or teaching focused. These differences are as real in

68

|

Chapter 3

Europe as in the United States. Many European historians of the United States work in schools where teaching dominates, and just like historians who teach four classes per semester in the United States, they have little time for research. Instead, we would like to point how the marginal standing of American history in most European history departments affects the professional opportunities and obligations of junior historians. The United Kingdom and Ireland are the exceptions to this rule. There American history is well represented in the curriculum and positions are regularly advertised. It is therefore possible to concentrate on colonial North American and United States history in both teaching and research. Often universities in these countries allow faculty to develop their own courses and to teach advanced special subjects close to their research interests. But in most of Europe this is not the case. In those countries where historians of the United States can find positions in history departments, U.S. history makes up only a part of the teaching for most (but not all) of them. They often have to teach very broadly in the history of their nation, Europe, and the world. This has consequences for their professional identity and research output because lecturers are expected to engage with their colleagues and to contribute to pedagogical developments. Thus, rather than addressing her or his peer group, an Americanist might seek to open dialogues with non– American experts at national history meetings. In many countries, a lot of historians are affiliated with English or American studies rather than history departments. In France, a rough count suggests that there are almost three times as many historians of the United States in English departments as in history departments. This too has significant consequences for what the historian does. Historians in French English departments are under obligation to develop and publish textbooks and teaching materials that teachers and students in English rather than history programs can use. Additionally, the specific demand for textbooks for teachers’ qualification courses, based on a national syllabus that changes every other year, creates opportunities for publishing on a wide array of topics but can take enormous time and energy away from original research.16 Juggling all those demands can put historians in a precarious position. Just as with graduate students, the chances for junior faculty to interact with a peer group of historians of the United States vary greatly on the European continent. As a rule, the smaller the academic community, the more incentives there are to seek a peer group beyond national borders. The small size of the Irish academy, for instance, means that its

The Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe

|

69

graduate students and faculty have to demonstrate collaboration with scholars and research networks in the United States and, increasingly, the United Kingdom. But the reverse is also true: French, German, and British scholars are less prone to travel to countries other than the United States because they find a community of Americanists at home. All European nations have American studies associations, of which historians sometimes form a substantial share of the membership. In the United Kingdom, several professional associations cater well to American historians, each hosting an annual meeting, devoted to early America, the nineteenth-century United States, and the twentieth-century United States. France has an active network of historians who study colonial North America and the United States up to the Civil War, which organizes regular seminars and conferences.17 For American historians based in smaller countries, where Americanists are few, these national networks provide a peer group closer to home than the United States. Although they are presently underdeveloped, transnational contacts between European historians are likely to deepen. Both national and European Union funding agencies strongly encourage the creation of research networks among European scholars rather than with extraEuropean colleagues. The European forums for American history that are evolving slowly but surely provide a further impulse toward more transnational contacts. Two interesting examples are the European Early American Studies Association, which began organizing biannual meetings in 2006, and the Summer Academy of Atlantic History, which held its third summer school for graduate students in 2013. In 2011 the Journal of Early American History, dedicated to scholarship on Europe’s American colonies to 1830, began publication in the Netherlands with a largely European editorial board. American Nineteenth Century History is another specialized journal founded in Europe. Run by British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH), it started in 2000 and has an editorial board of British and American academics. The full impact of these developments on scholarship in Europe remains to be seen, but it appears more than likely that for the new generations, not only national traditions and United States historiography but also shared European interests will set research agendas. The pinnacle of the historian’s career is the appointment to a full professorship. Situations across Europe are less wildly eclectic at this level. Many of the factors already touched upon—critical mass, resources,

70

|

Chapter 3

publishing requirements—also hold true here to varying degrees. We would like to emphasize the impact of two important, specific conditions: the requirements to become a full professor and the academic context into which they are inserted. Beyond the diversity in European systems—in wages, teaching loads, numbers of positions offered—one common trait (on the Continent) is that a full professor position is always completely distinct from any junior-level position. At least institutionally, becoming a full professor does not mean being promoted from an assistant professorship; it usually requires applying for a distinct position. In some countries, such as Germany, Sweden, and Austria, the full professorship is the only permanent research and teaching position. Here the differences in status and workload between junior faculty and full professors can be very pronounced. This is less so in countries such as France and the United Kingdom, where stable junior positions exist. Britain’s collegiate structure means that the teaching load tends to be the same for a lecturer and a professor, for example. In France, associate professors officially have obligations and opportunities that are similar to those of full professors, although only the latter can supervise PhDs. The traditional German model, which was highly influential in northern and eastern Europe, requires that a candidate for full professor first complete a Habilitation. This includes a second, more mature dissertation or book, reviewed by a peer group of professors. Crucially, it has to be in a different field than the PhD, to make the historian broaden her or his interests and expertise. This demand is a significant hurdle, which some now consider too cumbersome: Poland reformed the procedure in 2011, and in Germany, a parallel route of junior professorships has been introduced to bypass the Habilitation, but with stringent, productivist provisions for publications. However, the requirement remains the norm for many countries around Europe. Very often the new dissertation-book necessitates a fine balancing act between the desire to address specialists in American history abroad and the need to appear relevant to non-Americanists nationally. The fact that many Habilitation dissertations are written not in English but in the native tongue (similar to PhD dissertations) further underlines the impulse to write for a domestic audience rather than North American peers. Of eight Habilitationsschriften on American history presented in Poland between 2001 and 2012, seven were in Polish. Despite this attention paid to non-Americanist colleagues in the national academy, European full professors tend to have strong

The Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe

|

71

connections with one or more research universities in the United States. Harvard, Columbia, the City University of New York (CUNY), the University of Virginia, the University of California–Berkeley, Georgetown, and Indiana University are among some of the schools that have been very hospitable to European-based American historians and helped them to access United States scholarly networks. These networks benefit not only full professors. American contacts often help graduate students to spend time at North American universities. On occasion, European governments also set up institutions to facilitate transatlantic collaboration. A prominent example is the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington DC, which plays a key role in the careers of German historians of the United States: all of those now holding a chair at a German university have been associated with the GHI and its publications in one way or another. Some American think tanks, such as the Brookings Institution and the German Marshall Fund of the United States, are important to historians and political scientists who work on contemporary questions. In Continental Europe, some factors, such as the emphases on international publications and research networks, push European Americanists to engage with colleagues in the United States. Other factors point these scholars inward, toward their national audiences. In general, successful European Americanists have managed both to develop networks and publish in the United States and to pursue a research agenda that makes sense to their colleagues in their respective academies. There can be tension here, fruitful as well as destructive, as national traditions and historiographical styles can be quite different from historical writing in the United States. To an important degree, this Continental story is less true in Britain and Ireland. In the United Kingdom, the demand that historians concentrate on producing “REFable outputs” means that they now have fewer incentives to write for domestic popular audiences, university students, or non-Americanist colleagues (although the new criterion of “social relevance” might work as a crosscurrent in the future). Traditionally, professors of American history have been expected to fill a broad educational role by writing syntheses to introduce the exotic but powerful United States to their fellow citizens. This public expectation is still strong in many countries, such as Italy and France, where historians are often consulted as experts by the media and actively embrace the role of public intellectual. Yet this role is becoming less professionally important, and the increasing pressure to publish in the

72

|

Chapter 3

United States takes time and energy away from writing for a domestic audience, calling for a new balance. There is still variation across the continent, however. In eastern European countries such as Poland, for example, professors publish mostly in national historical and interdisciplinary periodicals and volumes of essays. A survey of university websites suggests that in Britain, in contrast, professors stress their engagement with the American academy. Of the nineteen full professors in American history at Russell Group universities, all publish in the United Kingdom, but eleven publish primarily in the United States, and only two, tellingly, point to their engagement with the broader public through the media.18 In most European countries the situation is somewhere between those of Poland and Britain. As a result of incentives to publish internationally and to become more involved in American academic life, coupled with disincentives to assume a broader educational role by writing for and addressing a general audience at home, it seems likely that European American history professors will tend to move toward the British model, which puts the stress on publishing academic articles and books in the United States. If this becomes the case, it will both homogenize American history in Europe and integrate the Continent’s historians more fully into the American academy. The downside of this development will be the growth rather than the closure of the divide between European and American history. Paradoxically, therefore, the integration of European and American historians of the United States would make American history not less but more parochial. It bears repeating that European diversity makes it impossible to claim that there is one European approach to U.S. history. However, these differences allow us to draw out some of the factors that bear upon the work, and therefore the scholarship, of historians—in Europe and elsewhere. Numbers, institutional requirements at different stages of the academic career, the position of U.S. history relative to other subfields (especially national history), and the institutional affiliation of historians (in history departments or American studies programs) all figure as important factors in that story. The many bureaucratically led reforms across Europe perhaps underlined the situation by making it unstable. They also revealed that many incentives often work at cross-purposes. If we may generalize, the pressure to publish in the United States is the single strongest factor making European history of the United States less different from that written in the United States. It is interesting to

The Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe

|

73

note that this pressure originated not in the community of Americanists but rather outside the academy. Those in the older generation were more inclined to act as cultural brokers and American experts in their countries. The new European networks and organizations that are now developing are feeling similar external pressure. Although the wish to collaborate was present before, it has only intensified with the demands and opportunities that the continent’s universities and governments, including the European Union, have imposed. This is not all positive. University professors are rightly hostile to attempts by government bureaucrats to determine their research agendas and to regulate their professional activities. Yet it is clear that nonacademic influences are not purely negative, and academics can often turn the schemes of politicians and bureaucrats into things that are both useful and legitimate. It nevertheless remains the case that U.S. history in Europe is often different from its counterpart in the United States. To a large extent this is because assessment criteria, career paths, and peer groups are all national, which makes possible the development of national idiosyncrasies. There are numerous European Americanists whose works have been accepted by American colleagues simply by virtue of being published in U.S. venues. The reason why not every European scholar of the United States decides to “pass” as an American is primarily that American publications and recognition by the American academy are only two among the many factors that determine careers in U.S. history in Europe. To the extent that American history on the Continent has a different flavor, it is due to such national determinants of scholarly choices. So what does this entail for the future? Predictions are of course risky, but if the trends that we have identified here continue, it seems safe to expect national structures to become less influential in shaping research agendas in Europe. The pressure to publish internationally and to develop international networks will push historians to become more closely engaged with historians in the United States. A counterbalancing force would be the development of European publishing venues, organizations, and research networks that might perhaps allow U.S. history in Europe to retain an autonomous identity. It should be stressed again that actors outside the continent’s academies are largely driving the trend toward the homogenization and Americanization of European history. If the present crisis of the European Union reduces the pace of integration or creates a dual structure of core and peripheral member states, this will likely have far-reaching consequences for the evolution

74

|

Chapter 3

of the continent’s systems of higher education. The final illustration of the way that the institutional setting affects historical research may therefore be the observation that even if the continent’s many Americanists set the future course of American history in Europe, its parameters will largely be determined in Brussels and Strasbourg.

Chapter 4

Straddling Intellectual Worlds Positionality and the Writing of American History nicolas barreyre, manfred berg, and simon middleton

“It takes a foreigner to clear the air of cant,” Jackson Lears wrote in his review of Amanda Foreman’s book on the American Civil War. Adopting the British perspective, Lears argued, Foreman captures the full complexity of the war, moving beyond the limitations of nationalist narratives of moral triumph and describing the confusion, fear, and futility of a war that very nearly ended in defeat for the North. The noting of an outside perspective is not unusual when non-American scholars publish from outside the United States but for its academic market. Sometimes, as in Lears on Foreman, it is counted as an asset. Thus commentators lauded Michael McDonnell’s study of the American Revolution for its clear-eyed view of the contests over mobilization in Virginia and the racial and class tensions that shaped the war effort and the early national-republic polity. Occasionally, the outside perspective is noted as a negative and non-U.S. scholars are suspected of a lack of empathy in the study of crucial and long-cherished topics in American historiography. For example, in a recent review of what she acknowledged as an empirically meticulous study of the relationship between Restoration England’s commercial expansion and burgeoning overseas plantations, Jane Kamensky faulted Nuala Zahedieh’s depiction of the developing slave trade for displaying the “chillingly neutral calculus of a management consultant” and thereby risking “unwitting collusion” with those who dealt in human capital.1 This question of the perspective and position of those who are elsewhere has engaged scholars over the years, some seeing it as a burden 75

76

|

Chapter 4

and others as an opportunity. In the mid-1980s, Donna Merwick compared her feelings of marginality as a Dutch-born historian of early America based in Australia to the challenges facing an anthropologist undertaking an ethnography in faraway Pacific islands: both worked as “professional strangers” at the margins of two cultures, having to translate their findings for different audiences and deal with “being there” while not. In the early 1990s, David Thelen offered a more positive spin on Merwick’s existential angst, maintaining that foreign scholars’ locations, their attentiveness to different audiences, and their predisposition to compare and contrast American styles and approaches with their native methods had great potential to shake up a U.S. historiography that had become mired in overly specialized and stalled debates.2 Thelen’s comments marked the launch of the Organization of American Historians’ Project on Internationalizing American History, which established foreign-language book and article prizes and a network of editors who continue to provide feedback on the writing of American history in their respective, non-U.S. locations. Toward the end of the 1990s, a related initiative invited international perspectives on U.S. history, leading to a volume of commentary rethinking traditional and mostly national frameworks and topics in global time, space, and place. Two essays—written by two of the six authors (of a total of eighteen) not working in the United States—warrant particular attention for their take on the challenge of fragmentation and specialization and the position of non-U.S.-based American historians. The French historian of the United States François Weil argued that the tendency to focus on a particular class, race, locality, or gender had added complexity but also nurtured an inward orientation among U.S.-based American historians. This left an earlier nation-centered narrative largely unchallenged overseas, not least because of its predominance in foreign-language translations, for which the more specialized “new” histories proved less amenable.3 Consequently, Weil reckoned that non-U.S. historians had three positions available in relation to American historiography: cultivating indifference toward and, especially for scholars with heavy teaching loads, avoiding specialized research and serious exchanges with U.S. scholars; “going native,” or emulating their U.S. colleagues to the point that non-U.S. location was irrelevant; or, by contrast, undertaking the kind of historiographical intervention that Thelen imagined, by drawing on their specific geographical, cultural, political, and intellectual contexts to contribute to the reconceptualization of American historiography.4

Straddling Intellectual Worlds

|

77

In the other essay, the German literary critic Winfried Fluck presents a different view of the relationship of non-U.S.-based scholars to the challenge of fragmentation and specialization in American history. If Weil asked how non-U.S.-based historians should relate to the interpretive impasses facing American historiography, Fluck argued that the stimuli driving specialization and division were also likely to thwart such engagement. Rather than respond to the challenge that concerned Thelen and Weil as if it were an external force, Fluck located its dynamic in the related processes of professionalization and historicism. Under the general heading of “the Americanization of the humanities,” Fluck argued that fragmentation and specialization followed hard on the heels of the transformation of the humanities into a competitive profession and the consequent pressure on historians to produce original interpretations (original, in this context, often meaning no more than “different from others’ ”). The theoretical and methodological innovations, or turns, of the 1960s through the 1990s intensified this process by endowing interpretations with additional and distinctive “symbolic capital” and bolstering claims for novelty while discouraging dialogue, the integration of findings, and production of the much-vaunted syntheses. In time, ideological positions of Left and Right yielded to the pursuit of individual distinctiveness, deemed crucial for professional status. Meanwhile, historicism’s cardinal rejection of the viability of master narratives and grand theories generated further specialization. In a gloomy conclusion, Fluck observed that the internationalization of American history was unlikely to counteract these trends. Indeed, exactly the reverse was probable: the “internationalization” of American history would become one more “new” and specialized approach among many. Moreover, given the numbers of scholars working in the United States and the importance of networking in the pursuit of scholarly status, the international perspective was unlikely to draw much notice from the professionally all-important domestic American scene.5 This chapter picks up these musings a decade later. We argue that the historical community is collectively at a point where the outsider-insider dichotomy, as a trope, has outlived its utility. Yet we do not mean to say that historians of the United States based outside the American academy are indistinguishable from their U.S. colleagues, although in some aspects they might have become so. We consider, however, that it is more useful to apprehend all historians of the United States as belonging to the same field, while acknowledging that their position shapes in myriad ways the kinds of intervention they make there. This chapter

78

|

Chapter 4

explores this proposition by taking advantage of the perspective of a particular subgroup we happen to know well (and belong to): European historians of colonial North American and the United States. In the past twenty years, and noticeably gathering pace since the start of the twenty-first century, European historians have published more work on American history than ever before, and more often in the United States.6 Evidence will be found elsewhere in this volume and needs not be repeated here. Although many of the books by Continental European scholars have been translations, there is an unmistakable trend toward writing in English, in some cases beginning with doctoral dissertations, and publishing directly in the American academic marketplace. In effect, European historians of the United States are increasingly going native, occasionally to the point of scooping major positions and prizes, becoming indistinguishable from their American peers.7 In most cases, professional and publication profiles have been developed via networks of U.S.-based colleagues working on related topics and fields, so privileged by European scholars of the United States that they only rarely know their continental peers beyond their own national context. The combination of cheap air travel, technology, and the low number of European practitioners of specialist U.S. history fields has oriented scholars across the Atlantic. They have been less interested in what Weil called “historiographical intervention” and more concerned to present themselves, to paraphrase Michael Heale, as historians of the United States who happen to work in Europe.8 Yet even as they appear to be part of a trend, European Americanists have operated within the possibilities and constraints of their particular locations and subfields, which resist their consignment to a single category of outsiders. For example, the sense of removal from or marginality with respect to the United States has long been diminished for British scholars, who enjoy an advantage as native English speakers and, particularly in the past decade or so, have reached a critical mass, as the existence of multiple British associations of U.S. history attests.9 British research productivity also reflects the rapidly changing institutional environment and the intensification of professional competition that Fluck noted, with one important modification. Since the 1990s the pursuit of professional repute in the United Kingdom has been inextricably bound up with institutional competition for state funding and league table rankings that generate the symbolic capital deemed essential in the contest for undergraduate students, diminishing research grants, and, latterly, private tuition fees.

Straddling Intellectual Worlds

|

79

In the twenty-first century, then, scholarly location has become more complex than the insider-outsider dichotomy implies. Location—or, as we prefer, positionality—names the place that a historian holds in relation to not only particular audiences and intellectual milieus but also their linguistic, professional, and institutional contexts. But if outsider, still less foreigner, no longer accurately characterizes European historians of the United States, their position in the field, although rarely scrutinized in more than rather offhand fashion, remains distinctive. Our chapter therefore focuses on taken-for-granted conventions, for example in written style, and contextual characteristics, most notably language— that is, what might be called informal, conventional knowledge—for clues about the distinctions that shape European historians’ contribution to American history.10 Drawing from examples across Europe, we suggest that attention to positionality gives us a richer understanding of the work that scholars do and may yet provide grounds for the kind of intervention that Thelen imagined. “I never saw my grandmother dressed in anything but black,” Elizabeth Ewen declares in the opening lines of Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars. “During the time I knew her she stood a tall 4′10″. I barely understood a word she said. She spoke Italian. I pretended to understand. She would talk and I would nod my head in agreement.” In Americans in Waiting, Hiroshi Motomura also writes of his childhood: “My family came to America in 1957, when I was three years old. We lived in an apartment on Bush Street in San Francisco, a tenminute walk from the traditional Japantown first settled by Japanese immigrants a half-century before us.” William Cronon claimed a similarly personal connection to the focus of his study. “My earliest memories of Chicago,” he tells us in Nature’s Metropolis, “glide past the windows of an old green and white Ford station wagon. I was not yet in grade school.” These openings, of course, are a literary device. They aim to enliven the setting, literally bringing to mind long-dead relatives or memories and giving a greater sense of immediacy, relevance, and connection to what might otherwise be taken for a dreary academic survey. One senses the anxious editor looking over the historian’s shoulder and urging them to animate their subjects and thus their story. An older generation preferred appeals to a collective and progressive narrative. Thus Carl Bridenbaugh maintained, “Our national history has been that of transition from a predominantly rural and agricultural way of living to one in which the city plays a major role.”

80

|

Chapter 4

But latterly relevance has often been framed in a more personal mode. In The Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger recalls the initiation of his ten-year-old self into the racist culture of his small Midwestern town. Alternatively, an “elderly,” and likely apocryphal, “southerner” interrupts John Diggins’s musings on a train to ask, “Did Mr. Jefferson really believe that ‘all men are created equal’?”—prompting the reflection that introduces his Lost Soul of American Politics.11 In most European academies, these personal narratives, embedded in scholarly books, would likely be considered “typically American.” Whether, on closer scrutiny, they really are is less interesting, in our view, than this perception and its implications.12 Such personal intrusions are sufficiently numerous in American history texts and rare enough in European ones to qualify as a distinguishing characteristic in the minds of European scholars familiar with the U.S. academy. Similarly, the widespread use of the first-person plural often strikes European readers of American history. In France, for instance, the use of nous has been pretty much banned from monographs on national history. While U.S. scholars may casually speak of the American Revolution as “our revolution,”13 no German historian would refer to the revolutions of 1848, 1918, or even 1989 in the same words. Invoking “we-ness” to affirm national purpose and identity would violate a broad consensus that historians must maintain a critical perspective and eschew feeding the nation’s myths as they once did. In England, a similar concern prompted the Cambridge professor Richard Evans’s acerbic riposte to Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, who wanted to reform the history curriculum in schools to better represent “our island story.”14 Using we in writing national history, once common, is now generally seen as outdated and problematic, with some exceptions: in Italy, for instance, historians speak freely of il nostro Risorgimento. The perceived differences in manners of writing history should not be overly generalized. Yet however trivial they seem at first glance, they give us clues to the effect of positionality on scholarship. One is obvious: the habit of writing American history in the first-person singular and plural puts nonnationals in the realm of “the outside.” However innocuously or rhetorically intended, deriving historical insights in relation to an imagined collective self posits that foreign scholars must have a different perspective. To them, it would appear incongruous, for instance, to set out “to find a usable past for a nation that 150 years after emancipation still has a long way to go in solving

Straddling Intellectual Worlds

|

81

its racial problems,” as Carla Peterson did in the recovery of her family’s history in nineteenth-century New York.15 The second clue is more difficult to characterize, but it opens a window onto the core of history writing. Whether there is such a thing as a distinctive American style is debatable. Yet there are elements of American scholarship that recur often enough and are striking enough to European eyes to make it into the informal, conventional knowledge that European Americanists seem to share, the kind of common sense they build along the course of their careers. Consider, for instance, German academic monographs, which begin with an often lengthy methodological chapter intended to inform readers of the work’s formalized theoretical framework and reinforce the author’s analytical style. This makes for a strikingly different presentation than that of American books on U.S. history. Manfred Berg and his editor, for instance, agreed that a mere translation of his book on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People simply could not find a U.S. readership: it needed to be adapted to a “narrative-oriented American style.”16 The case of Germany is probably the most striking. The same requirements do not apply elsewhere in Europe, as there are debates in different academies on what is and is not acceptable when writing history.17 These variations indicate that the issue of writing and style raises deeper questions about our scholarship than simple authorial idiosyncrasy and literary flair. They are, if you will, the trace elements of larger trends that shape and condition the academic settings and intellectual conversations in which academic historians operate. Consider: economists share the same writing norm of an identical, formalized pattern for their articles across national academies. The same cannot be said of historians. Yet in a peer-reviewed world, being published requires meeting the collective expectations of what good scholarship is, including what it looks like. When publishing in several academies, one is confronted with differing, often unspoken demands. Trends can be difficult to pinpoint, as there is still, in most countries, a tradition of writing well, of elegant prose, of literary value—a realm where most people strive for an individual style. Yet most European historians would agree that they need to write differently when publishing in the United States. Italian political and intellectual historians, for instance, long had a style of history writing rooted in German idealist philosophy and in Italian historicism. Conceptual foundations, large interpretative landscapes, and complex, often convoluted formulations tended to prevail over experimental demonstrations and detailed factual series. Today, history

82

|

Chapter 4

writing in Italy has converged with the more pragmatic, empirical, and fluent style dominant in American journals. Still, many note that the multilayered, although sometimes obscure, sentences of Italian historical narration provided more room for free expression than does the experimental scheme of journal articles in the United States, with its at times flattening premise-thesis-development and documentationconclusion structure.18 There is no attempt here at defining “better” history or “better” scholarship. Our goal is to point out what location in Europe, for historians of the United States, brings to light about the common field of American history. We seek what insight the informal, conventional knowledge that European historians casually share as the unscientific impressions they gather along their careers might contain. In this case, awareness of variations often comes from trial and error, since there is no formalized method of putting articles together. The repetition of the experience across European academies of writing for both European and American journals sketches a pattern and leads to two conclusions. First, sustained engagement with (at least) two distinct intellectual worlds—that of historians of the United States (overwhelmingly American in number) on the one hand and that of fellow historians of their home countries on the other—is what makes European historians of the United States aware of those differences in writing style. This engagement is an effect of positionality. Second, such differences, although rarely acknowledged in historiographical discussions, might well be a serious constraint on efforts to internationalize American history or to develop truly transnational or global histories. Terminology and semantics offer another such experience of the effects of positionality: they form key challenges to all historians who regularly write scholarship on the United States in any language other than English. As translators know well, similar words often carry very different meanings across languages. For example, in Spain, América more readily designates both American continents than the United States. This ambiguity, coming from the conscious self-presentation of the newly independent United States, exists in all European languages. But deeply rooted historical links with the rest of the Americas prevent any Spanish scholar from using America, and to a lesser extent American, unselfconsciously.19 In Italy, cultura popolare mainly refers to preindustrial rural people and their identity, including class identity—a decidedly different meaning from that of popular culture, used since the 1950s and 1960s to get away from the phrase mass culture, with its

Straddling Intellectual Worlds

|

83

negative overtones, and to give dignity to the creativity of people who were mainly urban and industrial.20 Here again, the challenges of translation force scholars to confront definitions that have become idiomatic in American texts. As language is keyed to culture and history, writing U.S. history for a European audience thus can harbor unexpected challenges. Words used daily become traps. The term race is a case in point. For scholars of U.S. history, race (along with its numerous derivatives, such as racism, racialization, and so forth) has become a fundamental category of analysis. However, translating the American terminology of race into other languages often creates serious difficulties, as such words come layered with very different historical and cultural associations. In German, Nazi genocidal racism discredited the very word Rasse almost beyond redemption. Remaining strongly tied to a narrow biological definition, it cannot convey the vast semantic field and broad spectrum of normative implications of the American usage of race, both lay and academic. In such a cultural and political context, where the use of Rasse carries a suspicion of believing in the biological existence of race (and thus of being racist), engaging, in German, the vast body of historiography on race in the United States is a tricky endeavor. For a long time after World War II, German Americanists simply did not use the term. Things changed in the wake of the civil rights movement, however, as they not only recognized the centrality of race in U.S. history and society but also subscribed to the idea that the concept of race is predicated on social and cultural constructions. Consequently, German authors began using Rasse again, but in quotation marks, to distance themselves from the term’s biologist implications. Many find it necessary to clarify their terminology in the introductions to their books, while some flatly refuse to translate key terms such as race, African American, and black community because they feel there are no acceptable German words for them.21 The problem with incorporating the American usage of race may appear particular to Germany because of its Nazi past, but it repeats across Europe. Even in Britain, the word race carries meanings that differ enough from those of the United States to need disentangling. In France, race evokes memories of both France’s colonial past and the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazi persecution of the Jews; at the same time it goes against France’s self-image as an egalitarian republic that knows no races but only citizens.22 In Spanish the concept of raza is loaded with a history of racial constructions, first against the

84

|

Chapter 4

Moors and the Jews and then, in the context of the New World empire, against indigenous populations. Moreover, the word was used for a long time to construct a unifying notion of a Spanish race, not as a category that broke the population into irreducibly different groups. Finally, raza also incorporates the more recent importation of scientific racism and the later influence of Nazi ideas in the Franco years.23 The word, therefore, comes with multiple layers that often jar with the U.S. experience. Of course, there is a long history of discussions around the concept of race in the United States, both in and outside academic circles. European audiences also have a kind of familiarity with the centrality of race in American life through popular entertainment and news. Yet the changed context of reception means that historians of the United States in Europe are aware (sometimes painfully) that they cannot write the same way in their own language and country as they would in U.S. publications. Thus writing in another language is more than a matter of translation or even the pedagogy of a foreign culture: it involves confronting divergent definitions of notions whose uses are steeped in contrasting historical experiences. Although political ideas circulate easily throughout the Western world, key words of political language raise such problems. In Europe, general readers understand liberalism in its traditional sense, as a political and economic theory that favors individual liberty and minimal government intervention. In contrast, American liberalism,  whose modern usage the New Deal shaped, is widely associated with “the steady postwar expansion of federal social and economic responsibilities.” Europeans identify this political position as Social Democratic. Meanwhile, American advocates of laissez-faire capitalism usually call themselves conservatives, whereas in Western Europe, paternalist conservatives were instrumental in building the welfare state and have been persistent critics of materialism and aspects of modernism they associate with the triumph of American capitalism.24 So writing about American politics for a European audience (with all the variations between countries) involves more than finding the proper equivalent label: it also requires confronting underlying assumptions of what “the Right” and “the Left” are and carries an implicit comparative perspective.25 The informal conventional knowledge we have made explicit—at the risk of hardening it, we admit—is the result of what looks to be a shared, collective experience born of location. At first glance, it seems

Straddling Intellectual Worlds

|

85

linked to writing U.S. history while being “outside” the U.S. academy. The differences we have spelled out so far—in style, the use of we, and the problem of words—appear to bear out that notion. Yet such a characterization quickly reaches analytical limits. As has been made clear, many European historians fully participate in the academic conversation in American history and engage with their American as much as, sometimes more than, their European colleagues. They publish in American journals and with American presses, attend conferences in the United States, exchange ideas with American colleagues. In short, they belong to the same field. However, the distinctions considered above are not trivial, we argue, and can shed light on how historians work and think. To understand them, we must delve deeper into what the positionality of scholars means and what consequences it entails. Positionality, we contend, is more than a geographic description and should not be reduced to the notion of living and working in Warsaw or Rome (for instance) as opposed to Memphis or St. Louis (although this is an important part of it). It involves a functional description of where a scholar stands in a field, relative to others in the same field and to others in other fields, whether he needs to relate to them or not. More precisely, we suggest that each scholar—in our case each historian of colonial North American and the United States—is at the intersection of several audiences. Some are intellectual milieus, with which ideas are exchanged and scholarship cross-fertilizes; others are audiences constructed and mediated by institutions such as universities, publishers, and media outlets. All those audiences are not equally important, depending on institutional strictures, professional demands, intellectual engagement, and personal idiosyncrasies. Some must be addressed, for instance, while others are more optional; some have more weight in advancing a scholar’s career; and so on. The specific configuration of audiences varies from academy to academy and is thus directly linked to location in a more geographical sense. This is what we call positionality in this chapter. As we have seen, it creates distance between American and European historians of the United States (on whom we focus here), but it also factors in their shared ground. In the field of colonial North America and U.S. history, European academics generally address four audiences: the professional audience of historians of the United States, overwhelmingly American in number; the professional audience of historians in their own academy, mostly non-Americanist in number; the lay audience of the general public in their home country (among which their students are a particularly

86

|

Chapter 4

important subset); and the lay audience of the general public in the United States. The relative importance of each group to the career of historians depends on the academic system they work in. In Britain, for instance, there is little pressure for historians of the United States to address British historians in other fields. The bureaucratic, recurring, nationally organized evaluation of British academics instead incentivizes the production of sufficient “research outputs”—articles and books—in recognized journals and presses. For historians of the United States, these are mostly American. Thus British Americanists’ main, and almost only, audience is their peers in U.S. history, who are mostly in the United States. In France, by contrast, the institutional structure gives a larger importance to non-Americanist historians in the career of Americanists: the evaluation of PhDs and the hiring of professors, for instance, are never left entirely to specialists in the field, and dissertations must be written in French. For these reasons, the home audience of non-Americanist historians is as important to a career as the international audience of historians of the United States. In Germany, the two-stage process of first writing a dissertation to enter the academy and then writing a Habilitationsschrift (a second academic thesis) in a different historical field to become a full professor forces historians of the United States to engage as much with their peers at home as with their American and international colleagues in U.S. history. In other countries, such as Poland, addressing a home audience remains a primary professional duty of historians. In all this diversity of configurations, the necessity of addressing home audiences (professional and lay) has consequences for the history written by European scholars of the United States. One seemingly trivial matter is the inclusion of extensive background in books written for a non-American audience. Many European authors have experienced the need to supply information to their home audience, interested but uneducated in U.S. history, that they felt would not be necessary for an American readership. It is, no doubt, a narrative constraint to incorporate such basic, sometimes bulky, information into a work of scholarship; it also forces the making of sometimes difficult choices, as space is increasingly limited in today’s academic publishing world. Yet it probably also has deeper, often unexplored consequences on the scholarship itself. Inasmuch as part of a scholar’s thinking is elaborated through writing, (often unconscious) decisions about what an audience likely knows, and can therefore be left implicit, can affect the argument. The few cases of authors translating their own work are illuminating in this

Straddling Intellectual Worlds

|

87

regard. Rob Kroes, for instance, translated two of his books, originally written and published in Dutch, into English. In the first one, on Dutch Calvinist pioneers in the American West, he found he needed to make explicit many assumptions about the Dutch religious landscape that he had deemed familiar to his first audience, in the Netherlands. In the second book, on the Americanization of Europe, he reworked many of the illustrations and examples, an experience that convinced him that his American audience was “not truly aware of the impact their own daily culture has on foreign publics.”26 Having to rewrite the work with a different audience in mind makes explicit what was previously undisclosed: the process underlines some of the assumptions that came with the original scholarship, as what was once considered obvious subsequently requires explanation. It is thus worth investigating the effects on scholars’ thinking and writing of the audiences that they need or seek to address . Topic selection is a case in point. In Germany, for instance, nonacademic audiences are highly interested in political history, foreign relations, and presidential history, and historians have diligently served those interests.27 Accordingly, until the mid-1980s, German scholars tended to heavily favor topics with a German angle that would be of interest to the general public and to their non-Americanist colleagues. Diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States and German immigration to America dominated the field—a pattern that could be seen in many other countries, for similar reasons: the dominant role of the United States on the world stage and the ties that old migration patterns had built across the Atlantic.28 Yet from the mid-1980s, new generations of German scholars were exposed to the new American history that had been developing since the 1960s in the United States. They started embracing issues of gender, ethnicity, and race, especially the civil rights movement. Since the late 1990s, the new cultural history has been the dominant paradigm, including work on transnational and transcultural exchange. There has also been considerable interest in the history of social politics and social welfare, often from a comparative perspective. Greater circulation means that German scholars have Americanized in topic selection, moving away from German American topics and toward the mainstream of American historiography.29 This trend in topic selection, only sketched here, suggests that the “outsider” trope has become less relevant. As a whole generation moved to be part of the American historiography of the United States, to “go native,” as some have put it, the relative importance of the domestic

88

|

Chapter 4

audience, especially the home general public, diminished while that of intensifying exchanges with American scholars of the United States rose. In the particular configuration of audiences they need to address, the one that European historians of the United States share with their American colleagues has become more significant. Put simply, in many European countries it has become much more important to address American historians of the field first and foremost. In the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, this generated an effort by European scholars to blend in. To a large extent they have succeeded. Topic selection, as we have seen, is one sign, although differences between European countries should alert us that it is not so transparent. The American Civil War, for instance, is more studied in Germany than in France, while the American Revolution goes the other way. Variations suggest that local audiences still have an impact, even if the common audience of professional historians of the United States has become central. Positionality is a professional factor: it places scholars at the intersection of various audiences, all potentially open to them but with different requirements and rewards. This professional situation conditions scholarship, in the selection of topics, as we have seen, but also at a deeper level, in the analysis and outcomes of individual work. Such influences are difficult to parse with certainty inasmuch as scholarship is the product of individual historians with personal trajectories. Yet thinking in terms of specific configurations of audiences, partly enforced by institutions and professional norms—in sum, positionality—sheds some light on the processes that shape scholarship, as the following examples illustrate. When Raimondo Luraghi published his history of the American Civil War in 1966 in Turin, he was first and foremost contributing to a (political) conversation that had animated the public sphere in Italy for several decades. In this context, the goal of Italian historians was to integrate the great cultural trends of their country into a credible historical narrative, with a strong intellectual connection to public life. Luraghi’s achievement was a brilliant interpretation of the war in Gramscian terms. It was received in the United States as a fresh perspective on and analysis of a familiar story. But, so to speak, its new light was decidedly Italian, as it participated fully in intellectual debates of the peninsula.30 Today, engaging American historiography has come front and center for European historians of the United States, yet intellectual trends in the home academy still have a palpable influence. Take Paul Schor’s

Straddling Intellectual Worlds

|

89

work on the construction of population categories through the census.31 It is avowedly a contribution to the study of race in the United States. Schor thought out, researched, and wrote this book in dialogue with the American historiography of race and of the history of science. In it, however, he builds bridges to his French readers. At a time when racial and ethnic statistics were stirring a heated political debate in France (with its deeply rooted tradition of color-blindness in public statistics), his work could shed light for French citizens on the often cited but rarely understood American case. Yet his introduction reveals that the French audience is much more than an additional target for a work of American history with Americans as a primary audience. Schor had drawn inspiration and tools from a growing, distinctive body of French scholarship on the history of statistics.32 His example suggests that even when one is steeped in American historiography, when most of one’s research is done in the United States and most of one’s intellectual dialogue is with American colleagues, writing even partly for an audience in an intellectual context far from the preoccupations of U.S.-based scholars has consequences. Some authors very self-consciously borrow questions, problématiques, and theoretical tools from colleagues working on the history of their home country or other parts of the world. But even when they do not, nor seek to contribute to domestic debates, they nonetheless partake in intellectual conversations happening in their own academies. We suggest that these audiences, even when not purposefully addressed, do matter in the scholarship that we write. It can be useful here to think of some audiences as passive in a specific configuration—that is, they are intellectual milieus on the horizon, even if they are not directly engaged. The Swedish historian Max Edling did not target his account of the American Constitution at a European audience. Yet European political science and the English concept of a military-fiscal state avowedly influenced this work, based on a dissertation Edling wrote at Cambridge University.33 One could say that anybody could have had the same idea as he did, or that it fell to his idiosyncratic genius to link European political science and American history in this fashion. Both elements have a kernel of truth. Yet it is also the case that the findings of European political science were more present on his horizon precisely because of his location. If we think in probabilities, the odds of making this connection were higher for him than they would have been for someone in a different positionality. We should see the configuration of audiences as dynamic, as shifts occur both in systems (as, for instance, in the recent reforms in many

90

|

Chapter 4

European countries that emphasize the need for “international publications,” meaning “in English, in the United States” in bureaucratic parlance) and in personal career developments. The French historian Pap Ndiaye’s trajectory strikingly illustrates this. His first work focused on DuPont, the rise of engineers, and the making of the A-bomb.34 Then he turned to a new project, on life insurance and social engineering in the United States. Yet presenting his research in progress on race discrimination in actuarial practices to French students and general readers made him ponder the importance of race as a social and historical phenomenon in France. This led to a book-length essay that found unexpected resonance in French public debates and in turn to a new research project that incorporates the questions those debates raised back into U.S. history.35 Thinking of positionality as dynamic and diachronic helps to understand its impact without reifying it or making it the rigidly univocal expression of geographical location. The Polish historian Michal Rozbicki is one of those scholars with a transatlantic trajectory. Educated in Poland and having attained the rank of professor in a twenty-year career there, he moved to the United States in the 1990s. In a recent book he offers a cultural analysis of the American Revolution that draws heavily on European philosophers and culture critics such as Marc Bloch, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Terry Eagleton, and Zygmunt Bauman.36 Of course, these thinkers are all read and considered by U.S. academics, although not often by historians of the founding period. It is fair to speculate that Rozbicki’s continuous engagement with both the European world and the American academy positioned him well to think of and conduct an analysis that runs counter to many expectations of his American audience. This gives a clue to the possible reasons why specific configurations of audiences make some intellectual endeavors more likely than others, even though ideas and theories travel.37 Our suggestion, therefore, is to think of audiences as intellectual milieus and positionality as a particular intersection of such milieus, partially linked to location in a more geographical sense. Some audiences are readily acknowledged, such as peers in the American history field. Others are sometimes looked for, such as the general public, especially when one publishes books with trade publishers. Some are not actively engaged with or might even be denied: some historians, for instance, refuse to write for the general public, arguing that physicists do not either. The configuration of audiences also changes with the medium:

Straddling Intellectual Worlds

|

91

books might target a general audience more than journal articles do. And different institutional pressures give more weight to different audiences. For instance, non-Americanist historians are a more important audience for French historians of the United States than for the latter’s British counterparts, simply because of what their respective academic careers demand. Thinking of positionality as a particular intersection of intellectual milieus within which scholars work is useful for understanding both the historical trajectory of European historians of the United States and American history as a field today. The “outsider” trope with which we opened is increasingly misleading, because it focuses exclusively on one audience: historians of the British American colonies and the United States. This group being overwhelmingly American, access to it defined the condition of the European historian. There is no doubt, however, that in the past thirty years, exchanges between American and European scholars (and those in other parts of the world) have considerably intensified, justifying the shared feeling that all participate in the same field. Yet simply focusing on our shared intellectual milieu and ignoring the other audiences whom we address, which might be different from location to location, obscures the diversity of our group and might impede a true paradigmatic reflection on internationalizing American history or on bringing transnational or global history to the front. As the internationalization of American history has made considerable progress over the past two decades, some non-American scholars have remained critical of this process, which appears to be mostly predicated on American paradigms. “In the final analysis,” the Israeli historian Ron Robin writes, “foreign scholars engage the attention of American scholars only if they adhere to an American-generated agenda.” By being asked to contribute on “ ‘Le Melting-Pot’ in France,” for example, “foreign scholars are thus relegated to the task of sanctioning the sometimes narrow topical agenda of U.S. scholarship.”38 If this assessment is correct, it means that the location of American historians of British colonies and the United States so disproportionately favors their American peers and the American general public that the internationalization of American history engages the international part only so far as it addresses American questions. Our suggestion is that if we collectively want to internationalize American history, promote transnational history, or turn to a truly global history, we need to think beyond the purely intellectual content of such a

92

|

Chapter 4

paradigm shift. The structural obstacles that François Weil and Winfried Fluck pointed out a decade ago remain real, even though bringing international aspects into American history has raised awareness that themes and issues might be different from another perspective (and not only from the vantage point of archives). Thinking about the positionality of American scholars might be a useful tool in this process. Our sense is that not all American historians of the United States have the same configuration of audiences: for institutional reasons, teaching in Ivy League schools might give you the awareness of an international audience, and the means to address it, more readily than do many other universities, where the prospective international audience, of either scholars or the general public, might seem more remote. In effect, this is an invitation to our American colleagues, as well as other historians of the British colonies and the United States, to reflect on the particular audiences they address, either in purpose or in passing, in their work. Building and completing research projects are not intellectual processes done in a vacuum. Interactions with different groups influence them: our departments, our schools, our cospecialists in such and such subfields readily come to mind. Others might not be so easily noticeable. Yet it might be worth making such an inventory. Our hunch is that raising the profile of international audiences for historians of the United States will allow the internationalization of American history to go beyond the limits it seems to have encountered so far. Finding the institutional and structural means to make these audiences important to historians both in and outside the American academy should make for an exciting intellectual challenge and lead us to truly open up the field of history.

part three

Internationalization(s) of U.S. History

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5

Writing American History from Europe The Elusive Substance of the Comparative Approach susanna delfino and marcus gräser

introduction During the past twenty-odd years, the growing popularity of Atlantic, transnational, and global history, together with other perspectives in historical writing such as histoire croisée and entangled history, seemed to herald the demise of what had come to be seen as a rather limiting, “traditional” comparative approach to the study of history. The accompanying debate, revealing the diversity of attitudes and concerns held by European historians of several nationalities, dramatically exposed the elusive substance of this approach and suggested the need to reach a rigorous definition of the method and scope of comparative history visà-vis the newer, more fashionable ones.1 Because European students of American history have long favored comparative history, such an effort bore important implications for the writing of U.S. history. It also prompted European historians of the United States to interrogate themselves on the more and less distant causes of what appeared to be a growing asymmetry between themselves and their fellow U.S. historians in resorting to comparison with the other group’s experience. This analysis explores the extent and modalities of such comparisons, to which European and American historians of the United States have resorted to better understand and describe aspects of their own national histories. In other words, we mean to assess the specific ways in which they have responded to the

95

96

|

Chapter 5

perennial tension between comparisons and communications among various national styles of historical writing. Even a cursory overview of the recent historical literature on the United States produced on either side of the Atlantic suggests that while comparative inquiry continues to be an important source of inspiration for Europeans’ works, this doesn’t hold true for their American colleagues. Although there have always been high-profile examples of comparative history by U.S. historians—as illustrated by the popularity of C. Vann Woodward’s collection The Comparative Approach to American History, which instantly became a classic—transforming this general interest into lively practice was and still is much more difficult.2 We may therefore speak of a true paradox: whereas American historiography has a transnational disposition and American historians in general tend to be substantially more cosmopolitan than their European counterparts in the range of their scholarly interests, those among them who specialize in U.S. history—the subject of the present investigation—don’t seem to appreciate comparisons across the Atlantic to the same extent as do their colleagues in Europe. Hence, the field of comparative history does not automatically encourage a profitable conversation between American and European historians of the United States. One reason for this may be that the former, unlike their Continental European colleagues, who are required to be able at least to read English, seldom feel obliged to master a foreign language. As a consequence, they necessarily neglect literature written in German, Italian, French, and other European languages. While it is much more practicable to bring European historians to adopt English as the official language of their writings than to convince American historians of the need to acquire foreign languages, the fact remains that this incommunicability has been significant in marginalizing European scholarship on U.S. history. The intricate connections among language (including the dominance of English as a lingua franca of the academies), cognition, and a certain national style of historiography, as well as the sheer mass of native-born Americans working in the field of U.S. history, largely explain the current hegemony of American historians.3 In attempting to account for the differing attitudes shown by American and European historians of the United States toward comparative history, we will first provide a brief overview of the mutual influences and cross-fertilizations of the European and the American political and social cultures, starting with the late colonial era. From the very inception of the new nation, the United States constituted a privileged

Writing American History from Europe

|

97

term of reference for the observations of European intellectuals and thinkers, and it continues to do so. Although Americans were initially similarly intrigued by European ideas, this interest subsequently fluctuated noticeably. These changes, we think, relate to the influence exerted by the political and intellectual climates prevailing in the United States in each time period. It is arguable, therefore, that while the approach to U.S. history taken by Europeans has consistently been implicitly comparative, this has not held true for Americans. Second, we will discuss what we deem to be the reasons underlying these differences in approaches. While we do not mean to underplay the diversity of national cultures and historiographic traditions in Europe, it seems to us that they are revealed not so much by the approach to historical writing as, rather, by the special sensibilities that are intimately connected with each nation’s history. Third, we will give a brief rendition of the problematic career of comparative history and, while not ignoring the important contributions that U.S. scholars have made, will test the proposition of diverging paths in European and U.S. historiographies. Last, we will assess the position of comparative history today in relation to the more fashionable transnational, global, and other approaches and attempt to define it in light of the questions historians are called to answer in an increasingly interdependent world.

europeans and americans: perceptions and attitudes in historical perspective Since late colonial times, Europeans have looked at North America with an instinctively comparative eye. At first, sheer curiosity about the naturalistic and anthropological aspects of the new continent inspired this attitude, unleashing even the fanciest speculations about the influence of its environment and climate on the characters of both its animal and its human species. The French naturalist philosopher George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, for example, contended that North America’s fauna and human beings alike were inferior in physical development to their European counterparts and correspondingly less healthy. Meanwhile, the rêve exotique dominated French literature on North America throughout the eighteenth century and coexisted with no apparent unease with the supposedly rational soul of the Enlightenment, the highest expression of which was the synthesis of centuries-old European thought on the social contract and the contract of government.4

98

|

Chapter 5

With the Revolution of 1776, European intellectuals began to develop a serious interest in the institutional experiment of the new North American republic, and this was, again, eminently comparative, as it stemmed from an urge to provide solutions to the social and political evils afflicting their own societies, in light of the precepts for good government that their political theorists and philosophers had set forth. Their attention was fully reciprocated by American political intellectuals, who found much of interest in the works of the European Enlightenment. Sometimes personal acquaintance reinforced intellectual exchange, as was true with Thomas Jefferson and the Florentine Filippo Mazzei. Other times it was based only on loose correspondence concerning their respective works, as with John Adams and the French political philosopher Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. At any rate, the debate on the experiment in the form of government of the new North American republic captured the attention of intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. The very assumptions of a revolution inspired by the vision of a bourgeois, lay, and republican state and grounded in principles of individual liberty guaranteed by the supremacy of the law over the retainers of power were so much at odds with the realities of western European countries—most of which were still ruled by absolutist monarchies, with strong hereditary aristocracies jealous of their privileges— as to elicit the utmost scrutiny on the part of European thinkers. This was true not only of the French in the fashioning of their critique of the ancien régime but also of Italians and Germans (the inhabitants of the Italian- and the German-speaking regions of Europe) who, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were beginning to dream of independence from foreign dominance and of national unification.5 In the decade preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution, the works of Mably, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, and Etienne Clavière were crucial in sparking reflection on the applicability of the American model to the French reality. (Carlo Botta’s four-volume history of the American War of Independence played a similar role in the Italian peninsula in the early nineteenth century.) Soon after the revolution of 1830 in his native France, Alexis de Tocqueville undertook a journey to the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. Convinced that the spirit of his age tended toward greater social and political equality, he was much interested in analyzing the conditions that had allowed democratic institutions to develop in the United States.6 During the transition leading to the founding of liberal states in western Europe (circa 1848–1914), as discussed in chapter 2, the United

Writing American History from Europe

|

99

States continued as a model to reflect on, not least for the lessons it seemed to teach about how to accommodate democratic aspirations within the fold of essentially liberal political systems. American intellectuals, whose interest in European ideas had faded somewhat with the passing of the revolutionary generation, once more began to find serious inspiration in Europe. The last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the new century probably witnessed the greatest intensity of reciprocal attention and ideological interpenetration between intellectuals of the two continents. If, on the one side, political scientists such as James Bryce in Britain and Attilio Brunialti in Italy played, although with different modalities, important roles as cultural brokers between the political cultures of the United States and their respective countries, Americans absorbed the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte and the theories associated with scholars of the German historical schools of law and economics, and incorporated their ideas into the agenda of the Progressive movement.7 U.S. historians also took German historical scholarship as a model, particularly as represented by Leopold von Ranke, and thousands of young Americans traveled to German academic institutions for advanced training.8 As the historian Peter Novick has remarked, despite their scanty understanding “of the great gulf separating the German and the Anglo-American cultural and philosophical contexts . . . Americans enthusiastically adopted Ranke’s critical use of sources and his seminal method.”9 That epoch of extraordinary syntony came to an end with the outbreak of the First World War. While absolutist forms of state and authoritarian systems of government had ruled the peoples of the several continental European countries, Americans were blessed by having been the colonial subjects of the most liberal country of the Old World in terms of political/constitutional arrangements. With their colonial training in self-government and the respect of civil liberties, they had been able to create the most advanced state and institutional system in what was considered the civilized world. Americans could claim for their country the privilege of being the land of freedom and the paladin of liberal-democratic ideals in a world maimed by authoritarian violence and social injustice.10 That belief gained increasing sway among American historians of the United States as they looked with dismay at the growing nationalist direction of German historical scholarship. Germany lost her centrality for graduate training in favor of American institutions, and World War I further distanced the two academies. A new divergence developed between the philosophical assumptions and

100

|

Chapter 5

political cultures of Americans and the peoples of the several European nations, dividing their respective communities of intellectuals, including historians, which subsequent events further widened. The interwar period was even more crucial in sowing the seeds for the resurgence of an exceptionalist persuasion among Americans, best expressed by their rejection of the Wilsonian vision of the United States as the leader of an international system of collaboration to guarantee that the principles of freedom and democracy that had triumphed with the end of the Great War would avert the recurrence of such a conflict. With few exceptions, U.S. historians in that period became increasingly estranged from the theoretical and methodological debates stirring the European academic communities and instead adopted a liberal rhetoric inspired by a vague though distinctively American idealist vision of the historical role of their country.11 For example, while the crisis of historicism had a remarkable impact on German historiography, it exerted “no discernible influence on American historians,” who, in the majority, continued to privilege relativistic and pragmatic approaches.12 By the end of the 1920s, however, U.S. historians found a new interest in things European through the unfolding discussion on corporatism and its discrete applications in the several countries of the Western world. Reeling under the financial crash of 1929, influential strata of American society became persuaded that the corporatist formula propounded by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s program for economic recovery was the right recipe to rescue the country. Until 1935, many Americans, including their president, praised the corporate state that Benito Mussolini had introduced as a demonstration of his evidently sincere effort to restore Italian vitality and prevent a general European crisis. Comparisons of Italian Fascism and the New Deal inscribed in a larger investigation of the nature and forms of the corporate state continued to elicit the attention of Italian historians (and peaked in the 1970s and 1980s).13 After 1935, Fascist Italy’s ever-closer approach to Nazi Germany in militarism and aggressiveness and the rapid march of events toward war dramatically put an end to the flirtation between the United States and Italy. More generally, those developments created the conditions for the resurgence of an exceptionalist ideology among Americans, which, after the end of the conflict and with the onset of the Cold War, found expression in the blossoming of a consensualist outlook aimed at affirming the unique character of the American historical experience and its foundation in the liberal tradition.14 This

Writing American History from Europe

|

101

did not, however, imply estrangement from European intellectual debates. Quite the contrary: the United States’ surge to the role of top global power and Europe’s critical geographic position as a bulwark against communism in the new Cold War context not only prompted major economic intervention in western Europe but also suggested the appropriateness of massively exporting U.S. culture there. In particular, a certain version of modernization theory—with the AngloAmerican experience as a “normal way” of Westernization—became highly influential among European academics.15 At the same time, European scholars intensified their interest in the great North American republic, not only to find contrasting trajectories in the diverging political paths they had walked in the first half of the twentieth century but also to draw inspiration for the reconstruction of their postwar societies. Increasingly from the 1960s, the apparent incommunicability between historians of the United States on either side of the Atlantic seemed to be attributable to political/ideological differences, as growing numbers of European scholars, especially in Italy and France, embraced leftist political views as opposed to the prevailing liberal outlook of the Americans. While the emergence of New Left historiography in the United States in theory laid the ground for a rapprochement between them, in practice some distance remained. As Novick put it, although these American historians “regarded themselves as Marxists . . . and they frequently employed Marxist categories . . . their work . . . was notable for its heterodoxy,” largely lacking any Marxist theoretical content.16 This astute observation brings us back to Werner Sombart’s question of why socialism did not take root in the United States.17 Despite the apparent convergence of concerns that scholars of both continents showed for social, black, women’s, and new labor history in the 1970s and 1980s, theory-driven differences between their respective approaches persisted—insofar as (with very few exceptions) the intricate link between theoretical content and political engagement was much more unorthodox in the United States than in, say, France or Italy.

differences in approach and some reasons for them The seeming bifurcation in approaches to U.S. history is thus the consequence of deep differences between the respective cultural and philosophical contexts in which European and American historians grew up

102

|

Chapter 5

and operated. The former have been more receptive to the development of theoretical/methodological discourses and to heuristic speculation, the latter more prone to assign priority to documentary evidence and to a more narrative and storytelling mode. Despite the globalizing experiences of the late twentieth century, many American historians, while proclaiming the death of exceptionalism and their enthusiasm for new transnational perspectives, still betray their strong if largely unstated adherence to exceptionalism’s assumptions through their general neglect of the historical literature on the United States produced abroad. Such an attitude is confirmed by their eschewing of comparisons with Europe, which might give a better understanding of phenomena and processes relating to their domestic history.18 There is, of course, no single “European” historiography, the strength of European historians lying rather in the variety and richness of their respective national traditions and consequent perspectives, each of which highlights specific themes and issues that may suggest comparison with the most conspicuous term of reference in the modern history of the Western world. While languages may separate European academies, scholarly specialization, with its implicit requirement to master any necessary language, allows people of different countries to become part of a larger community of historians able to communicate in the lingua franca of their geographic area of investigation. By virtue of their position on the continent, European scholars now routinely develop at least reading skills in foreign languages. Translations of major works may help, but their principal value lies in exposing students and a selected public of readers to recent historiographic developments in the relevant country. In this connection, it is undeniable that the translation of works by Eugene Genovese, George Rawick, and Eric Foner, among others, had a great impact in Italy, not only in providing better tools for university teaching but also in benefiting historians in the field of modern history in general.19 Other cultural differences also separate European from American scholars. As Thomas Bender has argued, scholarship in American history that is framed in ways that do not necessarily tie it to the nationstate still has to struggle with “the unitary logic of national history.”20 Although it might be contended that Eurocentric attitudes have not disappeared either and that the national epics of countries such as Britain, France, Germany, and Italy also include references to the exceptionality of their historical experience, it is our opinion that this has not militated against a comparatist approach in those countries (whether between

Writing American History from Europe

|

103

themselves or with the United States) to the same extent as it has among American historians. Responsibility for this difference lies largely with the transnational, albeit mainly intra-European, perspective and the heavily philosophical and theoretical character of the intellectual formation that our several educational programs have traditionally offered. Such modes of inquiry have meant that larger numbers of European scholars have turned to the American experience than Americans have looked to Europe to find answers to major historical questions. This divergence seems to be rooted in the exceptionalist and national- or Continental-centric assumptions that respectively shape the attitudes of American and European historians. Despite the resilience of national identities, intellectual interconnectedness continues to exert a powerful influence among Europeans. The paradox of Europe is illustrated by the current ambivalence over both the safeguarding of national identities and the affirmation of a common heritage as a precondition of the creation of a political superstructure. Despite the very diversity that has helped shape the historical imagination of Europeans, their overall intellectual development partakes of a common patrimony, which, as such, is incorporated in the curricula studiorum throughout high school.21 Thanks to this kind of heritage, the several European historiographies rested largely on similar theoretical premises until the mid-twentieth century. The historiographic revolutions that began in the 1960s, with their emphasis on relativism, fostered fragmentation in approaches to history, including that of the United States, and heralded the possible affirmation of a new historical consciousness. In both the Old World and the New, new interests in social history emerged that tried to reconstruct the material cultures and the mentalités of the lower classes, in all their racial, ethnic, and gendered diversity. Although the French school of social history associated with the journal Annales exerted a notable influence on U.S. historical thought, enhancing interest in microhistorical investigation, the British historian E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class probably had a more widespread impact on American historiography.22 Whether its greater popularity was due to the language factor is hard to tell, for American historians increasingly adopted the microapproach as first propounded by French social historians, although in a theoretically uncomplicated form that was more congenial to their way of doing history. The new generations of U.S. historians of the 1970s and 1980s enthusiastically embraced Thompson’s approach to the history of labor,

104

|

Chapter 5

now seen as not exhausted by the study of its “aristocracy”—that is, the unionized industrial workers, who were overwhelmingly male, nativeborn, white, and skilled—but also comprising theretofore neglected categories such as immigrants, the unskilled, and females. The works of two such historians, Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery, stood out for their deep concern with theoretical issues among a host of studies that, in the opinion of Michael Kammen, were “on the whole even more empiricist than [that of] the master,” a claim that adds substance to the view of American historians of the United States as antitheoretical and antiphilosophical.23 Such a distinctive reception of the new approach to labor history had been anticipated by the success of Hayden White’s Metahistory, in which the author contends that history is essentially like literature: the historical account is made, rather than found, by the writer. With few exceptions—such as the historical sociologist Barrington Moore Jr. and later Immanuel Wallerstein, who successfully derived from historicalcultural backgrounds broad interpretive paradigms able to explain the wide range of political/institutional responses by a variety of Western and Eastern societies alike to the challenges that capitalism and economic modernization posed—the prevalence of a strictly national perspective ironically led the majority of American historians of the United States to privilege the microapproach.24 Although the adoption of the new perspective resulted in the publication of many books that enormously added to our understanding of the early social and cultural development of the United States, the lack of a clear theoretical premise lessened the incisiveness of even such fine works as Paul E. Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale, making them look like threads of a precious material in need of being woven into a fabric to fully display their value. Of course there were exceptions, best represented by Anthony F. C. Wallace’s Rockdale—but it may be worth noting that Wallace was neither Americanborn nor a pure historian, his scholarly background being that of an anthropologist.25 A still-ingrained tendency of European historians to refer to other contexts on their continent and to the United States as a preferential term of reference in the fashioning of meaningful arguments relating to a single historical issue or phenomenon can be defined as an implicit comparative approach. However, as this chapter will later clarify, the generalized adoption of one or more international terms of reference is not sufficient to produce a genuinely comparative study. And although

Writing American History from Europe

|

105

comparisons may be of various sorts, sometimes privileging similarities, other times differences, methodological rigor appears to be the discriminating factor. While the transnationalization of American history that is in vogue may sometimes work without that rigor and with scant theoretical information, comparative investigation will never succeed without a clear-cut, theoretically informed research question. Generally speaking, differences in cultural-political milieus have been pivotal in molding the sensibilities of historians operating on either side of the Atlantic. More to the point, whereas the interest of European historians of the United States in comparing their respective national or even continental positions has continued unabated, the global concerns of the North American superpower have recently deflected the attention of many of its scholars from the western European theater to other parts of the world. This doesn’t mean, of course, that U.S. scholars have completely eschewed the comparative approach. Simply, much as happened with Europeans, their historical vision has been shaped by their specific understanding of the historical experience of their country, including its international political and economic concerns. To identify the distinctive character of the broadly defined comparative inclination of European scholars in the writing of U.S. history and how it differentiates itself from the approach that their American colleagues take, let us first briefly summarize the career of this method.

comparative history: different trajectories in europe and the united states Although extensively applied to other disciplines, such as literature, linguistics, law, and politics, the comparative approach in historical investigation was long hindered by the prevalence of historicist theories. It was only in the early decades of the twentieth century that it began to gain credit, thanks to Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Henri Pirenne, and Marc Bloch, the founding fathers of the comparative method in the historical and social sciences.26 Despite its illustrious antecedents, however, comparative history had to wait until after World War II to take off, its growth a result of the alchemy produced by the convergence between historians and sociologists in the emerging field of social studies. In this initial phase, it was mainly historians of the economy who used the comparative approach, which historians tout court did not begin to adopt in any significant way until the late 1960s or so. Their expanded sensibilities about themes

106

|

Chapter 5

connected with social and cultural history undoubtedly contributed to this turn. Early on, European historians’ growing appreciation of internationalizing forces made them increasingly inclined to look at their countries’ histories in a transnational, intracontinental way, especially in light of the new challenges that the ongoing process of integration following the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall posed.27 The classic definition of the comparative approach that Bloch provided in 1928—that it aims at discerning analogies and differences between events, structures, and processes, with a view to explaining the reasons thereof—retains its validity.28 Later, however, both sociologists and historians felt the urge to better specify the term, not only in consideration of the several methodological options it affords but also to distance themselves from works that, although apparently comparative, do not live up to certain standards either in the character of the investigation or in the development of the argument. Jürgen Kocka, for example, has identified the systematic character of the analysis, the consistency in theoretical effort, and the high level of conceptualization required as qualifying features of any serious comparative work. Writing comparative history thus means “to systematically investigate historical phenomena in terms of similarities and differences, with a view to explaining or using them to formulate deeply thought deductions.”29 As Kocka admits, the rigor and the vast knowledge of the national histories under consideration (usually but not necessarily two) that the application of this method entails often discourage historians from adopting it. Comparing doesn’t merely consist in juxtaposing or discussing in a parallel manner the cultures, economic systems, institutions, or individual phenomena of two or more societies or nations, and so many respectable works whose titles suggest a comparative approach cannot properly be classified as such. Each national historiography in Europe presents examples: mainly collections of essays aimed at illustrating several aspects of the connections, cultural exchanges, and crossfertilizations that took place over time with the United States. More to the point, the majority of the chapters in these collections deal exclusively with either the European or the American context in relation to the topic of the book.30 By the same token, Kocka contends that neither the transnational or transcultural approaches that characterize many historical investigations are sufficient to classify them as comparative studies nor does this qualification apply to those in which recourse to comparison is marginal or cursory.31

Writing American History from Europe

|

107

Although not yet fully appreciated by historians, the potential of the comparative method is enormous. Sometimes it can help identify a previously neglected area of research and open up new directions in the reconstruction of a nation’s history. Bloch’s study of the English enclosures eminently served this purpose for better understanding the transformations of the French system of land tenure and land uses in the eighteenth century.32 Other times, while having as a primary object the explanation of phenomena and facts concerning the history of the writer’s nation, comparative studies can significantly illuminate new areas of the history of the country selected for comparison. Such is the case, for instance, with Kocka’s study of white-collar workers in Germany and the United States and with Hans-Jürgen Puhle’s book on state intervention and agricultural politics in Germany, France, and the United States, subjects that American historians had almost completely neglected.33 As these works illustrate, a sound comparative study must firmly focus on a broad category of investigation that constitutes the tertium comparationis, such as, say, industrialization, the formation of nation-states, class structures, capitalism, progress, backwardness, totalitarianism, democracy, or the welfare state. The main issues and debates that have informed historical discourse in each of the several European nations have not only translated into varying degrees of interest in comparative history but also largely determined historians’ propensities in the choice of themes. In Germany, the Sonderweg thesis of the country’s divergence from the West has been the prime mover of comparative research, leading to a predilection for subjects such as the formation of nation-states, the impact of strong traditional elites and preindustrial traditions on the development of a modern class structure, and the welfare state.34 The theme of an anomalous experience with respect to the other western European countries also prompted a comparative turn in Italy’s national historiography. A general presumption that Italian history is different from those of the other Western countries has underlain the study of Fascism in particular, inviting comparisons on the institutional transformations that the rise of mass regimes engender. One important subject that has engaged Italian historians in comparative analyses of different focus is the debate on neocorporatism—seen as an evolution traceable in every industrialized country in the twentieth century—that unfolded in the 1980s.35 In England, the widely shared adhesion to the idea of an assumed English exceptionalism discouraged comparative investigation with European continental realities even as it stimulated some with the United

108

|

Chapter 5

States. In two fields only, though with excellent results, the British cultivated comparative studies: economic and urban history.36 In France, after the encouraging beginnings of the late 1920s, historiography showed ever-decreasing interest in the comparative perspective. According to Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, suspicion long surrounded it, the result of a number of factors. First were the markedly regional and local roots of French historiography, which privileges contact with primary sources and is wary of possible prevarications resulting from the imposition of preset models. Second was the strong and continuing influence that political positions exerted in determining the central paradigms of the comparative approach. Third was the central place assigned to the French Revolution in the founding myth of modern France, which produced a strictly national narrative. Consequently, a comparative tradition was built, much as in Britain, in the fields of economic history and demography alone.37 The work of economic historians deserves separate treatment and special mention, for they have seized the potential of the comparative approach in their investigations of the conditions, timing, and characteristics of industrialization in Europe. In 1952, Aleksander Gerschenkron’s “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective” disclosed new horizons for the historical investigation of this phenomenon. Challenging the Rostowian paradigm of similar stages of development in institutions, economic systems, and societies, which set Britain as the first comer and therefore the model every other country ought to imitate to qualify as industrializing, Gerschenkron insisted on the principle of relativity and the importance of interactions between countries in explaining the different paths to industrialization that the several European countries had pursued.38 Early on, the growing spread of pluralistic and relativist views of historical processes freed economic historians from the shackles of rigidly mechanistic models and allowed for more nuanced approaches to the study of the origins of industrialization in western Europe. No longer seen as a race among countries, it could now be understood as a nonlinear, open-ended process that took a long stretch of time to definitely affirm itself: the so-called protoindustrial age.39 Industrialization has not, however, been the only subject of investigation. E. P. Hennock, for example, conducted important comparative studies on social reform and welfare in Britain and Germany. Public policies, social reform, and the development of the welfare state have figured prominently in European comparisons with the United States, especially in studies by German and Austrian historians and sociologists.40

Writing American History from Europe

|

109

This short overview of the development and character of comparative history in Europe illustrates a thrust to refer to the American case. While comparative approaches to European history are not absent from American scholarly production, they appear to be only one aspect of geographically much broader comparative interests that include Latin America and Asia. Beginning with the pioneering work of Barrington Moore Jr., it seems that sociologists with a historical and politological inclination, such as Reinhard Bendix, Theda Skocpol, and Charles Tilly, have mainly cultivated the comparative tradition in the United States.41 This is not to deny that U.S. historians have done commendable work in the field of entangled history. Think, for example, of Daniel T. Rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings, in which the author traces the roots of American progressive thought to the transatlantic intellectual networks of social reformers from the 1870s to the end of the New Deal.42 Major work has also been done in the field of Atlantic history. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra is indeed an outstanding example of the potential offered by abandoning a perspective heavily centered on the role of the colonizing powers, disclosing instead the marvelous informal networks of interaction and cultural exchange that arose in the Atlantic world between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.43 In a related vein, it is worth noting that an important strand of comparative historical studies developed in the United States from the early 1970s that aimed at outlining the economic, social, and cultural similarities and differences characterizing the slave systems in the several parts of the Americas and the consequences of emancipation in each of these regions. Suffice it to mention Stanley Engerman’s many works and editorial initiatives in this field, as well as those by Robert W. Fogel, Eugene D. Genovese, David Brion Davis, Ira Berlin, and Philip D. Morgan. George Fredrickson has investigated the comparative cultural, social, and economic dimensions of race and slavery in an international perspective.44 However masterful, all of these works, with the partial exception of Davis’s, have revealed the overwhelmingly extra-European nature of Americans’ historical concerns and made J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment, which directly addresses the impact of early modern Italian thought on the intellectual formation of Americans, look like an isolated voice in the panorama of U.S. studies of American intellectual history between the colonial and revolutionary eras.

110

|

Chapter 5

Quite unexpectedly, the U.S. South emerged in the 1970s as the most promising region for historical investigations beyond national borders. The new Atlantic, transnational, and global perspectives projected Southern history onto the international scene, generating a literature that greatly modified the region’s long-held image as somewhat marginal and isolated from mainstream American life. The questions raised by the unveiling of a Southern past very different from the prevailing, stereotypical one stimulated fine historical research of a comparative character that shared the focus with Europe, such as Peter Kolchin’s analysis of American slavery and Russian serfdom and Shearer Davis Bowman’s study of German Junkers and U.S. planters in relation to the issue of economic modernization. Don H. Doyle also made important efforts, adopting a comparative approach to such meaningful themes as regionalism, nationalism, and the “Southern question” in the United States and Italy.45 Some European historians, Italians in particular, have also identified promising grounds for comparative investigation between the U.S. South and the Italian Mezzogiorno in the pre–Civil War/preunification era, under different lights and with different focuses.46 Apart from these explicit comparisons, another European contribution to the rewriting of Southern history has been the conceptualization of the problem of industrialization in a slave society. According to a broad paradigm inspired by European theories of protoindustrialization, defined by the Dutch economic historian Franklin Mendels and elaborated by the British economic historian Sidney Pollard, old and new modes of production and systems of social and labor relations coexisted during a long historical phase.47 This view has allowed the investigation to broaden beyond the narrow limits of the traditional North-South juxtaposition and helped place the antebellum South’s experience of capitalism and industry in a more relativistic, open-ended perspective that has downsized the Northern experience in relation to those of western European countries. U.S. historians are increasingly taking transatlantic and global approaches to the study of economic development and early industrialization in the antebellum South, starting from the presumption that slavery was not incompatible with economic modernization. Recent research has documented the rise and development of an autochthonous class of entrepreneurs, the existence of a white working class in industrial and urban locations, and the emergence of a modernizing middle class in the Old South.48 Although still largely understudied, the economic and social history of the slave South is revealing itself as a promising field of investigation, the

Writing American History from Europe

|

111

importance of which is crucial in reinterpreting U.S. history through the Civil War era. It is therefore possible to argue that European historians, even when they have dealt with eminently domestic aspects of U.S. history, have always taken an implicitly comparative approach in their investigations, thus infusing new perspectives into ongoing debates. Arguably, the originality of their contributions has stemmed from the wealth of philosophical and theoretical references that inform their cultural and educational backgrounds. While the present thrust toward global studies encourages placing the history of the U.S. South in an international perspective, the necessary generalization that this approach entails raises concerns about the genuine, ongoing commitment of Southern historians to tackling the historical problem of industrialization in a slave society through the comparative investigation of foreign cases. Another example of the particular contributions Europeans have brought to the study of U.S. history pertains to the important topic of the origins, characteristics, and development of the welfare state in a comparative perspective. Welfare state building has been a favorite topic among historians who compare Europe and the United States— mainly because of a supposedly European, or more particularly German, British, or Scandinavian, Sonderweg of building early and rather strong welfare states. Europeans are usually proud of this statist tradition (the European social model), which—despite all the processes of Americanization—makes Europeans look decidedly un-American and more “generous,” or “advanced” than the United States and its ramshackle, late-coming, and incomplete welfare state (if it has one!). Comparative research on welfare policy has also been on the agenda of political scientists, economists, and sociologists, giving the field a distinct interdisciplinary tradition. This cross-fertilization fostered historians’ interest in modernization theory and its easy classification of early starters, latecomers, and so forth. In particular, the supposed crisis that welfare states (and public finances in general) have been suffering since the mid-1970s has prompted intensive research on welfare policy in both (western) Europe and the United States. The academic community has joined in public debates to defend welfare policy against its opponents, actively promoting research that embeds welfare policy in a progressive narrative of social justice. American scholars have been keen to demonstrate that the American welfare state was not belated and, in fact, has kept up with European welfare state development—Theda Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of

112

|

Chapter 5

Social Policy in the United States, published in 1992, became a classic in the field of the hidden (or not so hidden) American welfare state.49 When Bill—or rather Hillary—Clinton started an initiative in the mid-1990s to establish universal health insurance as part of the U.S. welfare system, European academics were enthusiastic. Finally, it looked as if the United States would turn into a full-fledged welfare state. But the initiative failed, vindicating the European skeptics who had never believed in congruence between the European and American welfare states.50 Anyway, the typical gamelike comparison—who has the best welfare state?—turned out to be rather fruitless. Instead of working on topics inside the welfare state along the lines of modernization theory and judging the systems for their belatedness or its opposite, the next generation of comparative welfare state historians was much more interested in focusing on a social group that had been closely associated with all welfare state-building processes but nevertheless had not gotten much attention from historians: the Bürgertum—the educated, professional middle class—who had to give political support to welfare policy, who staffed most of the associations and institutions of charity and welfare, and who lent their expertise to most of the private, municipal, and state welfare programs. The different attitudes of the Bürgertum toward charity and toward the function of municipal and state programs seemed to be a sensor that could indicate the different paths of welfare state building. Or rather, these attitudes would contribute to the establishment of two different concepts of welfare policy: welfare society vs. welfare state. Every dissimilarity could be carefully transformed into a question. Why did the belated American welfare state have a prematurely professionalized corps of social workers? If both the creation of a female dominion in social work and the flexibility of the American university system made this professionalization possible, then why was the strong German welfare state weak when it came to assigning or appointing women to social service? Are the reasons for Germany’s near-total exclusion of women from responsible positions in the municipal and state welfare services also responsible for the strength (the “masculinity”) of the German welfare state?51 Answers to these questions helped to reveal developed and undeveloped areas in both countries and showed that instead of merely juxtaposing two case studies and adding a twentypage comparison as a final chapter, it is possible to write comparative history in an integrated way, using queries as a method to weave various strains of national histories together.

Writing American History from Europe

|

113

conclusion: the fate and future of comparative history in transatlantic perspective The comparative approach has sometimes been looked on with suspicion and skepticism, largely because it was widely perceived as an attempt to forcibly fit sometimes ostensibly different historical cases into an artificial interpretational cage. Through the above explication we hope to have shown that comparison, whether explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious, is part and parcel of historical writing. This is all the more so in the present times, when the economic and social realities of the world are increasingly interdependent and interconnected. The adoption of Atlantic, transnational, and global perspectives by U.S. historians testifies to their growing awareness that no country’s history can be fully understood or properly evaluated unless it is put in relation to other contemporary realities. Transcending national boundaries, these new approaches observe the larger dynamics and trends that have influenced the historical development of areas of the world of varying geographic extensions. They highlight interplay and mutual influence. Ultimately, however, we contend that such approaches are the manifestation of an urge, often implicit but always present among historians, to use the comparative tool to make sense of historical processes, be they economic, social, cultural, or political. One result, Thomas Bender’s A Nation among Nations, is a remarkable step forward in the writing of a truly interconnected history of the United States.52 For the most part, comparative history has long received friendly reviews. But not many historians have practiced it. Despite splendid examples and wonderful books, some still regard it as a marginal affair in European and American historiography, an attitude that its practitioners lament.53 But claiming to be marginal may be considered typical of academics striving for more attention. What is more important is the crisis of identity that the traditional comparative method has been going through for several years now in consequence of the rise of transnational history and of histoire croisée’s more or less explicit critique of it. For decades, comparative history was seen as essentially the only reliable method for connecting the histories of two or more countries. Now that writing global and transnational history has become fashionable, it looks as if reflection on what comparison really means is no longer necessary. As histoire croisée and entangled history became more and more

114

|

Chapter 5

popular, especially among European historians, its proponents began to criticize comparative history for being superficial and for giving up on the historicity and specificity of individual phenomena. They have also tried to invalidate comparative history by accusing it of being tautological. A comparison, they argue, can only prove what the researcher chooses to take into account in constructing the comparison.54 Can histoire croisée really replace comparative history or claim to be a better, more nuanced or integrated way of dealing with various global or transnational issues? While any new method is apt to detect deficiencies in the older approaches—and there are, to be sure, many boring and mechanistic pieces of comparative history writing—histoire croisée has deficiencies and limitations of its own. Born of the postcolonial mood— much like connected, shared, and entangled history—histoire croisée in fact principally focuses on either premodern or non-Western societies not yet heavily structured into nation-states. Comparative history, in contrast, largely influenced by modernization theory, which took the nation-state to be the normal way into the modern world, has privileged the nation-state as a terrain of investigation. Regardless of this difference, histoire croisée and comparative history have a lot in common: any kind of history that tries to thematically connect various societies, regions, families—whatsoever—is making a comparison. Insofar as histoire croisée tries to distance itself from comparative history, it reverts to a historicist position: making implicit comparisons without openly acknowledging this method. Instead, as Dominic Sachsenmaier has argued, there should be “a growing sense not only that comparative approaches needed to consider exchange processes but also that the historiography of flows, transfers, and shared transformations, if properly conducted, needed to open itself to comparative perspectives.”55 While it certainly does not make sense to dichotomize comparative history and other approaches, such as histoire croisée, transnational history, and entangled history, to overstate our case, comparative history should be the basis of every kind of transnational history because one needs to have the foundations of knowledge of both (or more) cases to analyze transfers, croisées, and so on. Comparative history will always take the eminent features of transfer analysis and transnational aspects into account. It will be able consider its objects of research not only in relation to one another “but also through one another, in terms of relationships, interactions, and circulation.”56 Comparative history should form an umbrella under which these things can be combined; it

Writing American History from Europe

|

115

will serve as an epistemological base, as “dramaturgy” and a form of interpretation. Only a comparison can demonstrate the nexus between a universal (or, more cautiously, a transnational or transregional) structure and its specific national, regional, or local shape. Michael Kammen is right when he warns that “the transnational enthusiasts seem to be morally or ideologically disposed to minimize all those irritating yet illuminating differences.”57 It is only through comparison that the big picture comes into view. Another cause of the assumed crisis of comparative history is the perception of its being outmoded. Its rise and fall are similar to the rise and decline of social history and of social science history. From the 1960s to the 1980s, comparative history had numerous strong allies among sociologists who favored historical sociology and hence sought to cooperate with or at least earn the respect of historians.58 The relative decline of the social history paradigm and of historical sociology has curtailed cooperation among historians and sociologists and weakened their support for comparative history. The cultural history paradigm that supplanted social history in the mid-1980s was accompanied by a somewhat neohistoricist approach, insofar as it began to emphasize small units and uniqueness over big structures and similarities. Consequently, the comparative method was increasingly criticized for not being sensitive enough to cultural things.59 One may also say that the call for global, transnational, entangled, and other such histories signifies (or, perhaps more appropriately, anticipates) a crisis affecting more than comparative history alone, insofar as the idea and the practice of global history are always in danger of suggesting a global historiography, which does not exist—because historians always have a primarily national audience and are embedded in national institutions. But a different perspective is necessary, insofar as a nation “cannot be its own historical context.”60 Still, because Fernand Braudel’s and Immanuel Wallerstein’s scholarly achievements and latitudinarian knowledge of world history are exceptions rather than the rule, the practice of global or transnational history, if pursued improperly, may distract historians from its main goal: adding new perspectives to and understandings of the history of the nations under investigation. Not surprisingly, American historians, who are at the forefront of writing transnational history, often mention the problem of synthesizing their own national history.61 Global and transnational history may also suggest the sharing of a common world view, but behind this friendly façade is a strong asymmetry among the various national historiographies, if nothing else because of

116

|

Chapter 5

the sheer number of American historians (including all historians working at American universities) and the prevalence of English as a lingua franca.62 In this context, a global history approach allows American scholars to include, say, Japan as an example in their research without being able to speak or read Japanese, whereas Japanese historians will need at least a reading knowledge of English and, in all likelihood, cannot write about Japanese history without acknowledging the vast amount of English-language literature on the subject. There are even countries, especially in Africa, whose national history research is mostly produced in the United States. Finally, the practice of global history may loosen the nexus of research and teaching—which, since Wilhelm von Humboldt’s time, has meant that one’s teaching comes out of the expertise one has acquired in a special field of research. But no one really specializes in global history, most people being at best area specialists. It is true that comparative history—at least that related to the nineteenth or the twentieth century—has a certain national bias, but this is only because the nation-state was enormously relevant in shaping the lives of its citizens, and a great many others besides.63 Insofar as location matters, comparative history is a good way to learn about other countries and cultures: it is a conversation among historians of different countries and can still serve as a middle ground where they can connect and convey their new knowledge in a way that their respective national audiences can identify with. In this chapter, we have contended that whereas Americans have often looked to the European intellectual tradition as a source of inspiration, as in colonial times and the late nineteenth century, thus showing an implicit comparative inclination, the international developments of the twentieth century that climaxed in the outbreak of two world wars increasingly estranged them from European scholarly debates. This attitude began to reverse toward the reestablishment of a dialogue when the first university chairs in American history were instituted in western Europe, following the ideological and cultural campaign that the United States had undertaken there in the 1950s. Although U.S. historians may explicitly adopt a comparative frame of analysis, it is always implicit in the works of their European counterparts, who use comparison more extensively as a means to better interpret and evaluate not only the several phases of U.S. history but also those of their own countries and of Europe in general. Recent developments in attitudes among U.S. historians have raised expectations that a seminal dialogue may be restored between historians

Writing American History from Europe

|

117

on both sides of the Atlantic. The current wave of transnationalizing American history has already diminished the dangers of European historians’ being outsiders, which had prevailed in the olden times of national master narratives. Any American historian who does transnational or comparative history needs allies—hence European scholars of American history are now playing a much more interesting role. Doing comparative history, however, will not necessarily bring European historians into some united front, easy to identify and able to balance the weight of American historiography. Comparative history may nonetheless be a method not only of creating interfaces between those who do national and those who do American history in Europe but also of helping to counterbalance the increasing inequality of knowledge that comes along with the hegemonic role of American historiography. If, on the one hand, comparative history somewhat undermines the traditional national historiography and its master narratives, on the other it allows historians to save all that is valid and innovative in their national historiographies. Perhaps what is now perceived as the crisis of comparative history is in fact a transformation, as signaled by the expansion of its scope to realms such as mentalities and cultural practices. As has been contended, comparison contributes to modernize historiography, and in light of the present thrust toward transnational and global studies, comparative history can not only offer the ideal framework for interdisciplinary research, without renouncing its mission of teasing out and highlighting national specificities, but also serve as a forum for ongoing conversation among historians of various countries. Should these promises be fulfilled, they will enhance the ongoing processes of internationalization and fragmentation, which will lead to a true universal history—universal insofar as the principle of particularity will perpetuate.64 At the end of this critical reflection, we cannot but conclude that the location where one writes does and always will matter, in the belief that it can provoke original and seminal insights of historical reflection on the forces underlying the historical development of Europe and the United States alike.

Chapter 6

American Foreign Relations in European Perspectives Geopolitics and the Writing of History hans krabbendam, pauline peretz, mario del pero, and helle porsdam

Although the United States and Europe have no common borders, they have always shared a sense of historical proximity—which has been “translated,” at one point or another, into wars and alliances, migrations, intellectual exchanges, and trade. Yet more and more, Europe is disappearing from the picture, losing relevance and centrality in the American representation of the world. Americans are more interested, geopolitically and academically, in other regions, such as Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. What this means is that the geopolitical background from which European scholars are writing is deeply asymmetrical: since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, Europe has become less relevant for the United States, and, with a few exceptions, when it comes into play at all, it is most often as one collective entity, the European Union. It could be said that Europe—or what is viewed as Europe—is expanding, as the memberships of bodies such as the European Union and the Council of Europe continue to grow. The identity and specificity of individual European states tend to disappear in the American eye. At the same time, the United States remains as relevant as ever to Europeans. In this chapter, we shall look at how this evolving geopolitical condition and our position in both the European and American academic fields translate into our writing about American foreign relations and America’s role in the world. We argue that location plays differently in these fields than in other, related fields of American history, because 118

American Foreign Relations | 119

our evolving geopolitical position cannot but inform our objects of investigation and our interpretations. Foreign relations are broadly conceived and potentially comprise all kinds of connections that the United States maintains with rest of the world, including trade, financial relationships, migrations, and cultural transmissions. Our main focus here, however, is on diplomatic history in the twentieth century, including its cultural dimensions, although we will draw some parallels with migration studies in the modern period, a field that European scholars interested in North America have traditionally privileged. Originally, most of the scholarship that European historians produced on both diplomacy and migrations focused on transatlantic connections and bilateral relations. Whereas European historians of migrations needed to contribute to U.S. history and their own national history, those invested in diplomatic history belonged to the distinct field of international relations and hardly considered themselves historians of the United States. Nevertheless, over the past twenty years, in the context of the internationalization of Western academia, many European diplomatic historians have increasingly considered themselves specialists in American history, developing expertise in U.S. foreign policy. They have moved from being regarded as I.R. scholars to being seen as local authorities on the United States, as they have been offering an alternative view of the American role in the world and challenging the United States’ conception of its power, both soft and hard. While most American historians deal with U.S. power as projection, European historians argue for it as relation and focus more extensively on its cultural dimensions. This approach has made possible a better understanding of European agency in areas where U.S. authority had often seemed dominant. At the same time, the interest of a growing number of European historians is no longer captured by the transatlantic relationship but instead piqued by the more international set of relationships of which both the United States and Europe are part. In a sense, there has been a degree of convergence between U.S. and European historiography, as European scholars have turned from bilateral connections to more comprehensive transnational perspectives even while pursuing the role of their own country or continent. A corresponding shift can be discerned in migration studies, as hemispheric and global perspectives have tended to supplant the bilateral focus. European migration was more than a collection of national migrations.

120

|

Chapter 6

Hence, these fields tend to promote a greater awareness of national or European identity among their practitioners. A Swedish scholar studying U.S.-Swedish relations can hardly avoid approaching the topic from the Swedish viewpoint, especially if using Swedish archival materials; a European foreign relations expert examining the relative roles of the United States and Europe in ending the Cold War will likely be particularly sensitive to the European contribution. Other chapters in this book, which points to the importance of place in the writing of history, reflect on the impact of such phenomena as language, local educational structures, and career requirements on the way American history is written in Europe; this chapter is about location too, but the very field of foreign relations means that its European practitioners are conscious of location in a wider sense. They could be said to have a stake in their subjects of study in a sense that is not likely to be the case for, say, a European historian of the inner workings of the New Deal.

moving away from a transatlantic focus in diplomatic history The Relative Position of European Historians in the Academic Field Historians of American foreign relations have not always been historians of the United States. In the years following World War II, many European historians with an interest in U.S. foreign policy had a background as historians of the foreign affairs of their own countries or of the international system; they had not specifically studied the domestic history of the United States and very rarely had an academic affiliation as Americanists. This was sometimes a great advantage to them in their domestic academic situation, in that they were perceived as having something to say about international affairs beyond the American scene. In the wider context, they could connect to other historiographies. On the other hand, their comments on specific U.S. issues sometimes reflected their lack of deep knowledge of U.S. domestic history and historiography. Superpower the United States may be, but domestic politics often influence its foreign affairs—and here, European commentators without an understanding of the domestic picture were clearly at a disadvantage. This first generation of historians had students who determined to develop better expertise on the United States, but approached through its connection with Europe. In the formative phase of European stud-

American Foreign Relations | 121

ies of American foreign policy, bilateral relations between the United States and the respective home countries of the European Americanists became the primary focus. Several interacting factors were at play here: the availability of national sources, linguistic skills, the inevitably parochial dimension of most national historiographies. Entering the field during the Cold War, French scholars, for example—many of whom were former students or close colleagues of Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, who significantly revived French diplomatic history—turned mostly to the historical relationship between their country and the United States.1 Something similar happened in Britain, where much effort was devoted to exploring and sometimes questioning the notion of the “special relationship,”2 and in Germany and Italy, with their more often antagonistic stances toward the United States.3 This focus on bilateral relations in the early Cold War era is hardly surprising, since the field of American history was in no small measure created as a consequence of U.S. diplomatic attempts to reshape the American public image in allied countries. The generation that produced this kind of transatlantic history, concentrating on issues such as transatlantic migrations, cultural exchanges, and trade, had largely retired by the end of the century. As the field aged, the tendency to focus primarily on bilateral connections declined as historians moved away from transatlantic relationships and toward engaging the larger realm of diplomatic history. In countries whose universities and research centers have developed American history more recently, this shift has not happened. In Spain, Portugal, Russia, and Poland, most historians of the United States are still foreign relations scholars of their own country, and when they extend their interest to the United States, they tend to work on bilateral relations (see table 6.1). This concentration on connections between the homeland and the United States will most likely decline as the field grows older, and we expect that the perspectives of historians in these countries will also become more international. An Exception: The “Special Relationship” There is one striking exception to the general pattern of diminishing interest in bilateral transatlantic relations: the study of Anglo-American relations. In the past two decades, this has been one of the most dynamic fields of historical research. The so-called special relationship has thus become (once again) a privileged topic, studied by many historians of

table 6.1.

european historians of colonial to present-day america United Kingdom

France

Germany

Italy

Poland

Netherlands

Ireland

Hungary

Spain

Number who focus on American foreign relations and connections

47

15

7

7

8

6

6

4

4

Number of the above who work on bilateral relations

18

8

6

4

6

4

2

3

3

190

63

44

29

16

12

11

7

4

Total

note: The German figures are incomplete, but their proportions are valid. source: Eleanor Thompson collected these figures from the network that shaped this book.

American Foreign Relations | 123

U.S. foreign relations, particularly in Britain. Actually, claiming some sort of unique, indeed “special” relationship with the United States has not been an exclusive prerogative of Great Britain; other European partners of Washington have made similar assertions. Given the pervasive presence of the United States in European politics, economy, culture, and everyday life and the equal and constant presence of Europe in North America, this claim to specialness in the bilateral relationships between the United States and its various European interlocutors is almost inevitable.4 Something different, however, has distinguished the historical representation of the Anglo-American special relationship, rendering it somehow special among the specials. At least three factors, often connected to politics and current affairs, explain this renewed attention. The first is the return, albeit in a much more moderate and washedup form, of a traditional Anglo-Saxonist reading of the modern international system and of the roles the United States and Great Britain have occupied in it. In this interpretation, the torch of civilization, and even of the liberal imperial mission, passed from the United Kingdom to the United States in the twentieth century, in a sort of historical continuum whose common denominator was the alleged superior political culture and more advanced socioeconomic development of these countries.5 A second factor is primary sources. The huge asymmetry between U.S. and non-U.S. primary sources renders extremely problematic any historical research on the bilateral relations between the United States and almost every European country. To put it bluntly, while U.S. sources are often rich and abundant, non-U.S. sources are far too often scarce, if not entirely lacking, particularly for recent events. The United Kingdom is an exception to the rule. The British National Archives are among the few repositories that can compete with the U.S. National Archives for foreign affairs and, if possible, declassify material even more diligently and conscientiously.6 Thus in the case of Great Britain, the bilateral relationship with the United States can be studied in a truly bilateral way with primary sources—something that is not always possible for other countries. This condition in those countries obliges scholars to rely primarily on American documents even to reconstruct and discuss the choices and policies of Washington’s interlocutors. The third factor is strictly connected to the above-mentioned political dimension behind the rediscovery of the special relationship. The greater political and diplomatic Anglo-American convergence of the past thirty years has helped stimulate and catalyze renewed attention

124

|

Chapter 6

to the U.K.-U.S. special relationship. Despite differences, particularly over how to approach Mikhail Gorbachev and the problem of the reunification of Germany, the Ronald Reagan administration and the Margaret Thatcher government represented, in reality and even more in the popular perception, a sort of axis, cemented by anticommunism, neoliberalism, and a more general relaunching of Anglo-Saxon conservatism. Thatcherism and Reaganism have become symbols of political, discursive, and cultural transformations that took place first and foremost on the transatlantic Anglo-American route. This convergence, with the accompanying rhetorical refurbishment of the special relationship, persisted in the post–Reagan–Thatcher–Cold War era, first with the efforts of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to define a new, liberal, and transatlantic platform, epitomized by the various Third Way summits of the 1990s, and then in the post-9/11 Anglo-American collaboration that led to the intervention in Iraq and the attempt to define a new foreign policy doctrine of humanitarian intervention and democracy promotion.7 Despite its exceptional status in the larger western European field of foreign relations of the United States, the Anglo-American special relationship, as the subject of renewed attention, constitutes one of the most dynamic and innovative subfields of historical inquiry. For similar reasons, scholarship in many of the Central and Eastern European countries has increasingly matched this focus on bilateral relationships, reflecting the contemporary political importance of relations with the United States.8

european challenges to american exceptionalism One preoccupation arising from the background and location of European historians is the challenge over the past few years to American notions of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. Studying the history of U.S. foreign relations, in Europe as elsewhere in the world, means dealing with the rise of U.S. power, its multifaceted (and, according to many scholars, unique) nature, the various forms through which it is projected, and its effects and consequences in (and on) the United States and the rest of the world. Americans and Europeans themselves sometimes raise the question of whether European historians—consciously or unconsciously—write American history in such a way as to underscore the importance of Europe. Is a significant purpose of European

American Foreign Relations | 125

historiography concerning U.S.-European connections, cultural and political transfers, and so on to stress the role of Europe in what the United States and the world are today, and to stress European agency? Decentering Cold War History In light of the changing geopolitical roles of the United States and Europe, it is no wonder that a historiographical transatlantic divide is perceptible in analyses of post-1945 U.S. power. In the United States, generally speaking, historians seem to have been (and to still be) very concerned with the forms, means, and goals of the projection of U.S. power. Many U.S. historians have concentrated on the matrices of such projection and its various representations. Studies on race, gender, and modernization theory—to name some of the most innovative and original approaches of the past two decades—have highlighted the plurality of factors behind U.S. foreign policy choices and discourses, as well as the relationship between domestic and international dimensions.9 Furthermore, the projection of U.S. power has been discussed for its impact on others (often in a very univocal sense) and for its effects on the United States (the rise of the national security state, the transformation of political discourse, the economic impact of the so-called militaryindustrial complex, the emergence of the Sunbelt, etc.). A glance at Europe suggests a somewhat different pattern. European historians of U.S. foreign relations seem to place more emphasis on the relational dimension of power than on its simple projection, imposition, or absorption. They highlight both the constraints on the full deployment of such power and its transformation as a result of the interplay between the projecting, powerful side (the United States) and the receiving end (Europe and the rest of the world). If we take the two classical (and best) studies of the Marshall Plan—those by Michael Hogan and Alan Milward—this difference emerges quite clearly. In its corporatist synthesis, Hogan’s book concentrates on the U.S. domestic dimension; Milward instead shows how Europeans were able to influence the plan and its implementation according to their needs and objectives.10 By focusing on the receiving end, Milward and other European scholars have contributed to the challenging of traditional U.S.-centric narratives of American history.11 Including the Central and Eastern European countries (i.e., members of the former Soviet bloc and other socialist states) in the larger picture of Cold War history has also moved the lines of the traditional

126

|

Chapter 6

U.S.-centric perspective. The implosions of the pro-Soviet regimes and of the Soviet Union itself have finally allowed scholars to use previously inaccessible primary sources. While varying in transparency and comprehensiveness from country to country, with the former German Democratic Republic leading the way and post-Soviet Russia rapidly resealing its precious archival sources, these documents have allowed scholars to produce more complete multiarchival and multinational histories of the Cold War.12 Although few studies that are part of what is now commonly called the new Cold War history have dealt specifically with the relationships between the United States and one or more former Socialist countries, the U.S. presence has obviously been central to most of them. Led by the historians James Hershberg and Christian Ostermann, the Cold War International History Program (CWIHP) of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC has been at the forefront of the effort to finally internationalize and decenter the study of the Cold War.13 The CWIHP has published important anthologies of declassified documents from the other side of the Iron Curtain, issued a bulletin of essays and edited documents, and more generally engaged in an extraordinary and fruitful effort to promote and intensify the study of the Cold War. The reverberations have been felt throughout the field of international history and have prompted historians to dedicate more attention to the Cold War, as exemplified by the publication of the encyclopedic, three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War and by the appearance of two journals, Cold War History and the Journal of Cold War Studies.14 The new Cold War history, however, has revealed some relevant, and probably inevitable, limits. The first is strictly connected to the study of international processes that involve the United States and to the documentary asymmetry previously mentioned. Not infrequently, the multiarchival nature of the new Cold War history is simply cosmetic: one or two archives tend to be predominant in the quantity of documents used and, even more, in their quality and historical relevance. Furthermore, and even more important, multiarchival and international history is more easily said than done. It requires a level of knowledge and erudition that few possess and goes well beyond mastering several languages; it invariably clashes against the fact that some actors—certainly the United States in the past seven or so decades—have been far more important than others; and it often ends up producing a replica of a noble but very old-style and hardly innovative diplomatic history.15

American Foreign Relations | 127

However, a wish to challenge the dominant U.S. narrative is at play in parts of European scholarship on the Cold War. The European wish to reclaim European history is perhaps most apparent in the writing of the more “triumphal” aspects of later twentieth-century history—notably the rise of human rights and the fall of communist regimes. The London School of Economics scholar Michael Cox has claimed that “many American accounts privilege the role of the United States in seeking to explain the end of the Cold War,” with the unfortunate result of writing others—especially Europeans—out of the success story. For “those so moved,” he says, there is now a lot of work that can be done to show that maybe those Europeans were not quite as passive as all that.16 What is involved in the different transatlantic perspectives inherent in scholarship on the Cold War are the choice of objects to study and the lens through which certain events are seen. When it comes to which actors and movements were responsible for the end of the Cold War— and the whole question of who “won”—it makes a difference whether the focus is on the power game, and its underlying systemic conflicts, of the superpowers involved or on the importance of the “German question”—that is, the future of Germany. Many American scholars chose the former approach, whereas the latter informs much European scholarship. The question of Germany obviously begins in the European context, which is also where it ends. But when the object of scholarship is the power game between superpowers, the points of departure are the United States and the Soviet Union—not Europe.17 Many historians in Europe have been moved to emphasize the significance of European agency. For example, the project “An Epoch-Making Decade: ‘The Long 1970s’ and European-Transatlantic Transformation Processes,” funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities, makes the point that Europeans were far from passive recipients of rights from freedom-loving Americans. By looking at European national and transnational networks and by analyzing various multilateral diplomatic efforts to convene an all-European security conference with a special focus on human rights and democratization, project members claim that it is “possible to speak of changes within the European and transatlantic frameworks during the 1970s that reach far beyond the so-called Americanization processes after 1945.”18 Daniel C. Thomas and Angela Romano made similar points in stressing Europe’s agency in the process that led to the 1975 Helsinki agreements. They demonstrated that very few people in the United States realized the importance of the Conference

128

|

Chapter 6

on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) or its results.19 The Final Act of the CSCE proved to be a formidable instrument in the fight for human rights. The United States initially took the conference to be an initiative conceived by the Soviets to legitimate their domination over Eastern Europe. It was the European Community that was responsible for putting human rights on the Helsinki agenda, a move that was followed by Eastern-bloc dissidents and activists, who begged their Western supporters, including those in the United States, to prevent the Final Act from becoming a dead letter. Finally, several recent works have emphasized the crucial role that Western Europe, and Western European financial assistance, played in piloting both the peaceful demise of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the subsequent postcommunist transition.20 Reclaiming National Histories and European Agency in the Cultural Field Some European historians have reclaimed their national histories too. To take another Danish example, the research project “Ameri-Danes,” on Americanization processes in Denmark in 1945–75, has focused on the interplay among culture, consumption, business, and politics. The project has been interested in documenting “where Danish trends are parallel to what is found in other European countries, but equally important also where they are not”—one implication being that when Danes absorbed American ideas and material culture, they were, at least to an extent, appropriating American stuff for their own purposes.21 Again, the emphasis, in this and in other cases, has been on the relational and interactive dimensions of U.S. power: how, once projected, it has been resisted, absorbed, transformed.22 The leitmotif running through these projects is a European ambition to show that the United States is not acting in a vacuum and that a plurality of actors is involved. Focusing on the receiving end and emphasizing the agency of European political parties and cultural organizations, European historians have challenged the vision of the United States calling the tune in Europe. The implicit criticism vis-à-vis American colleagues is that the latter are sometimes too inward looking—too willing to universalize the American perspective. More attention needs to be given to the receiving end and to the relational dimension involved—to the interplay between the projecting, powerful side (the United States) and the receiving end (Europe and the rest of the world). Examples here

American Foreign Relations | 129

are the reception of modernization theory and of the Marshall Plan, both of which American and European historians have analyzed differently. Equally important are the many studies now showing how even pro-U.S. political forces often acted independently and somehow shaped U.S. policies and strategies in Europe.23 Other examples can be found. One concerns the cultural and political intervention of the United States in post–World War II Europe. The use of the Central Intelligence Agency to promote American views of a liberal and federalist Western Europe among social groups and political and cultural organizations has been extensively studied since the 1990s. Richard J. Aldrich has shown, for example, that despite the United States’ secret support for the European Movement, channeled through the American Committee on United Europe, the CIA was never able to act as a puppet master. According to Aldrich, this collaboration is more accurately described as one of “prominent European politicians in search of discrete American assistance, rather than the CIA in search of proxies.”24 Looking at the British Left, Hugh Wilford has demonstrated that if the CIA did indeed try to make it less socialist and more Atlanticist, politicians and intellectuals financed by the Americans during the Cold War were never manipulated by them.25 Studies dealing with other national examples have reached similar conclusions.26 In the cultural no less than the economic and political areas, that is, Europe-based historians have been intent on showing that there is another side to the story of Americans exerting control over Europeans. Looking at the cultural interventions of the United States, Scott Lucas has proposed abandoning the sterile opposition between freedom and control in favor of a focus on negotiations between the two sides: “Private initiative was not produced by a state puppet-master pulling strings; the mobilization of culture in the Cold War came through negotiation. . . . The significance of the [United States] was not in creating the cultural crusade but in providing a strategic vision and the organization for a crusade which went beyond the efforts of any individual or group.”27 Continuously focusing on the receiving end, European publications on American philanthropy in Europe have similarly questioned the relevance of unilateral paradigms. Several contributions published in Ludovic Tournès’s L’argent de l’influence insist on the decisive role that European intellectuals played in the success of social and intellectual experiments made in Europe thanks to money given by American foundations. Thus the research hospital created in Lyons in the 1920s

130

|

Chapter 6

was a coproduction of local industrial philanthropists, local academic eminences, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Tournès and his coauthors also show that anticommunist intellectuals and academics who received help from American foundations had some leeway in their relationships with their rich benefactors—for example, Eastern European exiles based in Paris around Constantin Jelenski developed their own conception of intellectual support for the Eastern bloc. In some cases, Europeans were even able to inspire models of reform for their American benefactors.28 Works such as these have drawn attention to the importance of cultural diplomacy, “the exchange of ideas, information, values, systems, traditions, beliefs, and other aspects of culture, with the intention of fostering mutual understanding.”29 In her pioneering work Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999), the British journalist Frances Stonor Saunders showed how cultural diplomacy, as the initiation of cultural exchange, is not secondary to political diplomacy but instead functions as an intrinsic aspect of it. Detailing how the CIA enlisted left-leaning intellectuals in the fight against the Soviet threat, Saunders demonstrated how cultural diplomacy can be employed in many ways and for various purposes.30 “Culture Is a Central Component of International Relations. It’s Time to Unlock Its Full Potential . . .”—this is the title of a 2007 report on cultural diplomacy by Kirsten Bound, Rachel Briggs, John Holden, and Samuel Jones for the British think tank Demos.31 In her book From Civil to Human Rights (2009), Helle Porsdam has a chapter on the importance of cultural rights in which she suggests that this area of human rights will be very important in the future.32 Ensuring the right to culture of all human beings, regardless of status, and safeguarding their democratic access to cultural goods may become a dominant motif, though it is not without divisive potential. The United States may deploy cultural diplomacy, but the European experience suggests that such a method is often subject to mediation, modification, and even transformation as it is applied.33

the temptation to go native: a consequence of the generational change? In recent years, it has been possible to discern something of a generational shift in the approaches of European scholars to American foreign relations, associated with their increasing specialization as Americanists,

American Foreign Relations | 131

their greater diversity of research interests, and, for some, a growing engagement with the cultural turn. They are more firmly grounded in U.S. historiography than their predecessors were and are sometimes perhaps tempted to go native, though convergence is never complete. For one thing, European scholars are often selective in what they take from American historiography, which varies from country to country. In the Netherlands, for example, while researchers of security policy have looked closely at trends in the United States, individual international relations scholars have focused on themes with which the Dutch identify (such as international law and human rights). They have not wanted to focus too much on what is happening in the United States but have been more interested in the effects of U.S. policy abroad. France and Italy are still dominated by traditional diplomatic history, though a younger generation is proposing a perspective that is slightly different from that of classical analyses of intergovernmental relations.34 The same goes for Denmark, where research is going on along more traditional lines—strictly diplomatic and political history—but where, at the same time, there are signs of different approaches coming to the fore, including social and cultural history. There seems to be a difference in interest and outlook between Danish scholars who have been educated in the United States or who have done their PhDs on American history and those who have not specifically focused on the United States and for whom the country is chiefly interesting because of its status as a superpower. For the first group, U.S. domestic history is worth pursuing in and of itself, whereas for the latter its relevance lies chiefly in the light it may shed on foreign policy issues. What is happening in Denmark is part of certain larger, generational changes among European historians of the United States. As the field is gaining maturity in countries where American history developed at an early stage of the Cold War, the second and third generations of scholars, often recruited as full-time Americanist historians, are much more familiar than their predecessors were with the codes and references of American historiography. Most have been partly or entirely trained in American universities, and many have been Fulbright scholars. More and more European scholars are members of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and participate in its annual meetings. Because of the small number of publications in their field in their home countries and especially because it is easier to know the research that is being conducted in the United States than that in other European countries, European scholars sometimes consider the

132

|

Chapter 6

American production the standard to emulate in terms of methods and references. Also, freer from political prejudices about the United States and less concerned by the discussion of the Americanization of Europe than the previous generation, members of the younger generation often aim to write the kind of American history that American scholars could write. One effect of the native turn is the increasing interest in the domestic influences on foreign policy making in the United States.35Another is the way in which European historians have turned to U.S. history to help make sense of contemporary domestic European concerns. This has been particularly striking in countries whose political institutions are usually immune from civil society interference, such as France. Produced in political contexts where domestic actors’ influence on policy making is suspect, many recent publications have revealed some fascination with the American pluralist political system, where, conversely, nonstate actors, particularly business lobbies and ethnic groups, have increased their influence on the foreign policy–making process since the end of the Cold War. In France, Pierre Mélandri and Serge Ricard’s edited volume on the domestic determinants of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century can be seen as a turning point for historians who usually practice traditional diplomatic history.36 It is surely the more visible roles that ethnic groups (especially Jewish, Latino, and Armenian American) and nongovernment organizations have recently played in American foreign policy making that have aroused the interest of a younger generation of historians.37 This interest has sometimes come from a desire to explain a rupture in Washington’s sense of its role in the world. Justin Vaïsse, a French historian long socialized in the United States, has proposed a genealogy of neoconservative thinking, looking carefully at the influence of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and the Committee on the Present Danger, to explain the hawkish turn that foreign policy took under Reagan and later under George W. Bush.38 The focus on nonstate actors’ influence on foreign policy can also be the consequence of an interest in a transnational (social or humanitarian) movement with a strong U.S. base. For example, Pauline Peretz’s research on American Jews’ solidarity movement with Soviet Jews in the Cold War led her to study the role of the Jewish lobby in the adoption of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked economic privileges to migration policies in relations with nonstate economies in 1974.39 It is notable that this focus on domestic (especially ethnic) influences on American foreign policy has translated into research on

American Foreign Relations | 133

similar influences in Europe. The new attention devoted to Jewish organizations’ influence on French foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel and the Middle East since the François Mitterrand presidency is a side effect of the violence of the “Jewish lobby” controversy in the United States.40 But this phenomenon goes beyond the controversial case of the “Jewish lobby,” as this questioning has been transferred to other groups—such as French citizens of Polish origin, as shown by the research that Florence Vychytil-Baudoux initiated on the comparative politicization of Poles in post–World War II France and the United States.41 Europeans thus look at the United States to draw lessons (both theoretical and political), and American academic frameworks influence European historiography, but European historians have not become clones of their U.S. counterparts. European scholars have their own preoccupations, arising from their locations. But one important qualification needs to be made here—as previously mentioned, certain archives in the United States have been opened to researchers earlier than have European archives, and access to sources makes a difference.

divergence or convergence between the united states and europe? two case studies This chapter has attempted to draw attention to the degree to which European scholarship in the area of foreign relations has questioned American tendencies to take for granted that what goes for the United States also goes for the rest of the world. In this last section, we will look at two other examples of scholarship in which the current geopolitical situation has influenced aspects of European writing on the American role in the world. The first concerns human rights—more specially, European reactions to and analyses of U.S. claims about what constitutes the core of human rights. Our second example is the European historiography of transatlantic (free) migration, which U.S. writing on migration history has affected and which has in turn generated publications that help to interpret migration beyond the “golden door” and “nation of immigrants” paradigms. (Human) Rights Talk Human rights have come to dominate international discourse, yet it is only fairly recently that historians have begun to show a serious,

134

|

Chapter 6

scholarly interest in them. Elizabeth Borgwardt’s A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (2005) and Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History (2008) are two examples from the United States. A third U.S. example is Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which attracted significant attention when it was published in 2010.42 Moyn disputes both the argument made by Hunt and others that human rights stretch back to the age of the American and French Revolutions and Borgwardt’s (and others’) focus on early post–World War II events such as the framing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the most important for the launching of the human rights revolution. Instead, he traces the breakthrough of human rights to the need for a depoliticized and moral response to disillusionment with contemporary ideologies and revolutionary political projects in the 1970s. It was only then, Moyn argues, that human rights truly became a social movement—moved, that is, from the halls of the United Nations to streets and public squares and became a tool with which to ask for international legal protection for individuals. Not surprisingly, reactions to Moyn from historians and social science scholars—both American and European—have tended to focus on his decoupling of today’s human rights movement from all that went before. That Moyn sees the human rights movement as a newfangled and utopian creed without any antecedents before the mid-1970s simply leaves out too much—from the proclamation by American and French revolutionaries of the rights of man, through the abolitionist cause and the importance, after World War II, of the International Bill of Rights and regional human rights instruments, to the American civil rights movement and various anticolonial movements. Moyn’s “narrative, tightly focused on public discourse soon after the war, overlooks the most salient point: that the defeat of fascism permitted liberalism and democracy to flourish,” Gary J. Bass writes.43 Beyond the issue of Moyn’s time frame, colleagues have critiqued some of the other claims in The Last Utopia, and these responses highlight the importance of location in interesting ways. In an entry on a weblog for students engaged in doctoral studies in the field of human rights, William A. Schabas—a Canadian historian and legal scholar at Middlesex University in London—points out, for example, that Moyn’s analysis is “a bit too US-centric. It does not . . . acknowledge the 1970s as a period when human rights in Europe improved dramatically, and pulled ahead of the United States.” By focusing on the United States,

American Foreign Relations | 135

Moyn also fails to “adequately assess the role of the ‘third world’ in the development of modern human rights,” Schabas furthermore writes, thereby joining other European or Europe-based historians and social science scholars who have been more attentive than their U.S. colleagues not just to the role of Europe but also to the importance of decolonization for post–World War II developments in human rights.44 For the British historian Robin Blackburn, a further problem is that Moyn fails to mention the many movements in the 1960s and early 1970s that helped broaden notions of human rights: “women’s liberation, gay liberation, the hopes for ‘socialism with a human face’ in Czechoslovakia, the overthrow of dictatorship in Portugal and Spain, the European surge of trade-union mobilizations.”45 Again, this comment points to Europe as an important human rights forum. But it also points to something else—the comparative lack on Moyn’s part of reflections on the importance of that part of the human rights spectrum that concerns economic, social, and cultural rights.46 “We need,” Blackburn argues in his review of Moyn’s book, “to deepen our notion of human injury. . . . Social and economic demands with a progressive character—the right to work, pensions, basic income, minimum wages, shorter working week, universal healthcare, etc.—can sometimes be advanced using the language of rights, even if over the past twenty years ‘HRD’ [human rights discourse] has more often been tethered to the liberal-imperial masthead. Conditions could change, and efforts to bring out the anti-militarist and socially egalitarian potential of respect for human rights, without quote marks or abbreviation, deserve support.”47 Blackburn’s argument is often made by European human rights scholars who support the wording of the Vienna Declaration of 1993, that “all human rights [i.e., civil and political as well as economic, social, and cultural rights] are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated.”48 By contrast, a number of Americans tend to think and argue that the core of human rights consists of civil and political rights only and that economic, social, and cultural rights do not constitute rights (properly understood) at all.49 This distinction is not watertight, of course: there are Americans who would never dream of questioning whether economic, social, and cultural rights are something other than rights, just as there are Europeans who consider civil and political rights more real and important than any other kinds. We are dealing with generalizations. It is worth noting, therefore, that a couple of recent attempts by U.S. historians to diverge from the view of American history as exceptional have approached a

136

|

Chapter 6

more European outlook on human rights. In From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (2005), Thomas F. Jackson discusses how King increasingly saw his and his fellow Americans’ fight for civil rights as a part of something bigger: a more global fight for human rights. In this global fight, Jackson shows, King and his supporters came to view the legal battles that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People fought for formal de jure equality as not going far enough—King eventually realizing that without economic justice, African Americans (along with minority groups and victims of colonization around the world) would never reach equal standing with the white majority.50 Thomas Borstelmann reaches a similar conclusion in The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (2011).51 For Borstelmann as for Jackson—and King—what was happening in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century was but part of a global development. As a result, in part, of the civil rights and other social movements, Americans have gained much more formal equality. However, the 1970s saw not only a drive for greater political equality but also a demand for deregulation and privatization, which has made U.S. society much more economically unequal. At one and the same time, that is, the United States became more and less equal. When it comes to (human) rights talk, it would thus seem, there is a clear divergence between Europeans and Americans, reflecting their different geopolitical views. As European and American historians and social scientists increasingly strive toward transnational history, however, a certain convergence is also seeming to come into play. Migration History In the field of migration history too, European scholars have sought to complicate the historiography, which in this case emerged primarily from the American academy. Initially, in the early twentieth century, European researchers cooperated on the same agenda as U.S. historians, although they were on the sending end of the migration chain. These American historians often had an ethnic relationship to the group they researched, which they strove to locate in the context of the United States as “a nation of immigrants,” and were concerned with issues of assimilation, discrimination, and pluralism.52 Often in cooperation with second- and third-generation immigrants, they explored the roles these ethnic groups played in the peopling of America, the fighting of its wars,

American Foreign Relations | 137

and the shaping of its democracy.53 In highlighting such contributions to American society, these authors were connecting themselves to the history of the “emerging giant,” and European migration historians joined in this project. The rising geopolitical standing of the United States in the course of the twentieth century added to the value of this European investment in migration history. As in international relations, these migration stories were asymmetric, in the sense that they faced west and tied the sending nation to the United States.54 But such positive stories had a limited audience, and conditions in Europe eventually militated against this genre. After the Second World War, migration history encountered serious obstacles in some key countries. In West Germany, the painful Nazi legacy of nationalism discouraged investment in the topic of migration, while Soviet-dominated and totalitarian regimes blocked migration history to the west and diverted research of migration to the east. But Europe’s internal borders slowly eroded, especially economically, and the British historian Frank Thistlethwaite’s famous 1960 call for research on both the sending and the receiving ends prompted scholars to pay more attention to the experience of and in European nations.55 Historians in Europe came to recognize more fully that the United States is just one destination among many—an alternative to domestic destinations, other European areas, overseas colonies, and indeed staying at home. The imperatives of integration had long prodded American scholars to conceptualize an assimilationist framework for immigration history. The quota legislation in turn, tying numbers of immigrants to national origins, encouraged a development of quantitative methods, and the quantitative impulse of the 1970s computer innovation allowed the analysis of and comparisons between large groups. This helped to focus attention on the sending nations, and European scholars were ready to contribute to the kind of approach that Thistlethwaite urged. In this phase, historians in western European countries with high levels of past emigration and no colonial empire as alternative destination took the lead in launching large research projects in migration. These led to the first European comparative studies, especially in the Nordic countries, and to closer transatlantic cooperation with American ethnic heritage groups, buoyed by Americans’ renewed interest in their ethnic roots.56 The Scandinavian emigration had a volume of 2.1 million, concentrated between 1860 and 1920. Swedish researchers produced twenty dissertations total on this subject in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by eight more over the three following decades.

138

|

Chapter 6

The production in Germany was even more impressive. German historians had close to six million emigrants to write about. Emigration studies in Germany peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, with an accumulated 150 titles in that period.57 This success served as an inspiration for countries with colonial alternatives and/or smaller emigration volumes. One example is the Netherlands, where a new scholarly phase began in the mid-1970s when Robert P. Swierenga, an American quantitative historian of Dutch American lineage, traveled to Europe and sought cooperation with Dutch academics. Fulbright grants fostered further transatlantic exchanges and fruitful collaboration, linking sources about origin to sources about settlement and facilitating new studies focused on regional chain migration, women, and religious subgroups.58 Most European countries sooner or later addressed their emigration experiences and produced national overviews. Italy came relatively late to the field. In 1984, Anna Maria Martellone sighed that this research was only beginning to take shape, but twenty years later the field was well covered.59 The end of the Cold War liberated the Eastern European countries from their earlier restraint.60 The most recent phase in migration research has in part been a response to changing conditions in Europe. The persistent labor migration from North Africa and former European colonies, augmented by political refugees, obliged many European nations to acknowledge that they too had become immigrant societies. The subsequent political debates led to more policy-driven research to solve tensions associated with migration, and academic interest in (American) migration history intensified. The United States, after all, offers a model of a kind of a multicultural society and possible strategies for integration. The Institut für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück, for example, founded in 1991 as an interdisciplinary center for migration research, has attracted visiting historians from around the world. Its many publications have helped transform the study of American immigration into a more broadly conceived research area in European migrations with contemporary global implications.61 This emerging transnationalist turn has also elevated culture to the place that nation-states formerly held as the important category of analysis—a development that has favored connections over divisions. This approach encourages comparative studies of migrations and the persisting interplay of cultural influences, both inside and outside the United States.62

American Foreign Relations | 139

Other studies have furthered this transnationalist approach. Recent and increasingly reliable estimates of return migration, for example, have helped to balance the asymmetry in the volume and direction of European migration. Between 1840 and 1920, approximately a quarter to a third of all European emigrants returned to their homeland, the discovery of which has sparked a renewed interest among European scholars in modes of communication and the transfer of ideas, practices, building patterns, products, jobs, and religious convictions, so complementing the tales of departure and arrival at both ends.63 This converging historical project has also given attention to transfer points in the migration process, which has again served to erode the sending-receiving polarity in migration research.64 Transnational influences are likely to continue conditioning approaches to migration history in Europe. They emanate from not just bodies like the IMIS but also the United States and the extraordinary large-scale migrations in recent decades from Latin America and Asia, each composed of peoples from several countries but categorized in regional terms, phenomena that may prompt European scholars to undertake pan-European studies instead of focusing on particular national or ethnic migrations. The tendency for much research funding to pass through the European Union and other agencies, some with a remit to develop common migration policies, will also encourage such a perspective. As Europeans become more self-consciously European, so too will their approach to history. What we have called the internationalization of the field of American foreign relations history has served to extend European scholarly inquiry to the entire world. A growing number of European scholars are moving from studying “the United States and us” to studying “the United States and the world” or “the United States in the world,” looking at the American presence on distant continents—Africa, Latin America, and Asia— and at Atlantic migration as part of a global phenomenon.65 The transatlantic paradigm seems to be, if not directly disappearing, then at least becoming less popular and exclusive. There are still books being published with a strict transatlantic perspective, and as we have shown, the study of the relationship between the United States and a specific country is still central in many national historiographies. But a number of younger European scholars are becoming attracted to a transnational paradigm instead. With their heavy focus, initially sparked by their location in Europe, on the relational dimension of U.S. power, they are

140

|

Chapter 6

increasingly tending to place the United States at the center of a web of multiple connections, thus expanding the scope of their analyses well beyond the strict bilateral or transatlantic dimension.66 The increasing practice of transnational history—the general interest in ideas, diasporas, diseases, environmental destruction, networks, and transnational movements as a whole—has surely encouraged these changing perspectives. In one sense, U.S. and European historiographies are better integrated, as the focus on relational issues has drawn attention to European agency in a number of areas, making possible a synthesis of scholarship from both sides of the Atlantic, much as Frank Thistlethwaite appealed for. But European identity is not lost. Indeed, it is in this field, which must continue to monitor the history and practice of such bodies as the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the European Court of Human Rights, that specialists in American history will likely be most conscious of being European, as well as Danish or Spanish or German or whatever. This consciousness can only be heightened if U.S. governments and other authorities insist on talking about Europe as a single entity. Whether an authentic pan-European historiography of the United States will develop remains to be seen, but it is most likely to be promoted when Europe and the United States are paired in a global context and in all the rich complexity of their relationships. If the writing of history is informed by location, historiography can also strengthen or otherwise change scholars’ evolving sense of place.

Chapter 7

Location and the Conceptualization of Historical Frameworks Early American History and Its Multiple Reconfigurations in the United States and in Europe trevor burnard and cécile vidal

The complex phenomena of globalization that the world has been experiencing have encouraged historians in the past twenty years to address and to problematize the issue of spatial scale. A genuine spatial turn is appearing among historians with a new interest in space and territory.1 This has led to the multiplication of intense debates on transnational and national history and to thinking about various alternative scales of analysis and kinds of history that could replace or complement national history: global or world history, connected history, comparative history. Born of a desire to escape a long-lasting exceptionalist bias of U.S. historians and to deparochialize U.S. history, the call for the internationalization of American history in the early 1990s took place in this context. The history of the colonial period in particular has been transformed as a result of contemporary historiographical rethinking of spatial boundaries. That early North Americanists have been especially receptive to a dramatic geographical reorientation of their subject is not surprising, since they work on a period when the American nation and nation-state did not yet exist. The perspective on political relationships is quite different in the study of both early modern European and Native American polities than in scholarship on nation-states after the revolutionary era. Early North Americanists also work on societies born from the first process of globalization, in relation to European imperial expansion, the rise of modern capitalism, and African and European 141

142

|

Chapter 7

diasporic movements. Hence, they have been particularly eager to abandon what they consider an anachronistic framework of analysis. By anachronistic, we mean assuming that the geographical boundaries of the contemporary United States should also define the limits of early America. At stake is the definition of early America. Although most early Americanists now work on the whole of the Americas—and early America is no longer systematically confused with British or colonial North America—this chapter focuses on early North American history, which remains a subfield alongside British Atlantic history, to sustain the dialogue with the other chapters in this book, written by scholars who work on U.S. history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. In the past twenty years, early North American history has been transformed by the rise of Atlantic history that connects the histories of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, putting a strong emphasis on transnational and transimperial relations among these four continents. Atlantic historians insist that one cannot understand the way societies on both sides of the Atlantic evolved and were transformed without taking into account the impact of Atlantic exchanges and dynamics. Atlantic history differs from an earlier transatlantic history that focused on the relationships between Europe and the Americas and dealt mostly with the modern period.2 In contrast, the new Atlantic history focuses on a specific historical moment in the early modern period characterized by the expansion of colonization, the slave trade, and slavery, before the creation of the American nation and nation-state. It seeks to put Africa at the core of its narrative. The place devoted to Africans and Africa constitutes a major difference from a renewed transatlantic history for the modern period that questioned U.S. exceptionalism, as promoted and exemplified by historians such as Daniel T. Rogers in his important work on Atlantic interactions in the late nineteenth century.3 Nevertheless, the general adoption of the Atlantic paradigm and unit of analysis and the rapid institutionalization of this area of study in the United States among early Americanists have not stopped the debate about other possible scales of analysis and frames of reference—such as imperial, continental, hemispheric, global, and world history. They have also not completely resolved the complex and ambiguous relationship of early American and U.S. history. Moreover, Atlantic history has also developed in Europe, among historians of early North America or the British Atlantic in particular. Other proposals to get away from the hegemony of (modern) national history also confront them. Consequently,

Historical Frameworks | 143

the multiple reconfigurations of the conceptualization of frameworks in early American history is a particularly interesting case study in which we can analyze and evaluate the impact of national or continental location on historical writing.

from early american history to atlantic history in the united states Since the study of early American history began to expand quickly in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, after a prolonged fallow period in the 1930s, its practitioners have been preoccupied with the relationship between colonial and national history and with their geographical units of analysis. Two historians of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn and Jack Greene, played especially crucial roles in the rise of early American history and in the academic formation of several generations of early Americanists. Both, for different reasons, were eager to move from the teleological perspective that informed works from before World War II on the colonial period, which also had an important impact on such works until very recently. Among other things, they were trying to escape the Whiggish implications of viewing early American history as mere prologue to and explanation of the American Revolution. Their advocacy of this fresh way of seeing helped early Americanists to progressively broaden their interests, from their initial focus on New England and then the Chesapeake, areas that played leading roles in the American Revolution, to other southern colonies and the mid-Atlantic colonies, followed by the British West Indies and finally Spanish Florida, French and Spanish Louisiana, and the other Spanish borderlands in the Southwest. A belief in the virtues of multiculturalism in particular spurred this new broadening.4 The study of early America has always been attuned to changes in the contemporary American landscape. Hence, the boundaries of early America, which originally meant only the thirteen colonies, were redefined and enlarged to include the whole North American continent and/or all British colonies in the Americas. Lest embracing the British West Indies be construed as a return to a British imperial perspective, however, the French and Spanish borderlands were integrated, once again connecting colonial history to American national history, as these colonies eventually became part of the U.S. national territory. Unlike in the first period of development of borderland studies, which Herbert E. Bolton initiated in the 1930s, the focus was not only on Spanish but also on French colonies.5

144

|

Chapter 7

Similarly, multiculturalism also transformed the writing of the history of European migrations to early North America, as the new interest in the 1980s and 1990s in non-English migrants testified.6 Precisely in this period, the multiplication of works on the various colonies, with a preference for community studies but also research with a bottom-up perspective on all social actors—migrants of all ethnic origins, women, Natives, and slaves of African descent—led to a call for new syntheses against the rising historiographical fragmentation that early American studies were experiencing.7 The new Atlantic history was thus born from the aggregation and reconceptualization of various colonial, imperial, and Atlantic histories: the old imperial school; the first Atlantic history, which appeared in the 1940s and the 1950s; colonial American history, transformed by the rise of the new social history, starting in the 1950s; and the history of the Black Atlantic, which multiplied from the 1970s with works on the slave trade, slavery, and the African diaspora. In addition, ethnohistory and the new Native American history developed alongside these exciting historiographical trends.8 As these long and multiple roots testify, the practice of Atlantic history is older than the concept of Atlantic history. If the term Atlantic history was first used institutionally in the United States in the Program in Atlantic History and Culture that the Department of History at Johns Hopkins established in the late 1960s, “no [American] university replicated its model in the 1970s and 1980s.”9 It was only in the 1990s that the modern idea of Atlantic history really emerged. One of its key intellectual influences was the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500– 1825, at Harvard University, which helped popularize the new historical framework.10 At its best, Atlantic history offers a global interpretative framework and coherent narrative to examine the making of the early modern world of the Americas, Africa, and Europe. An Atlantic perspective allows historians to replace the older and Eurocentric narrative of European overseas expansion with a polycentric history of the encounters among Europeans, Natives, and Africans in a conscious effort to get away from the “paradigm of power that had dominated modern historical studies from the beginning.” In other words, Atlantic historians shy away from a focus on the single point of view of Europeans and, more generally, of white male elites.11 Moreover, while early Americanists’ interests first expanded geographically within the borders of either British American colonies or present-day U.S. territory,

Historical Frameworks | 145

the major innovation of the new historiographical current was to expand the unit of analysis to the whole Atlantic world and thus to move further away from U.S. or other national history exceptionalism. Atlantic historians are committed (if they are committed to any underlying principles in what is a remarkably nonprescriptive form of inquiry) to avoiding any hint of a teleological narrative based on the transition from colony to nation. Atlantic history’s principal theme—that the Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century was more than just an ocean, more than just a physical fact, but was a particular zone of exchange and interchange, circulation and transmission, that extended well beyond the immediate banks of the body of water—not only is true in the sense that these connections profoundly shaped the texture of life on at least four continents over a very long period but is also a conceptual leap forward, allowing historians to make links among places, people, and periods that enrich our understanding of the complexities of a vital passage in the development of the world that we all inhabit. The idea of Atlantic history as a field of historical inquiry that is more than the sum of several national or regional histories is appealing in intellectual terms alone. Paradoxically, the seduction of Atlantic studies also comes from the intensity of the debate both between proponents and opponents of Atlantic history and among Atlanticists themselves. There are many competing definitions of the Atlantic world(s) and some very contradictory conceptions of the way Atlantic history should keep developing.12 Indeed, what might characterize the field most is its strong reflexivity. It has encouraged the publication of many theoretical articles, monographs, round table proceedings, and edited volumes to make sense of the variety of works that have appeared under the label Atlantic history, to legitimize, nuance, or contest the validity and interest of the Atlantic paradigm, and to scrutinize both the advantages and the limits of an Atlantic approach.13 In spite of these efforts to precisely define its object and methods, the Atlanticists’ community has resisted all attempts to circumscribe and order the area of study and to impose a unique and dogmatic direction on it.14 All the debates and tensions in Atlantic studies are linked to the presumptions hidden in the Atlantic paradigm. Atlantic historians tend to insist that the relations animating the Atlantic space played an essential role in the evolution of societies on both sides of the ocean, whose transformations it is impossible to explain without taking into account

146

|

Chapter 7

the connections among Europe, Africa, and the Americas between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century. This raises four unresolved, related issues: the respective influence of internal and external factors on the evolution of each society; the importance of transatlantic connections with respect to local, regional, continental, and global relations among the external influences affecting each society; the consequences of mobility, circulations, and exchanges that do not always have transforming effects; and finally, the differentiated impact of Atlantic dynamics on Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Consequently, the diversity of interpretations among Atlanticists could be subsumed into the tensions between comparisons and connections, between histories within and beyond the Atlantic world, and between Atlantic history as a conversation or as a field of study. Should we develop a more mobile and connective Atlantic history, which would mainly investigate the circulations and exchanges that led to the emergence and growing integration of the Atlantic world? Or should we create a localized Atlantic history, which would focus on the impact of these connections on the internal evolution of the connected societies in a comparative perspective and mostly underline the diversity and fragmentation of the Atlantic word?15 Favoring connections and insisting on integration might lead to the writing of the history of “a reasonably coherent and autonomous Atlantic world” with a single narrative for the whole, while prioritizing comparisons and putting the emphasis on diversity and fragmentation could encourage the writing of several connected histories within and beyond the Atlantic world with multiple narratives, privileging the Atlantic scale but also opening to other scales of analysis, such as the global scale.16 Consequently, in future the questions scholars will ask will change to whether Atlantic studies should grow into a “full-blown field of study with the potential to encompass older fields such as European, American, African, or Latin American history, and the imperial and national histories such continental classifications have traditionally assumed,” or remain a conversation among specialists of the different people and regions of the Atlantic world, allowing them to put their works in perspective and “calling attention to the larger contexts and promoting transnational comparisons.”17 In short, should the Atlantic world stay a simple unit of analysis and frame of reference or should it become the object of inquiry itself?18 Historians of British American colonies and historians of early North America based mainly in the United States first developed Atlantic

Historical Frameworks | 147

history, in the 1990s. Hence, for a long time it was nothing but a “reconfiguration of British colonial America” and a conversation in which the historians of the British American colonies tried to include colleagues working on others parts of the Atlantic world.19 Historians’ strong focus on the British Atlantic, to the detriment of the French, Iberian, and Dutch Atlantics; on the national Atlantics, to the detriment of the Black Atlantic; and on the American colonies, to the detriment of the European metropoles and African slave trade outposts and settlements, hindered the integration of the field. Yet Atlantic historians had no choice but to concentrate on these areas if they wanted to prove the heuristic value of the Atlantic paradigm and to respond to the critical proponents of alternative historical frameworks, world historians in particular. After two decades, it is still mainly early North Americanists in the United States who practice Atlantic history, although the field now includes a rising number of U.S.-based Caribbeanists, Latin Americanists, and Africanists. So far, however, it has failed to attract U.S.-based historians of early modern Europe, who instead embrace the imperial turn. Nevertheless, the recently published Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, which offers one of the first synoptic and critical overviews of the history of the Atlantic world, testifies to Atlanticists’ genuine effort to go beyond their initial focus on the British Atlantic and the European settlements in the Americas.20 Early Americanists, even those studying the British Atlantic, have expanded their comparative frameworks to all corners of the Atlantic world and to Africans and Native Americans as much as to Europeans. This multiauthor volume could be considered a first step toward the transformation of Atlantic studies into a “fullblown field of study.” Paradoxically, however, Europe remains the blind spot, the most neglected continent in the book and in Atlantic history generally. This is so for two reasons. First, the editors wanted to avoid a Eurocentric perspective. Second, the impact of the Atlantic world was probably weaker on Europe than on the Americas or Africa.21 The Atlantic paradigm is certainly least convincing from the point of view of European history. It competes with great difficulty with a (European) continental or global approach.22 Its unattractiveness within the historiographical currents of European history could influence whether and how Europe-based historians of early North America would take the Atlantic turn. It is certainly hard for Atlantic historians to find much of an audience in European history networks. This is where historiography brings us back to location.

148

|

Chapter 7

europe-based historians of early north america and atlantic history In the 1940s and 1950s, when Atlantic history had its first iteration, as a way of describing a sort of transatlantic Western civilization, it was primarily European Europeanists who first wrote about the Atlantic “community,” “civilization,” “space,” and “economy,” in the context of World War II, the Anglo-American alliance, and then the Cold War and the creation of NATO.23 A few British historians who played a crucial role in the development of American studies in the United Kingdom were also influential.24 Except for Robert Palmer, who conceived with Jacques Godechot the concept of “Atlantic Revolution,” most U.S.based historians did not take part in this debate.25 One generation later, the rise of the new Atlantic history was the result of a tight collaboration among historians of the British Atlantic or early North America working on both sides of the Atlantic.26 However, in contrast with the influential Europe-based historians, although a minority, interested in Atlantic history in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe-based historians of Europe since then have been distinctly reluctant to take the Atlantic turn. The strong hegemony of national history and the difficult integration of colonial or imperial history into national history in European academic systems may explain the long delay in the adoption of an Atlantic perspective beyond the Europe-based historians of early North or British America.27 One possible explanation for the joint development of Atlantic history among early North Americanists and British Atlanticists in both North America and Europe is the fact that U.S. historians eager to develop Atlantic studies knew from the start that they needed the assistance of historians not only from Britain but also from continental Europe (and from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa) in developing Atlantic perspectives. Bernard Bailyn thus opened his Harvard University seminar in Atlantic history to an exceptional degree to nonU.S. advanced graduate students and young scholars. Silvia Marzagalli has identified a total of 249 participants in its first ten years.28 Among them, North American (mostly U.S. and a few Canadian) historians counted for a large majority: 176 participants, or 71 percent. But there were also four participants from Africa, four from Australia, twenty from Central and South America, and fifty from Europe. This suggests the existence of a transatlantic academic and intellectual community with a strong Western bias or west-east dimension and a more difficult

Historical Frameworks | 149

relationship between historians from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Almost half of the fifty Europeans were Anglophones, which demonstrates the privileged position of British and Irish historians in Atlantic discourse. There were also ten German historians, six French, three Dutch, two Portuguese, two Swedish, one Danish, one Spanish, and one Austrian. A majority of the Europeans were specialists of early North America. The high number of European Anglophones who participated in the seminar reveals that Great Britain– or Ireland-based historians took the lead in the rise of Atlantic history in Europe. The simplest explanation for this is the strong integration of the Anglophone academic systems and the fact that Europe-based early North Americanists are the most numerous in these two countries. Political imperatives might also have played an important role in their precocity: in conjunction with the “special relationship” uniting the United Kingdom and the United States, British exceptionalism is one reason for the original greater popularity of Atlantic approaches for scholars of the Anglophone world than for those of the Francophone and Hispanophone worlds. As a result of their Euroskepticism, the British have often used the Atlantic as a counterpoint to Europe because it enabled them, especially the English, to convince themselves that their destiny was not linked with that of other Europeans. This was particularly true when Atlantic studies was mostly about the British Atlantic, even though British historians of Great Britain were as reluctant to take an Atlantic perspective as were French or Spanish historians of metropolitan France or Spain. Likewise, the high number of historians of the British Atlantic and early North America from all European countries at the Harvard seminars reflects the important role they have played in the rise of Atlantic history, especially in the United Kingdom and Ireland but also in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, though much less so in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, where Atlantic studies are not yet highly developed.29 They have been instrumental in diffusing an Atlantic perspective among Europe-based historians of the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Africa, serving as cultural brokers between the U.S. and the European academies.30 They have organized historiographical and epistemological symposia and published special issues to discuss Atlantic history and demonstrate its utility and interest.31 In 2009, European historians of early North or British America created the Summer Academy of Atlantic History with assistance from a few U.S. scholars. According to its website, its “aim is to bring together scholars of Atlantic History on the

150

|

Chapter 7

European side of the Atlantic and to provide a(nother) platform for young European and American researchers to discuss their research with established scholars (both from the Americas and from Europe).”32 Furthermore, the topics and approaches that Europe-based early North Americanists discuss and the kinds of Atlantic history they are developing do not seem at first sight to be very different from the topics and approaches of U.S.-based Atlanticists. The similarity in perspective is especially true of specialists of the British Atlantic who can be found on both sides of the Channel.33 Nevertheless, scholars who take advantage of their linguistic differences or skills and the proximity of archives to study non-Anglophone migrants34 and non-British societies in North America35 sometimes pay more attention than their U.S. counterparts to the connections between migrations in continental Europe and the Atlantic and to the impact of Atlantic dynamics on European societies.36 More generally, Europe-based historians of early America are more sensitive than their American colleagues to the fact that Atlantic history has been adopted and developed mainly by Americanists and not so much by historians of Europe or Africa until recently. Hence, they have organized conferences on the impact of the Atlantic world on the old worlds in ways that reflect their geographical position.37 The work of the British sociologist Paul Gilroy on the Black Atlantic has influenced their concern about Africa.38 However, some British historians of Africa have criticized Gilroy’s conception, in which “Africa figures as an object of retrospective discovery rather than as an active agent.”39 Following the model of John Thornton, who has influenced historians of early America by stressing the significance of Africa as an originary area of Atlantic cultures, Atlantic historians have preferred to explore actual relations among Africa, Europe, and the Americas.40 Consequently, in recent years, Atlantic history has won a new legitimacy in many European countries beyond the early North Americanist communities.41 Nevertheless, in contrast with the situation in the United States, where specific chairs, masters and PhD programs, book collections, awards, and an H-Net list in Atlantic history have been created and have multiplied very quickly, Atlantic history remains weakly institutionalized in Europe. In the matter of publications, Brill, a Dutch company that publishes books in English, has a series on the Atlantic World (which is edited, however, by two historians based in the United States), and the Taylor and Francis Group, an English company, has a journal titled Atlantic Studies, whose initial focus on cultural studies, critical theory, and literature has expanded to history.42 Nevertheless,

Historical Frameworks | 151

no chairs in Atlantic history have been established anywhere in Europe, and European universities have created few specific MA or PhD programs in Atlantic history.43 But beside scientific and political motivations, Europe-based historians of the British Atlantic and early North America have institutional and positional incentives to adopt and promote Atlantic history. First, it was impossible for them to ignore Atlantic history if they wanted dialogue with their U.S.-based colleagues, among whom it became prevalent. In fact, the development of Atlantic history might have improved the visibility, recognition, and position of some Europe-based historians (of early North or British America or other cultural areas of the Atlantic world) in the American academy. Hence, an Irish historian, Nicholas Canny, based in Ireland, and a British-born historian, Philip Morgan, who is a professor at Johns Hopkins University (and Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University in 2011–12), edited The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450–1850. Most of all, among the forty contributors to the book (including the two editors), twenty-nine have a position in the United States, one in Canada, eight in Europe (five in the United Kingdom, one in Ireland, and two in France), and two in Brazil. Among the eight contributors based in Europe, seven could be described primarily as Europeanists and one as an Africanist. Likewise, three of the four members of the Atlantic history standing editorial board of the Oxford Bibliographies Online study early North or British America and have a position at a European university.44 The adoption of an Atlantic approach, a cutting-edge epistemological innovation that offers many advantages to its practitioners, might also have reduced the marginal position of historians of early North America within North American studies in Europe, which historians of the nineteenth-, twentieth-, or twenty-first-century United States have long dominated. It is worth noting, for instance, that the Center for North American Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, which was founded in the early 1980s and has become the leading research center on U.S. history in France, included historians of only the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for its first twenty years of existence, although it trained graduate students working on all periods. The recruitment of two specialists of the colonial period in the mid-2000s coincided with the desire of its director, François Weil, to develop Atlantic studies. Likewise, while European historians of the United States have not formed their own association,45 historians of early North America have

152

|

Chapter 7

been pioneers in the creation of a historical society: the European Early American Studies Association (EEASA), based on the model of the successful British Group of Early American History (BGEAH), which has been promoting Atlantic history since its formation in the late 1990s. Apart from “foster[ing] international collaboration between early Americanists throughout Europe,” according to its website, the association aims “to [develop] early American scholarship that stresses the cosmopolitan origins of early American history” and “to show . . . how a European perspective on early American history can complicate and enrich an early American scholarship that is increasingly focused on Atlantic rather than purely American links.”46 Obviously, Atlantic history has played a role in this intellectual and institutional initiative. Nevertheless, the EEASA conferences, which started in 2008 in Paris and take place every two years, have so far attracted mainly historians of the British Atlantic or of early North America and not so many of Latin America, Europe, or Africa. One reason could be that, outside the United Kingdom, most Europe-based historians of early North America are affiliated with departments of Anglophone studies and not history departments. If they chose to take a full Atlantic turn, they would break away from their close colleagues working on U.S. history after the American Revolution. This is an impossible move in their institutional position. For them, Atlantic history needs to remain a simple conversation and not evolve into a full-blown field of study. Among Europe-based historians of early North America, only those affiliated with history departments might have the option to become fully fledged Atlantic historians. But even in their case, this would imply a reorientation, toward collaborating mainly with colleagues working on continents and regions other than the Americas, especially specialists of Europe, who dominate history departments in Europe and do not seem to share the excitement about the merits of Atlantic history. They might prefer other historical frameworks.

the attraction of alternative historical frameworks in the united states and in europe Among early North Americanists in the United States, the debate about the advantages and limits of Atlantic history has led to the emergence or reappearance of historical frameworks that attempt to replace or complement Atlantic history. Indeed, Atlanticists have not tried to impose a new scale of analysis—the Atlantic scale—to the detriment of all other

Historical Frameworks | 153

spatial scales; rather, historians have responded to the introduction of this new scale more generally, addressing and problematizing the issue of spatial scale instead of working at the colonial or national scale, as a result of inertia or tradition.47 Consequently, the rise of Atlantic history needs to be viewed alongside the development of hemispheric and continental history and the growing interest in world or global history as exciting new frames of reference that can supplant or supplement the traditional lenses of national or imperial history. All these frames of reference try to complement, overpass, or suppress the nation as the most common unit of historical analysis; none corresponds to any kind of political entity. This makes Atlantic history significantly different from imperial history, although the new imperial history increasingly consists of a global history of empires that compares imperial formations over time and space and studies their intra- and interrelations.48 Consequently, all these historiographical currents partake in the rise of transnational and transimperial history and share a dual emphasis on comparisons and connections. They differentiate themselves in their objects and the chronological and geographical scales of comparison. Despite the commonalities of these frameworks, it is not insignificant that in their recent collection of essays about Atlantic history (which offers a critical evaluation of the new historiographical current and includes an entire section on alternative frameworks), Jack Greene and Philip Morgan have not included a chapter on “the new imperial history (or the imperial turn),” although they write in their introduction that they would have done so “if space had permitted.”49 It is Trevor Burnard’s chapter, on the British Atlantic, that discusses this issue most directly.50 That imperial history is raised in the context of British Atlantic history is not surprising, since imperial history has always been an important historical field in Great Britain, where it has experienced a major transformation since the 1990s.51 Not only in the United Kingdom but also in France and elsewhere in Europe, the choice of historical framework in which to consider developments in the early modern Americas, Africa, and Europe is more restricted for early North Americanists than in the United States, to the alternatives of Atlantic history and a global history of empires. Does location, whether national or continental, play a role in the choice between these alternative frameworks? Indeed, it seems an essential factor in “the politics of comparison.”52 Paying attention to the location of the narrator—is the historian writing from Europe, America, or elsewhere?—helps us understand the political imperatives that have mingled with scientific motivations to

154

|

Chapter 7

expand or restrain the historiographical comparisons and lead the scholar to include or exclude some objects or territories. But before we examine the various incentives to choose among these historical frameworks, it is necessary to explain why one has to choose, since it is possible on an intellectual level to reconcile these multiple scales of analysis, which are more complementary than competing. In fact, one could even argue that we should embrace and play with all of these frameworks, combining them or selecting some among them according to our objects of investigation.53 For instance, many of the leading historians in Atlantic studies who are specialists of the British Atlantic empire and who play an important role in the promotion of the field also previously participated in the publication of the multivolume Oxford History of the British Empire and its companion series.54 All of these new kinds of history require broad linguistic skills, the mastering of many huge historiographies, and work in archives scattered in many places. If practicing Atlantic or global history can be challenging for an advanced historian and is most successful as a collective enterprise, entering the field can be highly difficult for undergraduate and prospective graduate students, even if they have strong linguistic or analytic skills. Thus, research instruments (such as surveys, textbooks, historiographical works, bibliographies, and archival guides) and programs offering special training have to be developed, which means making choices. To give one example: in France in the early 2000s, in the context of an intense public and scientific debate about the French colonial past, some historians tried to create a large research center devoted to the study of colonialism and imperialism. Since decolonization, the historiography on colonies and empires had not completely ceased, but it had become largely deinstitutionalized and thus made invisible and delegitimized.55 Nevertheless, because there had been a parallel debate in the public sphere about the history and memory of the slave trade and slavery, with important social movements and actions organized in 1998, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of France’s second abolition of slavery, by associations of people from the overseas departments protesting both the neglect of and discrimination against people from the Caribbean in the metropole, in 2001 the French parliament passed a law recognizing the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity. Three years later, the French government decided to create a commission to explore how to develop and promote the history and memory of these phenomena, and at its behest a day of national commemoration

Historical Frameworks | 155

was instituted in 2006. This followed the establishment the previous year, by the National Center for Scientific Research, of the International Research Center on Slaveries (CIRESC), on the model of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull or the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.56 The French government was trying to calm social unrest in the overseas departments and had, obviously, electioneering preoccupations. It was also easier for the state to publicly address the issue of the slave trade and slavery, presented as finished phenomena whose abolition was closely linked to the Second Republic, than to question the postslavery and postcolonial character of present-day overseas societies and the relationship between republicanism and colonialism.57 These political realities do not mean that the CIRESC is not an important institution, with ample scientific and academic, as well as political, rationales for its establishment. Nevertheless, its focus is on a comparative history of all systems of slave trades and slaveries and their abolitions at all periods of human history and at a global scale. At the time, for financial reasons, it was impossible to create another research center, which could have addressed other issues important to historians of colonialism and imperialism. So how and why do historians choose what topics they study and what frameworks of historical inquiry they use? First, we must acknowledge that there are always scientific and intellectual reasons to prefer one framework over another. For instance, scholars of Native American history have been especially critical of some of the principal assumptions undergirding Atlantic history.58 One reason for these criticisms is that Native Americans occupy a distinctive place among Atlantic actors, since they did not take part in the transatlantic—free or forced—mass migrations that gave birth to the Atlantic world. Nevertheless, as Daniel Richter has underlined, Native Americans lived as much as Europeans and Africans in a “new world”: “Native People, of course, did not literally travel to this ‘Indians’ New World,’ but the changes forced upon them were just as profound as if they had resettled on unknown shores.”59 Among other things, these changes encouraged not only multiple movements of migration and resettlement within the Americas but also some limited transatlantic mobility from the Western Hemisphere to Europe.60 Still, some historians think that continental history is better suited than Atlantic history to take into account Native American points of view: the fact that large parts of North America for a very long time remained Indian country or frontiers and borderlands where imperial

156

|

Chapter 7

rivalries allowed American Indians to maintain their sovereignty and exercise their agency makes some practitioners dubious about employing a historical framework in which Europeans are principal actors forcing transformative change.61 Continental history also takes into consideration better than Atlantic history the Pacific side of North America, with its Spanish and Russian colonies, or settlements in the eighteenth century.62 These Pacific perspectives are hardly mentioned by Atlanticists—taking an Atlantic perspective often precludes taking a Pacific view of historical change in colonial contexts. On the other hand, it could be argued that continental approaches are not free of anachronism, since the Rio Grande was not an imperial, national, or ethnic frontier in the early modern period. One might prefer a hemispheric framework that also “encourages the contextualization of regions that during the colonial era formed part of the same national culture.”63 French or British Caribbean colonies are thus better connected with their North American sisters. Likewise, the Spanish borderlands—that is, the northern frontier territories of the Spanish empire in North America—should be linked with the heart of New Spain and compared to other frontier regions in Spanish or Portuguese America. Moreover, hemispheric history complements rather than competes with Atlantic or global history. Taking into account the impacts of the connections not only with Europe and Africa but also with Asia is essential to understanding the way American societies were transformed and evolved. Further, despite many differences among these various American societies, the hemisphere can be said to constitute a more coherent unit of analysis in space and time than one predicated on the future boundaries of the United States. However, one of the faults of Atlantic history is that its practitioners have a tendency to impose an American narrative on Europe and Africa. Indeed, it is not insignificant that two of the historical frameworks that are presented as alternatives to an Atlantic approach—continental history and hemispheric history—concern only North America or the Americas. This orientation is very revealing of a strong America-centric bias in Atlantic studies, which seem less pertinent for scholars of African and especially of European history. The major question that arises from all these discussions, of course, is how far we should allow the undoubted spatial turn of scholarship on the early modern world to determine frameworks of analysis. If geography is merely to replace society or culture as an unthinking category of analysis, we are not moving as far forward as we might suppose. It will

Historical Frameworks | 157

also form a barrier against our connecting with colleagues in European history in particular but also those in African history who are as interested in interiority as in large-scale spatial connections. Paradoxically, some historians have criticized Atlantic history as just a revamped form of older styles of imperial history, displaying some of the drawbacks of that mode of analysis, notably Eurocentric bias.64 Other scholars have underlined that the newly proposed view of the Atlantic world as one of “entangled empires” also leaves aside Africa and an alternative, diasporic conceptualization of the Atlantic world.65 This tendency is reinforced by the choice of many authors to stop Atlantic history at the independence of European colonies in the Americas, which was obtained for the most part by the end of the 1820s.66 Consequently, this historiography may overemphasize the white or EuroAmerican Atlantic. The result would be the imposition of this analytical framework on the entire field of Atlantic studies, despite the fact that a growing number of historians point out that there was not one but several Atlantics, “shaped by the position, experiences and perspectives of each individual” and group.67 Nevertheless, other historians have argued that even though the history of the Atlantic world cannot be reduced to the history of empires, even of entangled empires, empires mattered greatly within and outside the Atlantic world.68 These scholars present imperial history as a valuable competing or complementary framework to Atlantic history. Although national Atlantics were not exactly identical to national Atlantic empires—English merchants, for instance, were active well beyond the borders of the British empire, and a reconfigured French Atlantic survived the dismantling of the French Atlantic empire at the end of the Seven Years War, with migrations between the French metropole and its former colonies and between former colonies becoming more important in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century69—some Atlanticists use Atlantic and empire as synonyms. This allows them to work on “empires” without problematizing the notion. In contrast, historians working in the frameworks of colonial studies, postcolonial studies, and the new imperial history have put the concepts empire and colonial at the heart of their reflection: instead of predefining these categories ahistorically, they consider them as highly historically contingent and contested processes between “colonizers” and “colonized,” which needed constant work to be built, reconstructed, and imposed. They prefer to speak of “imperial (social) formations,” in order to insist on the processual, flexible, and conflicting dimension of

158

|

Chapter 7

the interactions between imperialists and colonists.70 In taking into account all historical actors, both “colonizers” and “colonized,” this new imperial history also points up a problematic tendency among Atlanticists to overemphasize “subaltern” agency over the realities of colonial domination and to minimize the destructions and violence that went with European imperialist and colonialist projects.

the politics of comparison Beyond scientific evaluations of the heuristic power of these various historical frameworks, political and social pressures from the society in which historians live and work also influence their choices. Hence, the transformation of the geography of early American history from the 1970s and the rise of Atlantic studies in the United States from the 1990s cannot be understood without taking into consideration the spread of multiculturalism and the Hispanicization of the United States. The confluence of academic and contemporary geopolitical trends is particularly obvious in the prevalence of comparative books on British and Spanish colonies and empires in Atlantic studies,71 and in the debate about relations between the Hispanic and British components of and the place of North American history between Eliga Gould and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, which appeared in two issues of the American Historical Review in 2007.72 In the last article, Cañizares-Esguerra links his position in the controversy to his origins as “an Ecuadorian whose children have been born and raised in this country” and explains the “political implications of our academic debate.”73 He starts his response with a description of Austin, divided by International Highway 35 into white suburbs on one side and Hispanic districts on the other, to emphasize the inversion between core and peripheral regions in the Atlantic world in the early modern period and core and peripheries in national histories, which might not reflect relations of power and discrimination at the outset of the twenty-first century. Since, except for Cuba and Puerto Rico (and the Philippines), the Spanish Empire disappeared with the early modern period, Atlantic history constitutes a better response to the expectations of the multicultural, particularly Anglo-Hispanic, U.S. audience than the new imperial history, whose main focus is nineteenthand twentieth-century empires, although it could also fuel the denunciation of contemporary U.S. imperialism in Latin America.74 Likewise, the emergence of the new imperial history in Great Britain or the rise of the debate about the integration of national and colonial

Historical Frameworks | 159

history in France from the 1990s can be viewed as “one symptom of the pressure of postcolonial social, political and demographic realities on the production of modern knowledge,” as Antoinette Burton has underlined for the United Kingdom.75 In the same way, Catherine Hall has explained how the imperial turn was taken after the very important arrival and permanent establishment in the metropole of migrants from the former colonies—including those from places that are called the Old Colonies in France, the Caribbean territories and the Indian Ocean islands—following decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s and the birth of second- and third-generation children in the past few decades. Their presence in the heart of English society led to the disintegration of the constructed split between metropole and colonies on which the empire was built: “The increasingly vocal claims made by Britons of color, the challenges they mounted to what it meant to be British, to belong in this society, opened up new thinking about race and nation and critical return to the empire and its legacies. Scholars working in the field of British history turned to questions about the connections between metropole and colony. . . . They deconstructed the separation made between domestic and imperial history.”76 In France, because of the trauma of decolonization, especially the wars in Indochina and Algeria, the same process has happened, but more recently and more slowly: the first step was reached when colonial and slave studies were increasingly institutionalized, thus becoming more visible and legitimized, but it is only in the past few years that a new imperial history exploring the “tensions of empire”77 between metropole and colonies has started to develop for the early modern period.78 In any case, the most common chronology in Atlantic history suggests that as an identifiable field of historical inquiry, it stops with the age of revolutions (the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and Latin American independence movements at the end of the 1820s). This means neglecting the West Indies and the Antilles, the territories that were at the heart of both the French and the British Atlantic empires in the early modern period and were decolonized at the end of the nineteenth century or in the 1960s or remain in the dependency of European metropoles. It also does not speak to the tensions of contemporary, postcolonial European societies. Not surprisingly, despite the fact that the Caribbean was one of the most “Atlantic” spaces—as a plantation system’s stronghold, where all the Atlantic empires intersected—it is one of the areas of study most neglected by Atlanticists, or, to be more accurate, it has not been put at center stage of Atlantic narratives. This

160

|

Chapter 7

disregard is more pronounced for the British West Indies than for the French Antilles because of the importance of the Haitian Revolution in Atlantic studies.79 In contrast, the new imperial history, which is increasingly a comparative and entangled history of empires over time and space on a global scale, allows historians to better link the empires of the early modern and the modern periods—the Old Colonies and the subsequent African, Asian, and Pacific colonies—even if they still give priority to the more lately built empires. There are new, pathbreaking works on, for instance, the relations and influences between the Caribbean experience and the conquest and colonization of Algeria, which could not have appeared in the framework of Atlantic studies, because Atlanticists usually do not converse with historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires in Africa and Asia.80 But in noting this conundrum, we return to the scientific motivations for choosing among several frameworks of analysis, which demonstrates that it is difficult to disentangle intellectual and scientific enticements from political and social pressures. Taking into consideration the divergent histories of most of the Caribbean islands and of continental America also illuminates another tension in Atlantic studies: the focus on either colonization or slavery. Both the United States and Brazil remained slave societies long after independence. In contrast, most Caribbean societies remained colonial long after emancipation, while in Haiti and Cuba, independence quickly followed the abolition of slavery, but a century apart.81 The debate about the chronological limits of Atlantic history reflects this tension, with numerous historians arguing that one end point should be the abolition of slavery in the Americas, at the close of the nineteenth century, instead of the end of most Atlantic empires, at the century’s beginning.82 This discussion is not trivial but rather an important guide to the ways in which the Atlantic world is conceptualized. In both cases, the question of colonial domination is at stake, but on the one hand, the emphasis is on its external dimension, the relationship between the metropole and the colony (the question of empire), and on the other hand, the focus is on its internal dimension, including the exploitation of nonEuropean populations (dealing in particular with the question of slavery and more generally with that of unfree labor). It is thus surprising that Atlanticists have in general retained the 1820s as the most common end of Atlantic history, since many of them insist on the crucial role that individuals and private initiative played over the European crowns’ control, and on the important autonomy

Historical Frameworks | 161

that colonies enjoyed until the mid-eighteenth century because of the weakness of imperial constraints and centralization. The use of the expression early America instead of colonial America is very revealing about this trend. Hence, the new promotion of the 1880s as the best end for Atlantic history better fits the emphasis on the slave trade and slavery as more crucial phenomena than empire building in the birth and intensification of the integration of the Atlantic world. In this perspective, Africans and Africa are put at center stage of the Atlantic narrative, which a Eurocentric bias no longer distorts. The new end is also more in conformity with the way Americans consider their present-day society. They see it less as postcolonial than postslavery, a fact that the lack of success of postcolonial studies among historians of early North America demonstrates.83 The most important issue for many American historians is the legacies of slavery, including the persistence of racial thinking and discriminations. Indeed, as Sylvia Frey has underlined, “the emergence of racial ideologies and racial orders is one of the great fault lines, perhaps the great fault line, in studies of Atlantic history.”84 In contrast, in Europe, where the legacies of slavery are visible mainly in what the European Union calls the ultraperipheries—the overseas departments—and not at the center of the national territories, the racial question appeared later in the public debate and was not been immediately linked to the legacies of slavery. It was first raised in relation to migrations into the metropole from former colonies in (North) Africa and Asia: only such movement entices these societies to address their postcolonial dimension. Thus, it is not surprising that U.S.-based early North Americanists have a tendency to privilege Atlantic over imperial history and that Europe-based North Americanists are more tempted by the imperial than the Atlantic turn despite the strong influence that the powerful U.S. academy exercises. The increasing importance in European academic systems of big collective research projects financed by the European Union might also encourage Europe-based historians to take the approach they do. These research projects inevitably try to promote and develop the history of Europe, including its relations with the wider world. To guess how Atlantic history and a global history of empires will keep developing in both the United States and Europe is impossible, or at least unwise. To an extent, Atlantic history has matured, insofar as there is a host of articles denouncing the limits and flaws of its perspective or announcing its fall. Nevertheless, the study of the Atlantic is still

162

|

Chapter 7

very much alive in the Anglophone world. It has kept its attraction among historians of British America and is gaining new ground among historians of the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Africa on both sides of the Atlantic. The recent rise of continental, hemispheric, and imperial history has not succeeded in halting this trend. Ten or twenty years ago, for instance, Atlantic history, imperial history, and world history hardly existed in France. Since then, these fields have bloomed quickly, even though they still raise intense discussions and strong resistance from scholars committed to national history. Instead of competing with one another, these historical frameworks jointly contribute to the questioning of the national frame of reference. This does not mean, however, that they will develop in the same way in Europe as they are likely to do in the United States. Indeed, as this chapter has demonstrated, location, both national and continental, matters for historical writing and for the conceptualization of historical frameworks, but it matters in complex ways, with multiple factors, such as local institutional constraints, academic culture, political and social pressures, and power relationships between increasingly connected academic systems, which could have complementary or contradictory effects. This might explain why, despite the apparent expansion of the various forms of transnational history, the national paradigm has proved to have strong resilience.

part four

Perspectives from Elsewhere

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 8

Positionality, Ambidexterity, and Global Frames thomas bender

Beyond reframing American history, the La Pietra project (1997– 2000) for internationalizing its practice included an aspiration to advance the role of scholars working outside the United States.1 Whether or not the La Pietra meetings had much to do with it, transnational and global framings of American history have flourished beyond anything the participants could have imagined. But the greater incorporation of foreign scholars and their scholarship, which the participants (one-third of whom were Americanists working outside the United States) strongly desired, has not been realized to the degree envisioned or hoped for. Of course, the number of books and articles by historians working abroad that one sees cited in notes in journals and books published in the United States has increased considerably in the dozen years since the “LaPietra Report” appeared, but that increase falls short of being commensurate with the quantity and quality of work that these chapters reveal. Let us hope that this book accelerates the engagement and incorporation. At the La Pietra meetings, we anticipated that a global framing of American history would make it more accessible and useful for scholars and the public abroad. Particularly important was opening to and connecting with the work of these scholars. There was an image of the Janus-faced European historian as a key figure, at once engaged with the disciplinary practice and findings of historical scholarship in the United States and aware of a very different audience, of European students and 165

166

|

Chapter 8

public. Is the global framing (or other transnational or comparative framings) of use in this difficult role? The chapters here expose a certain naïveté at the Villa La Pietra. They point to important questions about both the raison d’être for historiographical cosmopolitanism and the theoretical and practical issues facing scholars of U.S. history who work outside the United States. There is also a looming question, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, about whether there is something in American history, historiography, and professional institutions that makes the incorporation of these scholars more difficult. To these large and consequential questions I cannot give answers, but I can share thoughts. The wide-ranging overview in the first chapter reveals that European engagement with American history and society from the beginning of the republic is greater and more diverse than I had realized. For Europeans well beyond Alexis de Tocqueville, America served as a reflecting pool for thinking about modernity and alternative political arrangements. Early in the nineteenth century it was useful for political reflections, but by the end of that century it represented something else: market capitalism and industrial productivity, with hints of opportunity. Later yet, it became an advertisement for the pleasures of consumerism and popular culture.2 In each of these phases, Amerique, as Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have phrased its worldly presence, was a prompt to imagining alternative futures.3 For western Europe, its usefulness has declined since 1989, particularly in the new millennium, while for those parts of Europe that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, American political, economic, and cultural practices have had at least a momentary appeal and usefulness.4 As the authors of these chapters indicate, American academic institutions and resources have set the standards for scholarship since World War II, despite recent self-criticism and some public loss of confidence within the United States. Yet equally striking is the extraordinary postwar European development of historical scholarship on the United States, particularly by the quite numerous current generation of historians, whom one author here has called the third generation. There has been a vast increase in the number of positions in American history in Europe, to more than six hundred, from near zero in 1945. The increase has been most dramatic in the former Soviet bloc nations, where research and instruction in U.S. history had been marginal at best in the Cold War, save in Moscow.

Positionality, Ambidexterity, Global Frames

|

167

Many of the positions for Americanists were established in American studies or English language and literature programs rather than in history departments. This was partly the result of the national focus of European history departments and a tradition of foreign study centers. But American foundations also encouraged it. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation turned to the area studies model of the United States in addressing the need for more foreign study centers in view of the postwar emergence of U.S. global power. Moreover, at the same time, there were substantial investments in American studies programs in the United States. The Fulbright Program also emphasized American studies. In the short run, as this volume testifies, the foundations and the Fulbright Program gave an enormous boost to American studies, but in the longer term this left historians in an odd institutional location in European higher education, often without the standing of history department appointments.5 This circumstance has had further consequences in recent years, as American studies as a field of inquiry has evolved into cultural studies, with a stronger emphasis on identity questions and issues of subjectivity and less on issues of causation and forms of institutional arrangements and power. While giving much welcome visibility to previously marginalized populations and institutions, this scholarship has often done so at the expense of the study of established power and the relation between the relatively powerful and those less so. It has also produced fragmentation that has discouraged synthetic narratives, which would make American history accessible to a wider range of readers. That said, on the basis of the work in this volume and the academic location of the contributors, it seems that American history has been increasingly incorporated into European history departments and may be said to be flourishing in many parts of that continent. This development raises the large and important question of positionality in historiography, a theme that runs through all of these essays. What is the relation of the position or location of the author to the subject and to authors in other locations? What community of historians does one write for? One’s local profession? The institution of historical writing and teaching in the United States? Or should we expect a wholly new perspective that is itself transatlantic? What is the optimal relation of European scholars and their scholarship to these and other potential audiences? Does it point toward a cosmopolitan historiography? If so, what might that look like? And what might these alternatives mean in practice? Parallel with these concerns is the question of whether

168

|

Chapter 8

Europeans are likely to contribute more fruitfully to scholarship on American history by framing their work as comparative, transnational, or global—or national. This volume shows quite clearly that early European work in the American field was achieved by way of transnational approaches. The name of the game was connecting American history with aspects of one’s national history. Frank Thistlethwaite was an early advocate of the transatlantic study of reform and ideas, while other pioneers turned to foreign relations and immigration—all of which extended the national history into American history.6 One could do this without demanding a chair in American history. Leaders of a later generation, supplied with a legitimating professorship in the American field, had the possibility, increasingly taken, of going native. At La Pietra there were several conversations about this. My recollection is that some of the younger foreign participants were uncertain of the merits of going native. Some of the Americans, myself included, felt strongly that if internationalizing the practice and the geographical scope of American history were to be of distinctive value, it would depend on intellectual cosmopolitanism rather than assimilation or passing for a native. I would like to make that case here, partly because the strong sense of we-ness and self-enclosure that has historically permeated American scholarship on the United States could use some ventilation. American exceptionalism still has a subliminal life, to which European scholarship and a transnational or global framing can produce a valuable corrective. Even among native historians who would deny American exceptionalism, there is a tendency to enclose U.S. history, separating it from the larger history of the globe. I should be clear, however, about what I mean by exceptionalism. I do not mean mere difference or even claims to superiority. Rather, I follow the strong version that Daniel Rodgers has articulated.7 He makes a distinction between exceptionalism and uniqueness or difference within a diverse whole. Exceptional in its dictionary definition means “outside the norm.” Treating the United States as an exception effectively homogenizes what it is apart from, in this case the world. Thus with American exceptionalism there can be no common or global history with local variation, since the rest of the world is reduced to a single “other.” A colloquial language usage common to all American universities (so far as I am aware) illustrates this point. It reveals the degree to which we unthinkingly separate ourselves from all that is not us. Ironically, my

Positionality, Ambidexterity, Global Frames

|

169

example is the name of the office in American universities where foreign visiting scholars and enrolled foreign students must report on arrival with their visas. It is typically called the Office for International Scholars and Students. Given its clientele and function, it should be called the Office for Foreign Students and Scholars. But instead it misuses the word international, equating it with foreign in a way that suggests the United States is not part of international. Throughout this volume there are various references to positionality, whether with that specific word or not. I concur with the concise statement on the matter in the preface, for I think that the condition of positionality is unavoidable in intellectual work and is in fact a positive value. To wit, I quote: “European historians, like all historians, are conditioned not only by the time in which they write but also by the places from which they write.” I think this is fundamental. While going native rightly describes the impressive capacity of some scholars to incorporate the culture of American intellectual life and its vernacular practice of history into their work, it cannot be complete, it cannot wholly erase difference—and thank goodness for that.8 The result is an invaluable scholarly ambidexterity. It can enable Europeans to fully engage American historiography but retain in their work a distinctive flavor, as a biologist would phrase it. The spatial statement in the preface also appeals to me because it echoes the spatial language that the philosopher Thomas Nagel used to weigh the relation of subjectivity and objectivity in his book The View from Nowhere.9 To the extent that we distance ourselves from the object of inquiry, we reduce subjectivity. That makes sense, but we cannot retreat to nowhere. There is a limit, which is the crucial basis for our subjectivity or, phrased differently, our particular insight into the world of which we are a part. My point here is that I do not see going native or remaining European as choices; they are complementary perspectives that together offer distinctive insights, not unlike those that American historians of Europe can have.10 In the case of European scholars of American history, I hope that their distinctive insight will counter and weaken the we-ness of American historical discourse. The context of our scholarship is not limited to the differences of European and American space, however. More practically it is also about the institutions of academic professionalism. Each of us works within a social matrix that constitutes our audience and conditions what chapter 4 calls our “conventional knowledge.” This is what localizes national cultures of intellectual life. It also supplies us with collective

170

|

Chapter 8

concepts, a vocabulary of motives, and the key questions that shape our work.11 These cultures are different in the United States and in Europe, and various in Europe. The audiences for historical knowledge vary by national culture. This too shapes professional practice, either allowing esotericism or, conversely, demanding (as in Italy) the capacity to speak to the greater public. But all of these differences mean that the resources for a cosmopolitan community of historians are available for students of the United States, wherever they are located. One might say that the variations or differences in the cosmopolitan community are often modest, even small. No problem. As Sigmund Freud recognized long ago and Carlo Ginzburg pointed out in quoting Freud on Giovanni Morelli, small insights make all the difference. Morelli distinguished copies from originals, Freud wrote, by “insisting that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main features of a picture, and he laid stress on the significance of minor details, of things like the drawing of the fingernails, of the lobe of an ear, of aureoles and such unconsidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every artist executes in his own characteristic way.”12 The second big question running through the whole project is that of the uses of transnationalism, variously construed as a connector of Europe- and U.S.-based historians. Three framing models are on the table: comparative history, transnational history, and global approaches. It is clear from the chapters in this volume that Europeans are more inclined than Americans to do comparative history. The obvious reason is the absence of language skills among Americans. Yet chapter 2 makes an intriguing point about one subfield in which U.S.-based historians have been more inclined to take a comparative approach: Southern history and slavery. That part of American history, as C. Vann Woodward long ago observed, ill fits the exceptionalist ethos. Perhaps that is why the South, which, like Europe, has suffered defeat, is of interest to European historians.13 Or it could be the difference of slavery and race, particularly as issues of race become more important in Europe. The logic of exceptionalism may discourage American Americanists from undertaking comparative studies, but the growing separation of American historiography from the social sciences is surely a factor as well. The American Historical Association recently and successfully requested the National Research Council to henceforth classify history as a humanities discipline. The reasons were not wholly intellectual, but the move was symbolic of changing intellectual orientations within the

Positionality, Ambidexterity, Global Frames

|

171

discipline. The cultural turn away from the social sciences toward the humanities has had consequences such as lessening interest in largescale and analytical questions intrinsic to historical sociology and in larger social theories that both invite and provide routes to comparative studies. This shift is more evident in U.S. history than in American scholarship on European history, which shows that the discipline is at its best when it maintains its historical mix of humanistic and social scientific aims and methods.14 I am happy to vote for all of the approaches that open up national history, but I want to make a case for a global framing, which contains all of the others. Moreover, there is a historical claim for such a project: as I have argued elsewhere, American history and global history (and global capitalism) began at the same moment, with the same event.15 On this, Adam Smith (in The Wealth of Nations) and Karl Marx (in The Communist Manifesto) agree. To say this is not to say that every monograph must be a global history, but it does mean that we must recognize that vectors of historical change operate across space as well as temporally.16 And those vectors can derive from deep time as well as extend to the ends of the earth.17 Although comparative history need not reify nation-states, it often takes them as natural units of analysis. This can be a problem, as when it abstracts nation-states from global or other transnational histories.18 On the other hand, a global frame and most transnational frames address the shared or common history of the relevant entities, which are usually more than two, while inviting comparisons. Likewise the more complex forms of transnational investigation referred to in the chapters as entangled and histoire croisée. In fact, it is almost psychologically and analytically impossible to avoid at least implicit comparisons while working in a global frame. The global framework assumes or demands at least one global or transnational historical process in which all entities participate, whether affecting or affected by it, with similar or different local outcomes. For example, I have argued that a global crisis resulting from unregulated capitalist urbanization and industrialization generated a transformation from laissez-faire to various forms of social liberalism, of which American Progressivism was one version, with different particular outcomes by nation.19 Perhaps the best example of a global framing of American history is Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War, a work mentioned only in passing in this volume.20 A Norwegian scholar now working in Great

172

|

Chapter 8

Britain, he does not consider himself a historian of the United States or the book a study of the United States, and in fact he made that comment at the Bancroft Prize dinner honoring him and his book as an outstanding work in the field of American history. Yet the United States is at the center of this global history. Atlantic history has become increasingly popular in American history departments. Yet the profession’s departmental research and curricular structure severely temporally constrains its definition. In the United States, the category Atlantic history effectively excludes scholarship focusing on the period after about 1815, such as James Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920.21 Nor does it include the major work by Daniel Rodgers (even though Atlantic is in the title). Works on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Atlantic world by Europeanists in American departments fare no better: the U.S. academy may admire but does not recognize as Atlantic histories the Atlantic studies of Mary Nolan, Victoria De Grazia, Volker Berghahn, or some of the scholars in this collection.22 The problem is that in the United States, unlike in Europe, the historiographical concept of the Atlantic world originated in a rebranding of American colonial history.23 It is clear, as these chapters point out, that European scholars came to transnational studies of the Atlantic by a different route, not bound by the distortion of the teleological colonyto-nation framework from which Atlantic studies emerged for historians in the American academy. The European freedom on this account enriches their concept of the Atlantic world or Atlantic history well beyond that of scholars working in the American academic context. The opening of historiographical space that this freedom represents reveals the substantial benefit of location and the importance of considering positionality in historical studies. Let me add two other possible framing devices. One is empire. The history of the United States coincides with the history of empires, as it began as part of one and became one itself. Empire connected Europe and America (and the rest of the world) in a spectrum of ways worthy of temporal and spatial examination. The other approach recently arrived from the antipodes. The notion of a settler society connects Europe and America, especially in recent uses by Ian Tyrrell and James Belich.24 A final point: this book is a deeper collaboration than usual. Usually, each chapter in a collective volume has a different author, but here each

Positionality, Ambidexterity, Global Frames

|

173

chapter is itself a collaboration that extends to joint authorship by international teams. Although one can see a particular hand at work in some cases, each chapter is nevertheless both better for the collaboration and remarkably well realized as a single essay. If scholarship goes in the direction of global framing, international collaboration will surely be an essential part of it. This volume is a marvel of such work.

Chapter 9

Reflections from Russia ivan kurilla

Russia occupies an unusual position with respect to the European historiography of the United States. First, put bluntly, there is the question of whether it belongs to Europe as Europe is usually understood. Russia is an Asian country as well as a European one, belonging, for example, to the Eurasian Economic Community. Russian scholars have at times been regarded as part of European academia and at other times not, such as during the Cold War. So do Russian historians of the North American colonies and the United States belong to the community of scholars discussed in this book, or do we contemplate European historians from the outside? Or, to put it another way, are Soviet and Russian historiography European? There are arguments for both positions. In principle it should be possible to develop a historiography that stops at the current borders of the European Union or the Schengen zone, but even in this case one would need to remember that the period of the most rapid development of the study of U.S. history in Europe coincided with the Cold War, when the continent was split apart and political forces heavily influenced American studies. (This helps to explain why Russia for many years now has had a large contingent of American history specialists.) Second, Russia has developed its own way of approaching the United States, its own counter-Orientalism (playing on Edward Said’s term), its distinctive view of the American past. Soviet studies of American history were numerous; hundreds of monographs were published; tens of 174

Reflections from Russia

|

175

dissertations were defended. The Soviet version of American history became a kind of hegemonic discourse in Eastern Europe during the Cold War and has subsequently been rejected by the majority of those countries, at least in the political sphere, while surviving in the works of some academics. Finally, my favorite (constructivist) methodology obliges me to be attentive to the use of academic history in constructing national identities. In Russian studies of the North American colonies and the United States, one can locate the elements of identity politics; indeed, such elements can be clearly seen. This book in its turn is an attempt to research or perhaps shape some “European” approach to U.S. history. The authors do not regard themselves as participating in a great project of constructing a European common identity, but others of us may be intrigued by what their exercise could suggest about the possible emergence of “Europeanness.” Historians study where and why the American and European experiences were different and similar, thus engaging in the debate on national identity. Going a bit further into identity analysis, we find an intriguing problem. When inserting Russia into the equation, we get three identities, with Europe in the center and the United States and Russia providing the two extremes of European history, representing virtual limits that demarcate Europe’s shape (Europe being “neither Russia nor America”). Russian and American world views differed markedly. Russia and the Soviet Union on the one hand and the United States on the other played the mutual roles of significant Others, helping to define the national identity of each for the greater part of the twentieth century. Europe (as commonly understood) played a lesser role in the creation of these two polar identities in the Cold War standoff. Such intensive use of U.S. history and politics in Soviet discourse made the connection between the Soviet domestic agenda and the academic study of the United States closer in the Soviet Union than in other European countries. Russian and European scholars studying U.S. history pursue many common themes. However, they also have differences. Without digging deeply into Russian historiography, let us recall some turning points. In December 1825, a group of Russian nobles mutinied against the new emperor, Nicholas I, demanding the introduction of a constitution. They elaborated several constitutional projects with clear resemblances to the U.S. Constitution. The Decembrist rebellion was smashed; many

176

|

Chapter 9

participants were executed or exiled to Siberia. However, their interest in U.S. models prompted one scholar to characterize the rebellion as “a mutiny of Americanists.”1 Russian interest in U.S. history took academic shape in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the two countries had similar problems and political and social agendas, including slavery and serfdom, territorial expansion, and social reform. These issues were already largely foreign to Europe, from which the two countries therefore experienced a common distancing or exclusion. Moreover, Nicholas I based his program of technological modernization on the expertise of American engineers and inventors, whom he invited to St. Petersburg and Moscow. Kharkov University’s Professor Dmitry Kachenovsky published the first academic study of recent American history in 1858 and inspired his student Maxim Kovalevskii, who later wrote excellent books on American democracy.2 History was not a favorite discipline for the early Bolshevik government, though it invited hundreds of American engineers and technicians to assist the Soviet Union in its industrialization in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The United States was associated with the future rather than the past. But the few interwar historians who studied U.S. history, such as the patriarch of Soviet historians, Aleksei Efimov, laid the foundation for the further spread of U.S. studies among the next generation of scholars.3 The boom in U.S. history in Russia coincided with the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. Both wars contributed: for many young Americanists were World War II veterans who had admired the Allies and often chose the wartime alliance as their theme.4 But it was the Cold War that poured funds into the field and required ideologically orthodox descriptions of the “most probable enemy.” Russian scholars who tried to escape politically charged recent history often turned instead to early Russian-American contacts or colonial America. Still, the choice of revolutionary eras inherent in Marxist historical writing resulted in good studies of the American Civil War (its centennial in the early 1960s boosted the topic). Soviet history students who chose the United States as a field were usually among the most capable. Even though the whole field was used as an arena of ideological struggle, the state could not afford to hire poorly equipped scholars. That resulted in some really deep research produced by Soviet historiography, especially in critical areas of American history. The Soviet view on the major problems was essentially

Reflections from Russia

|

177

Marxist, and the stress on conflict rather than consensus helped Soviet Americanists produce good works on black slavery and the workingclass movement in the United States before American revisionist historians reinvented those themes in their writings.5 In the Soviet Union, American history was a popular while also somehow an elitist part of academia, due both to the Cold War standoff and to the continued fascination with the forbidden American culture and way of life imagined by nonconformist youth. So Soviet studies of U.S. history and politics rapidly expanded after the Second World War, thus making the Soviet case paradoxically closer to that of the U.S. ally Great Britain than to that of continental Europe. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the “socialist camp” and the destruction of communist ideology that marked the end of the Cold War created a crisis in the Soviet study of American history. The good news was the freedom of expression, freedom to choose one’s theme of research and to travel to the United States to work at archives full of primary sources. The bad news was an abrupt decrease of funding. The new generation of Russian scholars is less dependent on the state agenda and more mobile, traveling to the United States more easily and more frequently than their predecessors.6 And again, after decades of isolation, Russian historians of the United States are trying to reenter European academic life. However, freedom from state-defined agendas does not mean freedom from the pressing issues of the home society. From such a perspective, any study of American history in Europe can be seen as comparative history. What the authors of the first chapter of this book stress—the “homemade” nature of the historical questions—makes us as Russians interested in those problems of American history that are important for our agendas, open or hidden. Any historical research is a dialogue: we ask questions of the past (of whatever country we study) and look for the answers in the historical sources. The important problems we want to reflect on are our questions (and later, interpretations). Why do we ask those questions? We believe that the problems any study poses are connected with national agendas—broadly defined, they include not only political agendas but also the social and cultural issues a society faces in a given period. From this viewpoint, any study of the history of the United States outside that country is a unique dialogue between the historian’s society and the American past. Thus, the study of European historiography, for Russians as for Europeans, involves reflection upon the existence of the

178

|

Chapter 9

problems and questions that are common for Europeans but rarely (or never) come to the mind of an American historian. Do all Europeans ask the same kind of questions (which American historians do not), or are the authors of this particular book just a group of representatives of national historiographies with nothing in common besides being “nonAmerican”? I am delighted by the authors’ and editors’ decision to avoid state-by-state descriptions and instead to offer a common framework for analysis. Each of the chapters of this excellent book has its own merit. I will comment on just a few of the topics that I consider the most intriguing, those resonating with my experience as a Russian U.S. historian. When the authors construct a “European historiography,” they can reflect on the borders of “Europe” in the different periods of the field of “U.S. history.” Thus, in the nineteenth century, Russian scholars considered Russia’s relations with the United States part of the wider problem of Russia and the West or even Russia and Europe. However, in the 1920s, the Russian mind juxtaposed the United States to Europe, and from 1945 Europe itself was split. From this viewpoint, Russia’s place in Europe also changed over time. A subsequent historiographical exercise might benefit from more openly incorporating temporality, tracing the linkage between the development of historical studies of the United States and the development of Europe as a whole. Institutional contexts matter, as chapter 3 demonstrates, and the Russian community of U.S. historians is probably the biggest one outside the United States, with the likely exception of Great Britain.7 That is an obvious heritage of the Cold War, but it is also a great resource for individual young scholars. The major division in Russian academia lies between the universities and the Russian Academy of Sciences, which until recently was a network of purely research institutes but now also provides some graduate and even undergraduate training. The Bologna Process is gradually deconstructing the model of education borrowed from Germany, so some of the challenges that the rest of Europe has faced have their counterparts in Russia.8 However, another heritage of the Cold War is the continuation of the relative isolation of Russian U.S. historians from their European colleagues. Historical politics is an important phenomenon in contemporary Europe, and the United States cannot escape being part of that. This takes us into a very different domain, but the many examples of changing street names and erecting monuments throughout central and eastern Europe, with Soviet heroes replaced by American ones,

Reflections from Russia

|

179

demonstrates that American history is directly involved in regional memory battles. There are striking similarities between European and Russian treatments of American history, not only in, say, studies of migration to the United States but also in the ways of shaping research problems. While in Italy the study of their own underdeveloped South boosted an interest in the American South, in Russia the study of the process of settling and mastering the vast Siberian forests and southern steppe produced an interest in the American West. Among recent Russian-language titles, one can find “American and Siberian frontiers” and allusions to comparative endeavors. This brings us to an important contribution that this book makes to our field: it encourages us not only to look for comparisons between American and our national experiences but also to compare the uses of U.S. history within different home environments. So comparative history turns the European study of the United States into a comparative study of European nations dealing with that country in different ways. The problem of language that chapter 4 discusses may be seen as just another example of the difficulties in comparisons. It might be expected that the study of race in American history, which invokes such different connotations in European contexts, would not encounter the same problem in Russia, but in fact the problematic of race also has a distinctive translation into the Russian agenda, where interethnic tensions usually take the place of interracial. Chapter 6 argues for significant differences in the respective ways that U.S. and European scholars treat issues in international relations. One of the major differences between European and Russian analyses of U.S. history is that the predominant approach to U.S. foreign policy of the former is a study of power. Russian scholars can criticize U.S. policy in different parts of the world, explain the connections between business interests and American foreign relations, or analyze the sociocultural foundations of foreign policy making, but few seem mesmerized by U.S. power. The Russian approach also includes the study of the sources of U.S. conduct, the links between the home agenda and foreign policy, and the stereotypes that shape the international visions of American elites. It is probable that, being citizens of a rival superpower, Soviet scholars did not see power itself as a problem. Further, while European Americanists sometimes feel it unjust that American accounts of the end of the Cold War write Europeans out of the success story, Russian scholars (supported by Russian society) experience deep

180

|

Chapter 9

frustration at the interpretation of the end of the Cold War as a U.S. victory (despite, for instance, the key role that Mikhail Gorbachev played). Finally, Russia has only a tangential relation to Atlantic history, with its sophisticated interdependences of trade, exploration, and war. However, the Russian exploration of the Pacific coast of North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could provide a substantial opportunity for comparative studies of commonalities and differences in exploration and settlement. Augmenting Atlantic history in this way may heighten understanding and lead to the creation of a more universal field. The construction of new identities can have its own merits, from both academic and institutional points of view. Defending dissertations, promoting debates about our work, and launching collective projects may become more vigorous in the European network of U.S. historians. Academic networks, however, perhaps need to strengthen institutional ties (as chapter 3 implies in its description of the very different practices in the national academies in Europe). Many European scholars of American history, it seems, have better connections with their U.S. colleagues than with fellow Americanists in their neighboring countries. So the “Europeanness” in our field still seems to be more a pending project than an accomplished outcome. However, identity is never finally fixed. That is why Russian scholars, who were part of European academia back in the nineteenth century and were then excluded from it for most of the twentieth, are now building their road back. The example of eastern and central Europeans proves that this is possible. Nonetheless, the comparative analysis of American history studies in Europe and Russia demonstrates that notwithstanding the many similarities, there are major differences in approaches, arising from very different historical experiences. This is rather good news: it is difference that makes us move ahead.

Chapter 10

Doing U.S. History in Australia A Comparative Perspective ian tyrrell

The chapters in this volume show the richness, complexity, and depth of European historiography on the United States and demonstrate in subtle ways how location and perspective still matter in the interpretation of U.S. history. The context of researching in Australia is vastly different in many ways from that in Europe, but there are some underlying commonalities. In the first section of this essay, I outline the context of the social production of historical scholarship in Australia. In the second section, I compare Australian and European historiography of American history to draw out presences and absences in the European case.

american history in australia There are currently thirty-nine universities in Australia, but in only about a third of these is serious work done in American history.1 While the number of researchers is less in Europe than in the United States, researchers in Australia specializing in U.S. history probably amount to less than half of the total history faculty of a single large U.S. state university. At any one time, there is a slightly larger number of doctoral students enrolled. Europe’s concentration of research is therefore clearly much greater, even though much less than that of the United States. While both European and American universities have faced cutbacks in resources available for teaching and research in the humanities 181

182

|

Chapter 10

in recent years, history departments in Australian universities have faced continual review, administrative upheaval, and downsizing over the past two decades. The essays in this book, particularly chapter 1, show that timing is important. The takeoff in professional historiography in Europe came, by and large, in the immediately post–World War II period, when American power made the study of the politics, institutions, and culture of the United States more or less unavoidable. Nevertheless, as chapter 1 shows, European U.S. history has much deeper cumulative historiographical traditions, going back to the nineteenth-century luminaries Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce and early twentieth-century figures such as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.2 Despite some antecedents in the interwar period, U.S. history in Australia dates from the visit of Allan Nevins to Sydney University in 1943. From that time to the 1960s, Norman Harper at Melbourne University did pioneering work in the field.3 The boom in the study of the United States in Australia (and New Zealand) occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s, when higher education in the Western world was expanding rapidly, and its story roughly parallels that of the European expansion, though from a smaller base. Of active historians, it seems that a larger proportion in Australia than in Europe have been trained in the United States; a good many of these are Australians or New Zealanders returning from American graduate schools, while some (smaller number) have been trained in Australia.4 Others, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, were Americans.5 The Australian situation is more like the Canadian than the European case in this and many other respects.6 Another theme running through this volume is language and translation. Chapter 4 enlarges the concept beyond the mechanics of language to style and rhetorical presentation in innovative ways, but it would be difficult to isolate an Australian style that is outside the U.S. version in these terms. In the use of the English language, the position in Australia is similar to that of Great Britain and unlike those of some other participants in this European project. Australian historians have found American publication relatively easy because of the shared language, though it is clear that in Europe, an increasing amount of new scholarship is being produced in or translated into English. Other factors suggest that being Anglophone has drawbacks. Australia has become a monolingual society. “Community” languages proliferate because of the nation’s sheer post–World War II ethnic diversity, but few academics or students have

Doing U.S. History in Australia

|

183

command of even one foreign language. European historians’ command of English is far better than Australian historians’ command of any foreign language required or useful for the research of American history. Few Australian scholars can investigate key non-English sources for what the new transnational history treats as important—including borderlands, much of early “America,” and the multilateral history of migration. The only major exception is the very few Latin Americanists, such as David Cahill. The second chapter in this volume rightly points to the importance of the political and cultural contexts in which European histories of the United States are written, and the same applies to Australia. I would, however, also direct attention to the structural features for reproduction of knowledge, as studied by the authors of chapter 3. Despite apparent similarities between the United States and Australia, there is little place for American history in the “staffing”—that is, the faculty—of Australian universities, though more in the curricula. There is a widely held if unstated assumption in Australia that almost anybody can teach and talk about aspects of American history (especially to the public). Thus an American teaching some other topic in history might be asked, when numbers fall in that field, to contribute to U.S. history. Mind you, a significant impetus to the study of American history in Australia came from people who were not trained in the field but came from related fields or simply adapted well. The late Rhys Isaac, a South Africa–born, England-trained historian of France, is the best example.7 The social production of history through professional practice is inevitably distinctive to some degree in every country. In Australia, experts in the American field tend to look toward the metropole, in this case the United States, for intellectual sustenance—and do not reach out to their colleagues in Australia except through the biennial conferences of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA). These have been important venues for sharing concerns and developing collegiality. But in regard to specialized research work, these historians look to the United States for validation, because only with international success will Australia accept them. A similar reservation applies to other fields of non-Australian history—but the magnetic pull is stronger in U.S. history than in any other field since the U.S. market can still sustain monographic publication in a way that few others can. This makes the selection of material for the Australasian Journal of American Studies (AJAS; founded in 1980) difficult, though what it has achieved is commendable, given the obstacles.

184

|

Chapter 10

Reflecting the particularly Australian interest in things American, the engaging parts of U.S. history are, for students, post–World War II history, race, the American Civil War, Hollywood and other pop culture, and recent presidential history. For more than two decades, most of the people who have commentated in the Australian media on U.S. foreign policy, for example, have not been linked with American history at all, and their historical knowledge of the United States is limited. In universities, many people study and teach American topics, for example in film, literature, and cultural studies, but are not and in many cases never have been members of ANZASA, and some key figures reject the idea that the United States (rather than film, for example) is their field of study. Strategic studies people as much as or more than historians shape the wider public perception of American foreign policy and the United States more generally—because their work is more present centered and instrumentalist. The world of American history and American studies in Australia is therefore wider than the one that its American history specialists inhabit. Australia has annual Fulbright symposia, but historians are almost always frozen out because the topics concern current events—for example, trade relations, the state of the American-Australian alliance, and contemporary environmental issues. The United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, created with money from Rupert Murdoch and the Australian government, shares the utilitarian and present-centered outlook, even though certain of its subsidiary academic programs give history a place.8 The center’s work has lifted the profile of the academic study of the United States, especially its politics, but not noticeably the place of history in that scheme of things.

comparative reflections In European studies of American history, there is a noticeable concentration on topics concerning internal matters of interest to various European countries and on transatlantic issues. But there is no direct relationship between geographic placement on the one hand and interpretation or intellectual preoccupations on the other. This is particularly the case in Australia. The pronounced academic interest in the American South, black-white race issues, and slavery is unlikely to have been due to reflection on Australia’s race problem, which is more akin to Amerindian history, in terms of amnesia and social marginalization.9

Doing U.S. History in Australia

|

185

Moreover, American history in Australia rarely engages the country’s Asian context, noticeable in the strength of Asian history there. Australian historians of the United States show no effective or persistent interest in Asian-American contacts and relations. The field of AustralianAmerican relations was prominent from the 1940s to the 1960s, necessitating a Pacific focus in the work of, for example, Norman Harper, Neville Meaney, and, much later, Roger J. Bell, but this approach is now seen as not mainstream. The study of the major issues of U.S. historiography—such as the American Revolution, Atlantic history, slavery, Progressivism, and civil rights—has replaced the history of Australian-American relations as the dominant form of historical practice. Nevertheless, the past three presidents of ANZASA have tried and are continuing to support linkages with Asia, especially the Japanese Association for American Studies. In Australia, the full professionalization of history came much later than in either Europe or the United States. The Australian Historical Association dates from only the 1970s, and U.S. historians were not integrated into it until several decades later. This is because ANZASA is a slightly older organization, established in 1964, and U.S. historians in Australia felt allegiance primarily to it. Delayed professionalization meant different professionalization patterns from both the United States and Europe, patterns that accentuated the dependency on overseas theory and practical links. One could, by comparing the United States, Europe, and Australia, build a model of the differential professionalization of historiography and show its uneven development, with different relations between historians and publics and between professional academic history and nonacademic forms. Unevenness and hence the ability or need to borrow from others changes the configuration of institutions and accentuates ties to foreign sources of culture. Australian historiography until the 1970s was more international than later in nearly all fields, being disfigured in the 1980s and 1990s by cultural nationalism—yet is now discovering or rediscovering transnational approaches.10 Sometimes, as in the work of Marilyn Lake and Patrick Wolfe, Australianists have fruitfully studied the United States in transnational perspective.11 Judging by the work that these chapters document, the view from Europe seems, with some exceptions, Atlantic centered.12 Australia’s location and history have, in contrast, encouraged a tradition of comparative analysis of settler societies in the larger British world diaspora. Wolfe and others have recently reinvigorated the comparative study of

186

|

Chapter 10

U.S. and Australian settler societies in innovative ways that incorporate transpacific comparisons or suggest that such an approach might be productive.13 The settler society approach is not so obvious in the European case. Some of these comparative histories have pointed to the importance of neglected U.S. linkages across the Pacific, even from the nineteenth century.14 Australia’s location in the Pacific should call Australian academic attention to the changing global role of the United States, which is intimately tied to its two-ocean geopolitical position. U.S. academics have been slow to realize and capitalize on this insight, as Bruce Cumings argues.15 The addition of Pacific perspectives is appropriate to U.S. historiography and to current events, as Barack Obama is taking the Asia-Pacific far more seriously than previous presidents have done. This perspective is also highly relevant given the epochal change in the balance of power between Asia and Euro-America, which might take one hundred years to accomplish but already seems irreversible. Another perspective from the Pacific concerns language. When we think about it from an Asia-Pacific angle, we see that lack of facility in foreign languages is a real yet relative problem. While Europeans might criticize Americans who write U.S. history without possessing foreign languages, the question of non-European languages tends to be neglected. Knowledge of Chinese and Japanese, plus other Asian and African languages, might be equally important for future approaches to U.S. history. Most if not all of the European countries have powerful national education systems with centralized bureaucratic control of standards and funding, like Australia. This is indeed different from the United States, with its federal mix and its private and state university divisions. But the continental European structures are also different from those in Australia, which seem more like the British in some respects, for example in research evaluation and student funding. In student places and student financing, Australia is a partial model for or harbinger of the recent British changes rather than a follower.16 In Europe, an emphasis remains on nationally based historical scholarship, and so too in Australia, but without the European Union’s supranational layer of policy formation for higher education. The role of money is key in all these systems. Funding problems and intrusive state bureaucracy are concerns shared between Europe and Australia but less so by the United States, where bureaucratic intervention is comparatively minimal. However, U.S. lawmakers’ political

Doing U.S. History in Australia

|

187

interventionism is, as shown in the disputes over the National History Standards of the 1990s and ongoing attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities, always a potent threat linked to budgetary constraints. Finally, across the entire Western world, funding constraints in the wake of the 2008 recession have interfered with humanities scholarship and have had far greater effects than direct political interference on types of interpretation, though the motivation for financial restraint may often be politically conditioned. The relationship between American studies and American history appears variable in many of these European countries and might have been dealt with systematically. In some countries American studies has a loosely affiliated or organized structure and in others a more coherent interdisciplinary focus. In smaller education systems, like Australia’s, bracketing history, literature, and other fields together is needed for practical reasons, but the disciplines remain distinct. A final comment concerns an absence, not a presence. More than one of the chapters raises the question of the wider public, to show that different academic-public relationships exist in Europe. The consideration of “the public” could include, from an Australian or an American perspective, the position of public history in the United States as a selfconscious field. An idea that perhaps does not travel well, public history seems absent from European histories of the United States, whereas Australian historians have adopted its terminology and methodology.17 The shaping of public history relates to the different traditions of state and local history writing in the United States and in various European countries, which might well have been considered, since they have historically structured the growth of fields and institutions of a professional nature in the United States. The equivalents cannot occur in Europe, because the role of state and local historians is institutionally and politically different, focused on the home country. One wonders how this configuration alters the nature of European historical scholarship on the United States on a scholarly level, especially in comparison with the historic importance of the “useful history” concept in the United States.18

conclusion It would be easy to turn such a piece as this into a bleat about the problems of doing U.S. history abroad and lament lack of recognition. However, European history, it is clear from the other chapters, is achieving high

188

|

Chapter 10

standards, innovative breakthroughs, and a greater recognition in the United States, especially when works are translated into English. Australian scholars have not had the same linguistic disadvantage, but they have, like Europeans, had a capacity to think as outsiders. Structure also matters, however. The broad teaching of U.S. history to undergraduates and graduate students in Australia, not the specialized graduate school focus that prevails in the top American universities, means that fresh insights can be obtained and are used in scholarship, just as in Europe, as these chapters show. In Australia, however, the teaching-research nexus, which has until recently been quite strong, is weakening, with the plethora of Australian Research Council funding schemes for postdoctoral work, relief from teaching, senior research fellowships, and the like. Once again, structures intervene to shape scholarship, in this case forcing it toward international collaboration, team research, large-scale projects, and quick publication outcomes, with the emphasis on metric evaluations that privilege articles over books. This application of the model of the “hard” sciences is hostile to the synthetic approach that has been notable in Europe and also offers a very different scenario for the future from that of the United States. For this reason alone, Australian research will likely continue to offer variations on the interpretation of the American past as this system takes stronger root over the next twenty years.

Chapter 11

Viewing American History from Japan The Potential of Comparison natsuki aruga

As a Japanese historian of the United States, I have an abiding preoccupation: what meaning does my work have in mainstream historiography, predominantly written by U.S. historians? This book directly confronts this concern and leads me to the conclusion that foreign scholars can indeed make a contribution to the field of American history. Thus encouraged, I argue further that foreignness, while lacking an ingrained native perspective, can nevertheless be a useful tool for uncovering aspects that have been overlooked. Before laying out this argument, I will briefly discuss the development of American history and its present state in Japan in light of the chapters that my European colleagues have contributed. Location matters to history writing because it is not a mere geographical place. It has its own culture, language, people, politics, institutions, economy, and all other features of human life. This book argues for the pertinence of several factors in Europe, and I am particularly struck by those for which there have been strong parallels in Japan. As in Europe, in Japan the political context and the structure of academic institutions have been profoundly important in shaping approaches to American history, not least in fostering the distinctive subject of American studies; in both arenas there has been a conscious creation of a need and a desire for learning American history; and changing historiographical trends in Japan echo those that chapter 1 delineates. The initial Japanese interest in American society and history came from the need to protect the 189

190

|

Chapter 11

country after it opened its doors to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, and politics has continued to impact academia.

the past and the present state of u.s. history in japan Two decades ago, I wrote in an article in the OAH Newsletter that Japanese historians of the United States were isolated both domestically and internationally.1 Since that time, the international isolation may have diminished, but U.S. history still lies largely outside the historical academic establishment in Japan. Yet if they are not often found in traditional history departments, somewhat paradoxically Japan apparently has a larger number of Americanist historians than any European country, the United Kingdom included, thanks essentially to the sheer size of its higher education sector. In Japan the study of history has traditionally been divided into national, Eastern (mainly Chinese), and Western (European, in particular British, German, and French). Few history departments in Japanese universities have professors of American history or offer U.S. history courses, which are usually placed in other departments, such as English literature, political science, or especially American studies. American studies departments and programs turn out the majority of historians of the United States in Japan. While in Europe there exists a tradition of linking U.S. history to European national histories, Japanese historians of the United States have worked more closely with Americanists in other disciplines, such as political science, economics, and literature, than with historians of Europe, Asia, or Japan. In contrast to their colleagues in some European countries, whose primary field until fairly recently was often their own country or international relations (see chapter 6), Japanese Americanist historians focus on the United States and rarely have contact with their colleagues who work on the history of Japan. They have perhaps been able to specialize in American history somewhat more readily than European historians, who are subject to the requirements set by their universities, governments, and national audiences, as chapter 3 discusses. It might also be noted that unlike in European countries and the United States, the doctoral degree until recently has not been a requirement for becoming a university professor in Japan. Today the number of Americanists with PhDs, from both Japan and the United States, is increasing, but they are still not a majority.

Viewing American History from Japan

|

191

The political conditions in the Meiji era shaped the structural position of U.S. history in Japan. When Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships forced the Tokugawa bakufu (government) to open its doors to the West in 1853, this spurred Japan’s leaders to learn about American society, and to protect their nation they needed to modernize it with Western ideas and technology. They looked initially to the United States, with its freedom and democracy and rise as a world power.2 Many books and pamphlets on the subject were published. Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of the most important intellectual leaders, translated the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. “All men are created equal” was the first sentence in Fukuzawa’s pamphlet series Gakumon no Susume (Encouragement of learning; 1872–76), which introduced the ideas of the Enlightenment; 3.4 million copies were sold. Today many Japanese children can recite the sentence without knowing that it came from the Declaration of Independence. Heroes of American history—such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln—were introduced, and subsequently the celebrated works of Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce were published in Japanese translations.3 Yet when the Meiji government eventually embarked on building a new, modern nation under the rule of the emperor, it looked to European monarchies such as Britain and Germany for ideas and institutions, because by then the darker sides of American history, such as slavery and plutocracy, had been more fully recognized and the American example was no longer seen as ideal. Government officials and professors of national universities were sent to European countries to study both practical and academic subjects, so the study of Western history focused on Europe and ignored the United States.4 The Taisho era (1912–26), which followed the Meiji, saw a brief moment of relative democracy. In 1918 a systematic and academic approach to American history began with the establishment of the Hepburn Chair of the American Constitution, History and Diplomacy in the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo.5 It should be noted that it was not placed in a history department. Its first professor, Yasaka Takagi, initially spent three years studying at American universities and made American democracy his central theme, like many U.S. scholars of the time, seeing Puritanism as its spiritual origin and the frontier as its most important environmental explanation.6 In the 1930s, when Japanese-American relations deteriorated, leading to the Pacific War, the teaching of both the English language and American history was

192

|

Chapter 11

discouraged. However, interest in American society and longing for American culture, as illustrated especially by Hollywood movies, did not fade away among many Japanese people. On the eve of the war, some books on American history, such as Frederick L. Allen’s Only Yesterday, were translated into Japanese and sold well. Liberals, believing that mutual understanding between the two countries would be the only way to prevent hostilities, regarded studying about the United States as of critical importance, and in 1939 the Institute for American Studies was founded at Rikkyo University.7 Having survived its wartime political and financial adversities, it has become a major center of American studies in Japan. After the war, Takagi and his associates anticipated European developments by founding the Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS) in 1947. From 1950 to 1964, Takagi and his colleagues published the five-volume Genten Amerikashi (Documentary history of the United States).8 As in Europe, during the Cold War (and under the occupation) the study of American history in Japan received a large amount of financial aid from U.S. government organizations and other American agencies. Much of this kind of support has continued, now shorn of its initial political implications, and in addition a number of Japanese foundations have funded research, education, and international exchange projects that have sent young Japanese scholars to American research institutions.9 Today at least two hundred universities offer classes on American culture and society, and about forty have American studies majors. In American studies, history is considered the core field, but U.S. history still remains outside history departments in most universities.10 In continental Europe, departments or schools of American studies in universities have provided academic homes for historians of the United States. In Japan, the American studies institutes in some universities have played a similar, important role, serving as libraries, offering open seminars and conferences, and publishing newsletters, journals, and books.11 The significance of international seminars and conferences, which give Japanese scholars opportunities to work closely with American professors, cannot be overestimated. The first of these was the Tokyo-Stanford University Seminar in American Studies (1950–56), followed by the Kyoto Summer Seminar (1951–87), the Sapporo Cool Seminar (1980–95), the Nagoya Summer Seminar (2007–11), and the Doshisha American Studies Summer Seminar (2012–14).12 Academic associations also play their part. The JAAS was reorganized in 1966

Viewing American History from Japan

|

193

and now has about twelve hundred members.13 More than a third list history as their field of study, and a majority have full-time college teaching positions. The association also publishes the annual Amerika Kenkyu (American review; founded in 1967) and Japanese Journal of American Studies (founded in 1981). There are also a number of local associations for American studies from Hokkaido to Kyushu. As in some European countries (see chapter 1), historians of the United States in Japan have been establishing separate groups. The Society of American Historical Studies was founded in 1975 and reorganized in 2004 as the Japanese Association for American History. It has a current membership of more than four hundred (of which about one hundred are graduate students) and publishes the annual Amerikashi Kenkyu (Studies of American history; founded in 1978). As these figures suggest, the number of scholars practicing American history appears to be larger in Japan than in any country other than the United States. But there are nearly eight hundred four-year universities in Japan, whose almost three thousand scholars of European history far outnumber those of American history. The latter is still a newcomer and not a well-recognized field in Japanese academia, even though many books on U.S. history, both academic and general, are published in the country.

from international isolation to internationalization Generally speaking, until one or two decades ago, Japanese historians of the United States were isolated from their colleagues in the United States and other parts of the world. This international isolation resulted from the differences of language and culture. Chapter 4 explores some of the implications of language difference on writing U.S. history in Europe. I find this bemusing, for from a Japanese viewpoint all IndoEuropean languages seem sufficiently similar that continental Europeans could readily learn English. Further, the majority of Americans share with Europeans a cultural history of Judeo-Christianity and the heritage of myths and folklore of ancient Greece and Rome and the Germanic tribes. This is what we Japanese think of as Western language and culture. No doubt there are problems of translation and understanding from one part of that culture to another, but if so, what are the implications for understanding across much greater cultural divides? With respect to the body of American historical writing, Japanese scholars face a challenge in escaping from their remote or outlying position.

194

|

Chapter 11

The Japanese public likes to read about American history and society—but in Japanese. There are numerous translations of books written by U.S. historians. Japanese Americanists have been heavily involved in such translations, though it must be acknowledged that many Americanists occasionally depend on translated versions of U.S. history, especially on topics outside their specialty. Needless to say, for their own research they use English-written primary sources in archives in the United States or elsewhere and secondary works in English. Several chapters in this book refer to recent internationalizing trends, from which Japan has benefited. An increasing number of Japanese Americanists have been trained in U.S. universities, and there have been major institutional efforts promoting international exchanges and conferences to bring U.S. history specialists in Japan into the global academic community of American history. Several foundations have supplied financial support for such enterprises. For example, with a grant from the Japan–United States Friendship Commission, in 1990 the JAAS, in collaboration with the U.S.-based American Studies Association, began to include at its annual meetings two workshops in English, in which both American and Japanese scholars participate.14 With the increasing internationalization of academic associations and exchanges of scholars, the international isolation of American history in Japan is not as great a problem as formerly. Japanese Americanists can, however, encounter some of the problems that European scholars discuss in this volume. They engage with American historiography by reading and listening to U.S. scholars, who are often invited to seminars and conferences. But, to employ the phrase that chapter 6 uses, a rising generation of younger scholars has tended to go native in research and writing. This is still not common, though it creates an identity dilemma for Japanese historians of the United States: are they historians of the United States who happen to be Japanese or “Japanese” historians? Can Japanese historians of the United States still do research based on their Japaneseness in this globalizing world?15 Japanese historiography of the United States from the 1950s through the mid-1960s may be said to have been divided into two streams: one influenced by Marxism, and the other reflecting U.S. historiography, which was followed by a majority of Americanist historians in Japan, most of whom were members of the JAAS. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, adherents of the former produced important articles and books about American slavery and racism. The latter group published pioneering works on political and intellectual history under the influence of

Viewing American History from Japan

|

195

American consensus historians such as Richard Hofstadter and Louis Hartz. This picture changed in the later 1960s, as in Europe, when the New Left came to dominate American history. Soon thereafter, Marxist historians joined the JAAS, and the two groups worked together in conferences and seminars. This was the context of the organization of the Society of American Historical Studies. In the mid-1980s, about a decade later than in the United States, the new social history came onstage in Japan. As these examples illustrate, Japanese historians of the United States closely follow American historiography and absorb much of it, though they rarely influence it (except, as again in Europe, in topics such as migration and bilateral foreign relationships). In general, the international exchange is still flowing one-way from the United States to Japan.

then how can a foreign historian contribute to the historiography of the united states? Here I propose a broader use of the idea of comparative history than that of the generally accepted definition, studies of more than one society not far removed from one another in space and time.16 William Sewell has offered other meanings and draws attention to “comparative perspective”: “viewing historical problems in a context broader than their particular social, geographical, and temporal setting.” He suggests the validity of comparisons between distant societies or the study of a single nation—not two or more—from another perspective.17 In an echo of chapter 5, I argue that a loosely defined comparative history approach, or Sewell’s comparative perspective, can provide new insights about the United States and produce new questions and new findings overlooked by historians operating from domestic American perspectives. For this purpose, I will draw on my study of child labor in America during World War II.18 But before discussing this research, perhaps I can suggest that the comparative perspective points up another little-noticed aspect of American society: people enjoying consumerism within a nation at war. Examinations of American society from within the national boundaries tend to focus on the image of a society totally committed to the war effort, but an outsider’s view highlights another, quite different, characteristic.19 In wartime America, women were a major target for labor mobilization, whereas in Japan, school-age children and young people were mobilized. From the American standpoint, we may see the wartime

196

|

Chapter 11

employment of women as the norm and ask, “Why weren’t Japanese women mobilized?” Then we might investigate the mobilization of the United States and Japan in the war and try to explain the causes of the undermobilization of women in Japan. However, if we reverse the position and look at the United States from a Japanese perspective, we may ask, “Why were women, not children, a target for mobilization?” In my research, this very question allowed me to uncover the increase of child labor and youth employment and the decrease of school enrollment in American society during World War II. This in turn leads to a reconsideration of the domestic experience of the war. Beginning with the fact of more women going to work on the home front, one might conclude that the war advanced the historical trend toward more gender equality. However, if one’s point of departure is the increase in child labor, the war may no longer appear so good for American society as generally believed, in that it retarded the education and welfare of American children and youth. The existence of child labor in the United States during World War II perhaps would have remained unnoticed were it not for the question posed from a Japanese standpoint, the kind of question that can be produced only when American society is looked at from the outside.20 The German historian Jürgen Kocka has remarked on the possibility of comparative approaches allowing one to “identify questions and problems that one might miss, neglect, or just not invent otherwise,” citing Marc Bloch’s research. Bloch, with his understanding of the English enclosures of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, revealed in fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century Provence “corresponding though not identical changes in the structure of landownership” and contributed to “a far-reaching revision of the history of the region.”21 To some extent, Kocka’s comments may apply to my study. I started my exploration of wartime American society with a question derived from my understanding of the mobilization of school-age children and youth in support of the war effort in Japan. This led to a discovery of the corresponding, though different in nature, phenomenon of child labor during the war in the United States, something that had been unnoticed and that might contribute to some revision—even if not far-reaching—of the history of the American home front. In conclusion, I would like to call attention to the transnational meaning of this comparative perspective. The definition of transnational history usually centers on the subject of study—“peoples, institutions and ideas across and through national boundaries.”22 However, it

Viewing American History from Japan

|

197

may also encompass a transnational perspective. The comparative perspective that I have just illustrated looks into American society from the outside, crossing national boundaries. In transnational studies we usually deal with more than one nation, but in the above example the focus is on a single nation but from a transnational viewpoint. As it shows, with a foreign perspective, even a study of one nation can contribute to both comparative and transnational historiography.

Chapter 12

Not Quite at Home Writing American History in Denmark david e. nye

Scandinavian historians were seldom much concerned with the United States before World War II, and in Denmark only a few scattered courses were first offered in the 1930s.1 The field developed slowly after 1945, stimulated by the Fulbright Program.2 No American historians lived permanently in Denmark before the 1980s, although several came temporarily on exchanges. For decades, these visiting Americans and a few Danes taught U.S. history primarily in departments of English and seldom in history or political science departments. A Danish Center for American Studies was almost established in 1970 at Århus University, but antipathy to the Vietnam War shaped a political climate that made it impossible, and the first such center emerged two decades later, at the University of Southern Denmark.3 Arriving in 1982, I began as a foreign lecturer with a two-year contract at Odense University. I was not expected to stay, and the position did not include a pension. Like Americans on previous exchanges, I thought of it as a European interlude. However, a new book that was to be my ticket back home instead led to a job at Copenhagen University in 1987. The longer I remained in Europe, the more it refocused my teaching and research. This chapter reflects on that process, from the late Cold War until 2012, keeping in mind three other American U.S. historians hired in the late 1990s: Eric Guthey (Copenhagen Business School), Russell Duncan (Copenhagen University), and Jody Pennington (Århus University). 198

Writing American History in Denmark

|

199

In the 1980s there were five U.S. historians dispersed among Denmark’s seven universities. The other four passed away or retired before the first American studies degree program opened, in 2003. Younger scholars not yet visible in 1982 replaced them. As the only U.S. historian at my university, I saw myself as a visitor. No Danish history department offered U.S. history courses, and the English faculty retained a strong British orientation. In all the Nordic countries, the shadow of Vietnam delayed the growth of the field. Indeed, in Norway the leading Americanists felt it necessary at the height of the anti– Vietnam War protests to write a letter that disavowed their support for U.S. foreign policy while asserting their continued interest in studying the United States. As late as 1991, Copenhagen University emphatically rejected a proposal to establish a center for American studies, even though external funding was available. In the 1980s, most Danish historians remained focused on political, military, and diplomatic history. Several of them considered Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis a viable argument and regarded Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform as a foundational text. In recent decades, the movement of scholars via the Fulbright Program and other exchanges has increased interest in social and cultural history. Yet even in 2012, Danish historians remained strongly Eurocentric, and Danish academic administrators still forced almost all U.S. historians to be part of English departments. Despite this unreceptive academic environment, Danish culture gradually provided me with a new framework of perception and comparison. The Nordic countries had sought a third way between American capitalism and Soviet communism. During the Cold War they were caught between the great powers, but they stubbornly resisted being subsumed into either the U.S. or the Soviet cultural orbit. They created capitalist welfare states with free university education, free medical care, and a wide range of social services. In Scandinavia, the monarch remained a powerful symbol and prime ministers performed little of the ceremonial work required of American presidents. And in contrast to religiously pluralistic America, the predominantly Lutheran population remained almost indifferent to abortion or sex education and found debates about creationism absurd. There were minorities of Fourth World peoples in Lapland and Greenland as well as new immigrants (many with Moslem backgrounds), but the Nordic countries were far more homogeneous than the United States, and the world’s highest taxes weakened class differences. In short, the politics and culture of

200

|

Chapter 12

Scandinavia provided provocative contrasts to those of the United States. The Nordic countries did not feel that they were behind the United States but rather that they were on a different path. Nordic distinctiveness robustly persists despite full exposure to American popular culture. The average citizen has seen thousands of hours of American programs, but Scandinavian television does not dub U.S. films or television shows. Their libraries and bookstores contain many American books. The local butcher or baker speaks English well and can sing American songs from memory. The penetration of U.S. popular culture into these nations may suggest that they are Americanizing, but no one who lives in them can miss the justifiable pride that Scandinavians feel in their societies. They see things to admire in the United States, but they do not want to imitate it. They have lower unemployment, a better trade balance, less national debt, a high standard of living, and the world’s highest literacy levels. They are advanced technologically, if measured by such things as television and mobile phone ownership and Internet use. Despite the cold climate, they use considerably less energy per capita than the United States. Their citizens are slimmer and live longer. An American historian immersed there begins to see the United States in new and not always flattering ways. In short, living in Denmark had a much stronger impact on my thinking than Danish history departments did. Professionally, European Americanists proved crucial to my development. The United States Information Agency sent me to lecture in all parts of Europe and sent American scholars to Denmark as well. My network also grew through the Europe-wide Socrates and Erasmus academic and student exchange programs. If there were few U.S. historians in Denmark, there was a community of European Americanists, including the congenial Nordic Association for American Studies, where I found a few other Americans, notably Bob Baehr in Norway, who opened many doors. The frequent conferences and seminars included memorable events in Dubrovnik, Rome, Venice, Salzburg, Munich, Mainz, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Oslo, Tromsø, Tampere, and Uppsala. This Europeanization culminated in a year (1991–92) at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study as part of a group of seven scholars organized by Rob Kroes. We focused on the recontextualizations and transformations that occur during Americanization and held many conferences, whose proceeding were collected into six volumes of essays. With Mick Gidley, a British colleague, I edited fifteen essays for American Photographs in Europe (1994).4 These examined such things

Writing American History in Denmark

|

201

as the reception of American art photography at German exhibitions from 1893 to 1929, the arrival of the Kodak camera in Britain and the response to its democratization of image making, the role of photography in immigrant writing, the reception of American photography in France after World War II, and the Family of Man photographic exhibit in Moscow during the Cold War. Even as I became rooted in Europe, I still expected to return to the United States. Yet I had began to think about my research in new ways. At the Roosevelt Center in Middleburg, the Netherlands, I heard Tony Badger give a paper discussing whether Europeans should aspire to write books that were indistinguishable from those published by Americans or whether this was a fundamentally mistaken goal. In a plenary session at an Oslo conference, Orm Øverland admitted that as a Yale graduate student he had had precisely that aspiration and took no interest in immigration history, much less Nordic ethnic groups in the United States.5 In midcareer, however, he redefined his professional goals and became part of a cohort of European scholars who recovered a nuanced social and cultural history of immigrant life, including many works of American literature published in the United States in languages other than English.6 Such translation and recovery projects were beyond my capabilities and outside my interests. The advantages I increasingly found in an Old World location were quite different. On one level, making constant comparisons between the United States and Europe brought new topics into view. Just as important, I found myself increasingly drawn into contact with European historians of technology. Our shared points of reference were not the United States but electrification, railroads, communication networks, and the social construction of technological systems. I remained an Americanist in this new context, but the themes and audiences were new. At the same time, the field of American studies in the United States was shifting rapidly, to focus on race, multicultural identities, cultural studies, gender issues, and borderlands.7 Technology had been a central concern of American studies in the 1950s and 1960s, but it had all but disappeared from the field by the 1990s.8 I wrote less for this disappearing audience than for the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), whose meetings I attended more regularly than any others. I eventually won three prizes from SHOT and served on its executive committee. When job offers did come from the United States, all were in technology studies. In an unanticipated way, the European sojourn had facilitated a shift in my professional identity.

202

|

Chapter 12

Ironically, in the midst of this transformation I was called to the first professor’s chair in American studies in Denmark, which led to fuller integration of both me and U.S. history into Danish universities. Returning to Odense in 1992, now renamed the University of Southern Denmark, I built up the first Center for American Studies. We expanded to a permanent staff of six (three in literature, myself, and two other historians, Helle Porsdam and Carl Pedersen) plus a visiting Fulbright scholar each year. There also were adjunct faculty in other departments, some teaching assistants, and a few PhD students. We hosted several conferences, and for six years I coedited American Studies in Scandinavia. It was still a small group but quite a change from the previous norm, of one or two Americanists appended to an English department. By 2012 the center was turning away more students than it could admit to the BA and MA programs, and it had trained most of the recent Danish PhDs in American studies. Between 1982 and 2013, permanent Danish university positions held by historians of the United States increased from five to ten, even though four of these professors retired or passed away. But although the field generally moved against the tide of Danish retrenchment in the humanities, a popular American studies program at the Copenhagen Business School closed entirely in 2012, and several universities still had no American historians. Moreover, as in Australia (see chapter 10), universities in Denmark began to emphasize externally funded group research, an unfavorable development for a tiny group of Americanists. Our diverse interests support a broad palette of courses but make collaborative research difficult. Collaboration requires finding specialists with similar research interests, who are more likely to be at other universities, so the Internet has fundamentally altered the possibilities for American historians abroad. Information previously received just a few times a year by newsletter or at conferences is constantly available. Discussion groups break the isolation of lone specialists. Materials once available only in archives or particular libraries are widely accessible. Each year, barriers to research have melted away, even if direct access to archives remains the ideal option. Moreover, one can now keep pace with American events and everyday life far more easily than in the 1980s, when one tried to stay up to date through the BBC and the International Herald Tribune. The double focus of the American historian in Europe can develop into stereoscopic cultural vision. He or she inhabits two cultural and linguistic universes, which intersect at some points but elsewhere run parallel or

Writing American History in Denmark

|

203

contradict each other. The bicultural perspective that develops is founded on a host of collisions, refractions, and reinterpretations. The continual similarities and disparities provide a sense of complexity and depth. As other chapters in this volume attest, European-born Americanists have a similar experience, starting from their side of the Atlantic. Comparisons suggest research topics. For example, Denmark provides a dramatic contrast to the American propensity to value the sublime in nature, architecture, and technology. The Danish landscape and material culture are constructed to emphasize the small, the cozy, and a human scale. Danes periodically discuss building skyscrapers in Copenhagen and usually decide not to. Such differences helped to frame my book on the American technological sublime. Likewise, contrasts between Danish and American energy use suggested a book to me on how consumption drove the formation of U.S. energy regimes.9 Working abroad has had other effects. A few historians who must cover all of American history cannot maintain narrowly defined specializations. Even a small U.S. liberal arts college has enough American historians to carve up the field into tidy units that are seldom more than fifty years per researcher. In contrast, most American historians in Europe are obliged to cover a much longer span of time and range of topics. This encourages one to conceive books on themes that stretch over long periods and ask broad questions. The expatriate Americanist can paint on a large canvas, drawing on a stereoscopic, comparative vision. However, the audience in Europe for even such broadly conceived books is limited, and one almost certainly needs a U.S. publisher. On the other hand, each nation needs textbooks suited to its students. Scandinavians are strong in English, but they have a rather disjointed knowledge of the United States, based mostly on popular culture and recent political events. They have only a sketchy idea of U.S. history and lack much basic information that American students have imbibed before university. To address this need, I wrote several short pamphlets, for example on the American sense of space and on the U.S. political system. When other teachers began to use them without my prodding (or permission), I wrote a proper textbook about the contemporary United States, which includes frequent historical detours to sketch in how institutions and practices emerged.10 Aimed at a niche audience, it suggests one public role for American historians in Europe. Equivalent books have appeared in Norway, Sweden, and elsewhere. An American historian abroad can also become a cultural interpreter for the host country, an ersatz expert on how foreigners see the natives.

204

|

Chapter 12

I turned the stereo gaze on Denmark in a short book for foreign students.11 Yet despite somewhat lucrative invitations to lecture on this topic, I gradually withdrew from this intellectual cul-de-sac. Such efforts underline one’s outsider status, hardly impress native-born experts, and have no effect on local foundations, which remain unwilling to send American researchers to the United States. Indeed, there seem to be no examples of Denmark’s four nonnative Americanists winning significant grants in Denmark. Instead, support has come from outside, for example from the Leverhulme Trust, the Dutch Royal Academy, and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as invitations from universities in the rest of Europe, the United States, and even China. Nor do the American historians in Denmark often speak about the United States on the local evening news. That role seems best reserved for native-speaker Americanists. They fluently master the nuanced comparisons that the media want, and they can contend with glib journalistic questions about current events. The phones of my colleagues Jørn Brøndal and Niels Bjerre-Poulsen ring after such expertise, and in the Netherlands, Norway, and no doubt elsewhere, the situation is much the same. The American-born historian permanently in Europe negotiates a bicultural status, drifting into the embrace of the local culture but keeping a professional eye on the United States. This split identity has its advantages. One learns to be comparative, to interpret and explain the United States to outsiders, and to tackle larger topics for Americans, written from the outside looking in. Yet the Danish acceptance is fragile. In 2013, only one of seven Danish universities offers a degree in American studies, history departments still require no courses on the United States, and most of the ten dispersed specialists struggle for scarce resources in English departments. Such a small, divided group cannot create a Danish school of American history, though occasionally collective works do appear.12 To escape marginality, each turns to or helps to organize transnational organizations. For example, in 2006, with two American academics in Norway and Sweden, I cofounded the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies. Because its name does not refer to the United States but emphasizes comparative and European dimensions, I believe, we easily received grants for six conferences, established a book series, and built links to like-minded scholars across Europe. American history seems most palatable to Europeans when presented as scholarship that is comparative, international, and contemporary.

Writing American History in Denmark

|

205

The American historian permanently in Europe is like an anthropologist who has moved so frequently between two cultures that each is deeply familiar. Yet professionally one is most at home neither in the host nation nor in its university system nor in the often myopic United States but rather with fellow European Americanists.

Chapter 13

American History in the Shadow of Empire A Plea for Marginality françois furstenberg

The international expansion of U.S. history in the past two decades presents both opportunities and risks to American historians outside the United States. Enormous credit goes to those who have led the charge, including Thomas Bender, David Thelen, Ian Tyrrell, and Bernard Bailyn. All have worked to broaden not just the intellectual but also the institutional range of American history. All have also thought about vexing issues such as translation, curricula, conferences, and journal publishing. Their impact has been tremendous and salutary. If exceptionalist approaches long positioned the United States as not just unique but also outside history—a nation exempt from the historical forces that have shaped the rest of the world—it follows that historians of the United States practicing outside that country would have little to offer Americans.1 But now American historians are urged to reach out, to connect their past with those of other nations and other peoples—to think of themselves as members of “a global community of historians of America.”2 And who better to help them do so than historians of the United States in Europe: they who have long spent their careers at the interstices of national history, between the histories of their own nations and the history of the United States. The turn away from exceptionalism offers European historians of the United States new and exciting opportunities, the chance “to extricate American history in Europe,” as chapter 1 puts it, “from the marginality that it had long suffered.” 206

American History in the Shadow of Empire |

207

As U.S. history has internationalized, its scholarship has grown. European historians now regularly publish their work with American university presses and in U.S.-based journals. Americans benefit from expanded intellectual and professional connections with historians in Europe, which help them break free from the provinciality they seek to overcome. U.S. academic life is enriched, both for faculty and for students, and U.S. history as a whole is improved by its engagement with broader trends in Atlantic history, global history, international history, borderlands history, and more. Meanwhile, historians of the United States in other countries have gained a new authority. Moving from the margins to the center garners bigger audiences, more prominent publishing platforms, and a greater voice in intellectual exchanges. All of this can lead to a somewhat triumphalist view of current historiography: intrepid historians overcoming retrograde intellectual impulses to create something new and better. But although that account has a great deal of truth, it is not the whole story. It may exaggerate the intellectual context that predated the recent wave of internationalization and occlude some of the drawbacks to the internationalization of U.S. history, both of which are worth pondering as we continue to expand our intellectual and institutional horizons. I have often wondered at historians’ tendency to denigrate past scholarship. We who study the past are quick to dismiss the scholarship that came before us. Books not even a decade old are often considered out of date. In such an intellectual context—always looking for the next turn— it is easy to overstate the alleged provinciality of U.S. history. Certainly there is much to criticize. American historians of the United States are far more monolingual than their colleagues in their own departments, not to speak of their counterparts in European departments of history. In general, they read less than historians of—for instance—Canada of the history of other nations. And it is true that many are mostly unfamiliar with the scholarship on American history produced in other countries. Nevertheless, one should be wary of generalizations. The United States is a big and diverse place, with a variety of regional and institutional cultures. The production of history happens very differently from one part of the country to another. The U.S. South has its own historical culture, as does New England, not to speak of the Southwest “borderlands” or the well-developed field of California history.3 But the United States is not just geographically diverse; it also contains a

208

|

Chapter 13

vast range of institutions of higher education, and one of the great strengths of the chapters in this collection is showing that institutions matter. The production of historical knowledge faces very different barriers when located at the underfunded branch campus of a public system than it does at a well-endowed university with a vigorous graduate program. American scholarship too is more complex than one might at first imagine from today’s triumphalist accounts of U.S. historiography. Repeated assaults on the allegedly exceptionalist nature of U.S. historiography may have made us a little lazy, a little too quick to generalize. I, for one, am impressed by how open U.S. history has been to outside influences, particularly European influences. Has there ever been a time when U.S. history was not in dialogue with that of other nations? European social and cultural theory, after all, informs the U.S. academy in general, and American history is hardly exempt. Just think of the European theorists who have transformed historical scholarship in the United States since the early twentieth century: Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, Reinhardt Koselleck, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek . . . not to mention Karl Marx. Generations of historians across the United States were, so to speak, brought up in historiography classes reading staples such as Carlo Ginzburg, R. G. Collingwood, E. P. Thompson, and Marc Bloch. The history of circulation between America and Europe that predates the United States itself no doubt facilitated some of this intellectual exchange. John Witherspoon, that dour Scots Presbyterian theologian, became the president of Princeton before the revolution; the renegade Venetian Jew Lorenzo Da Ponte, after writing the librettos to Mozart’s greatest operas, was the first professor of Italian at Columbia; Franz Lieber, a German refugee from Europe’s 1848 revolutions, taught political science at the University of South Carolina and Columbia for thirty years, largely founding the discipline in the United States. Since World War II, a constant stream of European visitors has continued to enrich American historical practice: François Furet at the University of Chicago, Roger Chartier at the University of Pennsylvania, Ginzburg at the University of California–Los Angeles, and Philippe Ariès, Pierre Goubert, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie at Johns Hopkins, among so many others.4 Writing on the American past has never been as detached from Europe as many people assume. Nineteenth-century historians such as Henry Adams and George Bancroft were more immersed in the

American History in the Shadow of Empire |

209

European archives than practically any U.S. historian today. Herbert Baxter Adams, a founder of the American Historical Association, completed his PhD in Germany. His student Frederick Jackson Turner also studied in Germany; Turner’s famous essay on the frontier—now regularly lambasted as the archetype of American provincialism and exceptionalism—drew on the geographic writings of Friedrich Ratzel and the political economy of Achille Loria. Even the much-maligned consensus historians were immersed in European historiography. Few readers of Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America today can come away unimpressed with his knowledge of European intellectual history. Erudite references to the most famous and even the most obscure European thinkers drop from practically every page. A generation of postwar German thinkers on personality, psychology, sociology, and more shaped the consensus historians. Reread Stanley Elkins’s Slavery and see if it seems enclosed within national borders. And it is hard to think of anyone in the mid-twentieth century who had a larger influence on the history of racism in America than Gunnar Myrdal or on the history of American political thought than Hannah Arendt. All this goes to say that it’s surprisingly hard to isolate what, precisely, is American about U.S. historiography. Are we talking about historical scholarship produced in the United States? Is it history written by people of American nationality? At the very least, it is worth distinguishing between scholarship produced by Europeans and scholarship produced in Europe. Consider, after all, the composition of many elite history departments in the United States. One of my mentors when I was an undergraduate at Columbia was a Swede who practices U.S. diplomatic history. At Johns Hopkins, the current department chair, a historian of what used to be called colonial America, is a British national. He holds the endowed chair previously held by a New Zealander trained in England who reshaped early American history and helped to launch dozens if not hundreds of articles, dissertations, and books on republicanism in the United States. One of the most prominent historians of the nineteenth-century United States at Harvard is German. All of this is pure anecdote, of course, and hardly an appropriate foundation on which to base any larger claims. But it does suggest that U.S. history, at the pinnacle of higher education in the United States at any rate, is pretty well represented by non-Americans. Indeed, I suspect that it would be hard to find the equivalent in Europe. But that, I suppose, is one of the benefits of empire: the ease with which it draws from the periphery.

210

|

Chapter 13

None of these reflections belie the arguments made in this volume. Quite the contrary: I am drawing on their marvelous combination of intellectual and institutional approaches to the production of U.S. historiography. It is this institutional interest—the focus on the “invariably unexplored influences of audiences, institutions, and academic structures and cultures”—that renders these essays so interesting.5 They all focus on the institutional/material context in which historical knowledge is produced: usually the university, with its tenure and promotion process, its rewards and penalties, and its funding for research, but also the structure of academic publishing, the creation of professional organizations, and the consolidation of professional networks. In this context, it is worth casting a more explicitly comparative eye on the institutional structure of the U.S. academy. The essays all gesture toward “the current hegemony of the American academy,” as the preface says, but they may not stress what is for me the one overwhelming feature of U.S. academia: from any comparative perspective, American universities are rich. They are not just rich; they are filthy rich. Set aside the big ones for a moment—Harvard, Yale, Texas, Stanford, and Princeton, whose combined endowments top one hundred billion dollars. Consider instead a smaller and less famous case. Grinnell College is a small liberal arts college in Iowa with just over sixteen hundred students. It has an endowment of $1.2–1.5 billion and in 2012 charged slightly under fifty thousand dollars per student in tuition and fees per year.6 By contrast, the Université de Montréal, where I taught for ten years, is a public institution whose total student enrollment, including affiliated schools, exceeds sixty thousand. It has an endowment of $173 million and charges just over three thousand dollars in tuition and fees per year.7 And I teach in Canada, which no one would consider a poor country. In recent years, I have come to think of the U.S. academic establishment in terms not too dissimilar from those applied to its defense establishment: rich, bloated, and wasteful but nevertheless incomparably the most powerful in the world.8 It is hard not be overwhelmed by the wealth of American campuses. Buildings sprout like mushrooms. Everything gleams, even the bathrooms. The libraries have resources unimaginable elsewhere. Computers abound. Today, as young brains from around the world flock to the United States for their training, some of them inevitably staying, I wonder about the extent to which U.S. academia serves as a tool for continued U.S. hegemony in the world. And so the rich get richer.

American History in the Shadow of Empire |

211

The wealth of the American university system determines what is, for me, its second dominant feature: its enormity. The size of U.S. higher education shapes the form and the content of its historical scholarship. Probably every college or university in the United States, no matter how small, has a history department, in most of which an important if not preponderant number of historians focus on the United States. The result is an output of scholarship on the United States whose sheer mass overwhelms. This situation creates a vast disparity in the number of practicing U.S. historians across national boundaries. Put it in slightly different terms: it means there are more scholars studying U.S. history at the Ohio State University than in all of France.9 Indeed, I would not be surprised if the number of U.S. historians in the single state of Ohio (gross domestic product: $478 billion) exceeded the number in all of Europe (GDP: $17.5 trillion). This is not to launch accusations of exceptionalism. I suspect that every country focuses predominantly on its own history. Surely more historians in Belgium focus on Belgian history than on the history of any other country. If anything, the United States is notable for the number of its historians who do not focus on their own country. The only country I know that can claim a higher proportion is not in Europe but right here: Canada. Any historian who practices U.S. history outside the United States comes face to face with this asymmetry. One consequence is that American historians of the United States can afford to ignore French historians of the United States in a way that French historians of France cannot afford to ignore American historians of France. And it means that U.S. historians in Europe face challenges their colleagues across the Atlantic do not. The latter can publish in their native language with presses in their own country and not worry that the broader currents of their national professions will marginalize their scholarship. That assumption of relevance—as these chapters demonstrate so ably—is not the case in Europe. None of these observations begins to address the financial resources that the best-endowed U.S. universities can commit to their faculty, in the form of teaching assistants, graders, research support, sabbatical leaves, light teaching loads, major library resources, and more. As a general rule, all of these material aspects of academic life are scarcer in Europe than in the United States. What is more, I have found that many historians in the United States—particularly those at its wealthiest institutions—often fail to notice such material realities when it comes to the production of historical scholarship.

212

|

Chapter 13

Which is why, I believe, globalizing approaches to U.S. history represent not just opportunities but also risks.10 Great privileges come from practicing history in the center of empire. In our age of globalization—or so we are told by its most breathless promoters—the world is getting smaller. Cheaper air travel makes international exchange easier; digital sources render research a breeze. Email! Skype! We must be up to History 4.0 by now. No wonder we take such an interest in mobility, fluidity, hybridity, and all the other iditys in our increasingly borderless world. But there is a cost to this privilege. Today’s “globalized” world, needless to say, looks a lot more borderless with a U.S. passport in hand than, say, a Haitian one. And although historians in Europe hardly face borders the way their counterparts in, say, Tunisia do, it may nevertheless be possible that their professional marginality has given them a greater sensitivity to barriers, both intellectual and physical. “Each historian of the United States in Europe is at the margins of both the U.S. academy and his or her national academy,” the authors of this volume’s preface write. That was certainly my experience in the ten years I taught in Canada. But marginality is not necessarily a bad thing. To the contrary; some powerful advantages adhere to the position. The authors here point to a few: the early awareness of connections as a historical approach, the interdisciplinarity of historians in area studies programs. Such built-in advantages led Tony Badger, the eminent British historian of the U.S. South, to ponder his intellectual trajectory. “Perhaps to downplay one’s British identity,” he suggested, “is to sacrifice the opportunity to make a substantial contribution to American historiography.”11 The risks associated with the wealth and size of U.S. academic life are, I suspect, more obvious to outsiders than to those wrapped up in its (relatively) warm embrace. “But enough about me,” goes the old gag. “Let’s talk about you: what do you think about me?” Here, it seems to me, lies the real danger of internationalization. Given current geopolitical realities, the process needs to be undertaken with great care and in constant dialogue with historians in other nations. The risks involved have led the Cuban historian Louis Pérez Jr. to worry whether “what begins as a project to internationalize the national in the end appears to nationalize the international.”12 They are why the Canadian historian Ian Steele has similarly wondered about Bernard Bailyn’s conception of the Atlantic world—“Bailyn’s American Atlantic,” he calls it—and the extent to which it represents “a daring takeover bid” by positioning the United

American History in the Shadow of Empire |

213

States as “the pioneer, culmination, and exemplar of a teleological early modern international Atlantic history.”13 These risks are also why the French historian Silvia Marzagalli has asked whether English-language scholarship has “bestowed a central role to the United States” and advanced a “neo-liberal vision” of the Atlantic world.14 In such a context, maintaining a plurality of voices, perspectives, and approaches to U.S. history is not just important; it may be the most urgent task facing U.S. history. Perhaps what we need now is not so much the internationalization of U.S. history but rather its Europeanization. And its Canadianization. And Japanization. And Australianization. And so on. Thus it may be that in clarifying what is distinctive about a European perspective on U.S. history—in bringing a “European” voice into greater self-consciousness—this volume will make its most valuable contribution. Who knows, perhaps the follow-up volume will even be published in Europe.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

preface 1. In twelve European countries for which we have information, there are about four hundred practitioners of U.S. history; the other thirty-eight (including Russia) would presumably add substantially to the number. Our tentative figures for 2010 range from 1 in Sweden to 188 in the United Kingdom and include 16 for Poland and 60 each for Germany and France. (They are also slightly dated—the lone Swedish scholar has recently relocated to the United Kingdom!) Such figures are very difficult to compile. Eleanor Thompson, now of Leicester University, assembled these through the network built around this project. They are used throughout this volume. 2. Andrew D. White, “On Studies in General History and the History of Civilization,” www.historians.org/info/aha_history/adwhite.htm (accessed February 28, 2011); “Editor’s Annual Report, 1991–1992,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 753 (interestingly, virtually all the examples of international scholarship cited here are from countries beyond Europe). Not all U.S. scholars who have commented on the question have assumed a different perspective. Eric Foner, for example, asserted in an interview with an Italian scholar that “European writing about the United States is either good or bad . . . but . . . there is nothing very distinctively European about it.” But even he assumes that there could, indeed should, be a distinctive European perspective, lamenting that “somebody in France ought to be doing a Braudelian study of some aspects of American history . . . somebody in Italy ought to be using Gramsci.” See Maurizio Vaudagna, “The American Historian in Continental Europe: An Italian Perspective,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 534. 3. The American Historical Association sponsored a major project in the 1980s to report on the contribution to the writing of American history by 215

216

|

Notes to Preface

authors outside the United States, of whom Europeans constituted the largest contingent. See Lewis Hanke, ed., Guide to the Study of United States History Outside the U.S., 1945–1980, 5 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1985), contributed to by “five hundred scholars in many countries” (1:2). 4. As in the nineteenth century, journalists, politicians, travelers, and public intellectuals have continued to offer their observations on the United States, sometimes in the form of histories, and have played a significant role in promoting interest in American matters in their various countries. Among others, see André Maurois, Histoire des États-Unis, 2 vols. (New York: Éditions de la Maison Française, 1943–44), which had several editions from different publishers until the 1960s; Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4 vols. (London: Cassell, 1956–58); Alfredo Signoretti, Storia degli Stati Uniti d’America (Milan: Ceschina, 1966); Oliviero Bergamini, Storia degli Stati Uniti (Rome: Laterza, 2003); Tom Buhrow and Sabine Stamer, Mein Amerika—dein Amerika (Reinbek, Germany: Rowohlt, 2006); Claus Kleber, Amerikas Kreuzzüge: Wohin treibt die Weltmacht? (Munich: Pantheon, 2008). 5. On sociological determinants of scholarly work, see the classic Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1984; trans. Peter Collier, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988); and the more recent Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 6. See Stefan Berger, ed., Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Many historians, of course, write about lands other than their own. Among those who have had to reflect on the significance of location in their writing have been the ones working in the burgeoning fields of colonial and imperial history, especially postcolonial authors challenging earlier orthodoxies. See, e.g., Vinay Lal, “Imperial Nostalgia,” Economic and Political Weekly 28, nos. 29–30 (July 17–24, 1993): 1511–13 (review essay of C. A. Bayly, gen. ed., The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947 [London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1990]); Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 7. An American historian of the United States can spend his or her entire career without needing to engage with foreign scholarship—but historians elsewhere cannot ignore the voluminous historiography produced in American universities. This says nothing about a comparative willingness to be open, but it does tell something about the conditions within which we work. 8. Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds., Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); “Miroirs transatlantiques: Circulation des savoirs et malentendus féconds entre les États-Unis et l’Europe, y compris la France,” special issue, L’Homme: Revue française d’anthropologie 187–88 (2008). 9. See, for example, Frederick Cooper, “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective,” African Affairs 100, no. 399 (April 1, 2001): 189–213; Patricia Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism,”

Notes to Chapter 1

|

217

Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (November 2005): 421–39; C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1441–64; Michael Kazin, “The Vogue of Transnational History,” Raritan 26, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 155–67; Ian Tyrrell, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Global History 4, no. 3 (November 2009): 453–74. 10. Sigmund Skard, American Studies in Europe: Their History and Present Organization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958); Hanke, Guide; Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton, eds., Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007). The last has a helpful introduction sketching general trends in teaching and studying U.S. history in Europe in relation to recent political developments. 11. See, for example, Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994); Anthony Mohlo and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Melvyn Stokes, ed., The State of U.S. History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen, eds., Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., American History Now (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 12. “Germany: Maurizio Vaudagna Interviews Willi Paul Adams and Wolfgang J. Helbich,” Storia Nordamericana 7, no. 1 (1990): 125. 13. The phrase has also been attributed to Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, and even Dylan Thomas and Winston Churchill.

1. watersheds in time and place 1. E. H. Perowne, flysheet, February 14, 1866, Cambridge Papers EM 23, Cambridge University Library, cited in Ged Martin, “The Cambridge Lectureship of 1866,” Journal of American Studies 7 (April 1973): 24; Sigmund Skard, The American Myth and the European Mind: American Studies in Europe, 1776–1960 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), 247. 2. Some arbitrary decisions have had to be made in writing this chapter. U.S. scholars have often made academic careers in Europe, and several European scholars have developed their careers in the United States; some, of course, have made influential contributions to U.S. historiography, but for the most part this review does not explicitly consider them. The chapter also does not attempt to identify top or important European scholars as such; rather, the examples have been chosen primarily to illustrate themes or trends. 3. “Poland: Maurizio Vaudagna Interviews Michal Rozbicki,” Storia Nordamericana 7, no. 1 (1990): 152.

218

|

Notes to Chapter 1

4. Wolfgang J. Helbich, “United States History in the Federal Republic of Germany: Teaching and Research,” in Guide to the Study of United States History outside the U.S., 1945–1980, ed. Lewis Hanke, 5 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1985), 2:40; “Maurizio Vaudagna Interviews Michal Rozbicki,” 140–41. 5. The French Émile Boutmy criticized what he read as the Austrian Georg Jellinek’s claim that the French Declaration had clear American origins, arguing instead that it originated in earlier French propositions. Jellinek responded that the American Declaration had German intellectual origins. Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1895; repr., New York: Henry Holt, 1901); Boutmy, “La déclaration des droits de l’homme et M. Jellinek,” Annales des sciences politiques 17 (1902): 415–43; Jellinek, “La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen et M. Boutmy,” repr. in his Ausgewdhlte Schriften und Reden, ed. Walter Jellinek (Aalen, Germany: Scientia Verlag, [1911] 1970), ii, 65–81. See also Duncan Kelly, “Revisiting the Rights of Man: Georg Jellinek on Rights and the State,” Law and History Review 22 (Autumn 2004): 493–529. 6. Many Europeans, of course, were happy to avail themselves of American consumer and cultural products, and commentators might criticize particular U.S. foreign policy decisions without being anti-American. 7. Anthony J. Badger, “Southern History from the Outside,” in Shapers of Southern History, ed. John B. Boles (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 206. 8. Among other examples, there was Sándor Bölöni Farkas, Útazás Észak Amerikában [Journey in North America] (Cluj-Napoca: Ifjabb Tilsch János, 1834), which contributed to the shaping of a civic society in Hungary before 1848, while in Poland the future Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz greatly amplified public fascination with his Listy z podróz˙y do Ameryki [Letters from an American journey], which appeared in Gazeta Polska in 1876. Although it was often the example of republican government that engaged European intellectuals, the American Civil War also stirred interest, not only in drawing attention to slavery but also in its implications for such movements as German unification and the Italian Risorgimento. 9. It has remained the case even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that journalists, political commentators, broadcasters, and others have regularly taken on the task of offering popular accounts of American history to European publics, although now it is the power more than the example of the United States that engages their attention. 10. Skard, American Myth, 20–22. Ebeling covered ten states in his North American Geography and History. 11. Skard, American Myth, 56. 12. Edouard de Laboulaye, Political History of the United States, 3 vols. (Paris, 1855–66); M. M. Kovalevskii, Istoria amerikanskoi konstitutsii [History of the American Constitution] (Moscow, 1890). Kovalevskii had been a pupil of the Kharkov professor Dmitry Kachenovsky, who published a biography of Daniel Webster in 1856. See Evgeny Badredinov, “Problems of Modernization in Late Imperial Russia: Maksim M. Kovalevskii on Social and Economic Reform,” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2005).

Notes to Chapter 1

|

219

13. Writing about the United States in late nineteenth-century Europe was not, of course, necessarily favorable. Some feared the poison of commerce and materialism. In Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as an educator), the German cultural critic Julius Langbehn identified “the crude cult of money” with North America and in subsequent editions insisted that it was “also a Jewish trait”: Tibor Frank, “Berlin Junction: Patterns of Hungarian Intellectual Migrations, 1919–1933,” Storicamente 2 (2006), accessed April 17, 2013, www.storicamente.org/05_studi_ricerche/02frank.htm. 14. The “long twentieth century,” a phrase that Mary Nolan recently employed in her exploration of transatlantic relationships (The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012]), seems appropriate for the examination here of the professional study of American history in Europe. The writings of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Tocqueville, and others are of great interest but belong in a different study. 15. See Sylvia L. Hilton and Steve J. S. Ickringill, eds., European Perceptions of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1999). 16. Alexandre Pons, “La question de Cuba au point de vue du droit international” (Thèse de droit, Université de Montpellier, 1907). 17. Skard, American Myth, 68; Philipp Gassert, “Between Political Reconnaissance Work and Democratizing Science: American Studies in Germany, 1917–1953,” GHI Bulletin 32 (Spring 2003): 38–40. 18. Johan H. Huizinga, Mensch en menigte in Amerika [Man and mass in America] (Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink, 1918) and Amerika levend en denkend: Losse opmerkingen [America, living and thinking: Loose observations] (Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink, 1927). On Huizinga, see Rob Kroes, “America and the European Sense of History,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1135–55. For a Spanish example of interest in American modernity, see Julio Camba, La ciudad automatic [The automatic city] (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1932). 19. Gramsci wrote this in prison in 1929–35; it was first published in 1948– 51. 20. Roman Dyboski, Amerykanizm (Warsaw, 1930). 21. The Commonwealth Fund chair was established by the American Harkness family, which had previously provided grants to allow British postgraduates to study in the United States. Bellot once declined the offer of a “massive” grant from the Rockefeller Foundation because it was for the development of American studies, not history: Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “Teaching U.S. History in Great Britain,” in Hanke, Guide, 2:322. The Harmsworth Chair of American History was established at Oxford in 1922 and was held for some years by Samuel Eliot Morison and then by Princeton’s Robert McElroy; it became an annual appointment in 1939. 22. Eduard Baumgarten, Die geistigen Grundlagen des amerikanischen Gemeinwesens, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1936–38). 23. Gassert, “Between Political Reconnaissance Work,” 43. 24. Bernard Faÿ, Roosevelt and His America (Boston: Little, Brown: 1933), 3. See John L. Harvey, “Conservative Crossings: Bernard Faÿ and the Rise of

220

|

Notes to Chapter 1

American Studies in Third-Republic France,” Historical Reflections 36 (Spring 2010): 95–124. Whether the Faÿ affair delayed the development of U.S. history in France is debated, but the first such post in a history department did not appear until 1967. 25. Gennaro Mondaini, La questione dei negri nella storia e nella società nordamericana [The Negro question in North American history and society] (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1898), Le origini degli Stati Uniti d’America [The origins of the United States of America] (Milan: Hoepli, 1904), and ed., La Costituente e la Costituzione americana del 1787 [The Constituent Assembly and the American Constitution of 1787] (Florence: Sansoni, 1946); Skard, American Myth, 82. 26. Skard, American Myth, 75, 79–80. 27. Otero Carvajal, Luis Enrique, et al., La destrucción de la ciencia en España: Depuración universitaria en el franquismo [The destruction of science in Spain: University purges during Franco’s regime] (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 2006). 28. Nikolai Vasil’evich Sivachev and Maria Vsevolodovna Silaeva, “Teaching United States History at Soviet Universities,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:510. 29. “Foreign News,” Time, March 13, 1950. 30. See, e.g., Richard H. Pells, Not like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), esp. ch. 4. Europe, of course, was not the only target of the American cultural mission; for an interesting perspective, see Antonio Niño and José Antonio Montero, eds., Guerra fría y propaganda: Estados Unidos y su cruzada cultural en Europa y América Latina [Cold war and propaganda: The United States and its cultural crusade in Europe and Latin America] (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2012). 31. Eike Wolgast, Die Wahrnehmung des Dritten Reiches in der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit, 1945–1946 (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2001), Gassert, “Between Political Reconnaissance Work,” 33–50. 32. Helge Ø. Pharo, “The Teaching of United States History in Norwegian Universities,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:236–37. See also Geir Lundestad, “Research Trends and Accomplishments in Norway on United States History,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:248–49. 33. Harald Runblom, “United States History in Swedish Research and Teaching,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:390, 412. 34. Doeko Bosscher, “The Study of U.S. History in the Netherlands,” in Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future, ed. Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007), 177. 35. See Lorenzo Delgado, Viento de poniente: El programa Fulbright en España [Westerly wind: The Fulbright program in Spain] (Madrid: LID Editorial Empresarial, Fulbright España, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación, Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo, 2009). 36. It is, of course, a simplification, since one could make special cases for the Nordic countries, with their unease about getting too close to the United

Notes to Chapter 1

|

221

States (as David Nye suggests in ch. 12), for the Iberian countries, with their identification with Latin America, and indeed for the eastern European countries where there was a measure of resistance to Soviet hegemony—not to mention Ireland, with its close historic connections with the United States. 37. Hanke, Guide, 1:57. 38. See Nicole Fouché and Jacques Portes, “L’institutionalisation de l’histoire américaine en Sorbonne, 1946–1988,” Historiens et Géographes 413 (2011): 242–52, which recounts how Claude Fohlen, a historian trained in French history, the incumbent of the first chair in American history at the Sorbonne, in 1967–88, used to refer to “Boorstin’s malediction.” Because Boorstin taught in English, attendance at his classes was low, and he thought the French would never be able to overcome the language barrier to produce Americanist historians, adding that they “didn’t understand anything about the United States” (244). 39. Jeffreys-Jones, “Teaching U.S. History in Great Britain,” in Hanke, Guide, 2:329. 40. H. C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of AngloAmerican Relations (London: Odhams, 1954), 19. 41. Jørn Brøndal, “The Study of U.S. History in Denmark,” in van Minnen and Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe, 85. See also MariePierre Pouly, “Analystes et analyses de la curiosité américaniste des anglicistes en France,” Debates 2010, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, January 13, 2010, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/58502. In Spain, studies of Latin America could crowd out studies of the United States. 42. Sometimes U.S. consensus history served a European political purpose. In Italy, for example, some historians sought to use American constitutionalism and the consensus synthesis to break the hold of Catholic and Marxist values in intellectual circles: Maurizio Vaudagna, “The American Historian in Continental Europe: An Italian Perspective,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 532–42. 43. In France, Jeanine Brun-Rovet has noted, where historians were rediscovering the conflicts in their own history, “misunderstanding was total” between the American consensus school and their own intellectual tradition: Brun-Rovet, “Teaching and Research on United States History in France,” in Hanke, Guide, 2:195. 44. E.g., Aldo Garosci, Il pensiero politico degli autori del “Federalist” [The political ideas of the authors of the “Federalist”] (Milan: Comunità, 1954); Guglielmo Negri and Mario D’Addio, eds., Il Federalista [The Federalist Papers] (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1955); Enzo Tagliacozzo, “Saggi sul pensiero politico americano” [Essays on American political thought], Annali delle Facoltà di Lettere, Filosofia e Magistero di Cagliari 27 (1959): 75–152; Luciano Bolis, ed., La nascita degli Stati Uniti d’America [The birth of the United States] (Milan: Edizioni di comunità, 1957). 45. Tiziano Bonazzi, “American History: The View from Italy,” Reviews in American History 14 (December 1986): 526. 46. André Tunc, Les États-Unis (Paris: Librairie de droit et de jurisprudence, 1959); Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts,

222

|

Notes to Chapter 1

1765–1780 (New York: Academic, 1977); Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973). From this period, see also Pierre Renouvin, Les États-Unis de 1860 à 1914 (Paris: Center de documentation universitaire, 1962). 47. Ingrid Semmingsen, The Creation of a World Power: A History of the United States (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1946). In 1963 Semmingsen was appointed to Norway’s first chair in American history, at the University of Oslo, though its American history dedication did not survive her retirement in 1977: Ole O. Moen, “The Study of U.S. History in Norway,” in van Minnen and Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe, 198. On other Norwegian scholars showing sympathy for American liberal or reform traditions, see Lundestad, “Research Trends,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:251–54, 288. 48. Denis Brogan, Roosevelt and the New Deal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); John A. Woods, Roosevelt and Modern America (London: English Universities Press, 1960); Waldemar Besson, Die politische Terminologie des Präsidenten Franklin D. Roosevelt [The political terminology of President Franklin D. Roosevelt] (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1955); Mario Einaudi, The Roosevelt Revolution, 1932–1952 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), subsequently published in Italy as La rivoluzione di Roosevelt, 1932–1952, trans. Bruno Fonzi (Turin: Einaudi, 1959); Federico Mancini, ed., Il pensiero politico nell’età di Roosevelt [Political thought in the Roosevelt era] (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1962); Per Vogt, Franklin D. Roosevelt (Oslo: J. G. Tanum, 1948). 49. E.g., Raymond Aron, Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle [Eighteen lessons on industrial society] (Paris: Gallimard, 1962); André Siegfried, Tableau des États-Unis [Portrait of the United States] (Paris: Armand Colin, 1954). 50. “Germany: Maurizio Vaudagna Interviews Willi Paul Adams and Wolfgang J. Helbich,” Storia Nordamericana 7, no. 1 (1990): 131. Adams mentions such scholars as Erich Angermann and Günter Moltmann. 51. See, e.g., Manuel Alonso Olea’s articles in Revista de Estudios Políticos 63 (1952): 183–213; 70 (July–August 1953): 107–51; and 71 (September– October 1953): 41–92; Alfredo Gradilone, Storia del sindicalismo: Stati Uniti (Milan: Giuffrè, 1960); Daniel Guérin, Le mouvement ouvrier aux États-Unis de 1866 à nos jours [The American labor movement from 1866 to the present] (Paris: Maspero, 1969). See also the pro-American Norwegian politician Haakon Lie, Arbeiderbevegelsen i De forente stater [The labor movement in the United States] (Oslo: Arbeidernes Opplysningsforbund / Tiden, 1947). 52. Henry Pelling, American Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 53. Jacques Néré, La Guerre de Sécession (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961); Claudio Gorlier, Storia dei negri negli Stati Uniti [History of the Negroes in the United States] (Bologna: Cappelli, 1963), which also appeared in Spanish in 1968; Raimondo Luraghi, Storia della Guerra Civile americana [History of the American Civil War] (Turin: Einaudi, 1966); Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Razas y racismo en Norteamérica [Races and racism in North America] (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1950); Daniel Guérin, Décolonisation du noir americain (Paris: Éditions du minuit, 1963), which subsequently

Notes to Chapter 1

|

223

appeared in Spanish and Portuguese translations; Eugenio Cazorla Bermúdez, “El negro en los Estados Unidos” [The Negro in the United States], Estudios Americanos (Seville) 21, no. 106 (1961): 68–82; Salustiano Del Campo Urbano and Juan Díez Nicolás, “El negro americano,” Revista de Estudios Políticos (Madrid) 120 (1961): 165–208. 54. Lundestad, “Research Trends,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:255. See also Niels Thorsen, “Nyere tendenser i amerikansk historiografi: Debatten om ‘konflikt’ og ‘consensus’ ” [Recent trends in American historiography: The debate on “conflict” and “consensus”], Historisk Tidsskrift 74 (1974): 342–63; Carsten Staur, “Richard Hofstadter og den liberale tradition” [Richard Hofstadter and the liberal tradition], Historisk Tidsskrift 79 (1979): 80–95; Hanke, Guide, 2:26. 55. Ivan I. Kurilla and Victoria I. Zhuravleva, “Teaching U.S. History in Russia: Issues, Challenges and Prospects,” Journal of American History 96 (March 2010), www.journalofamericanhistory.org/textbooks/2010/kurilla.html; Irmina Wawrzyczek, “The Study of U.S. History in Poland,” in van Minnen and Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe, 212. Parrington’s work first appeared in 1927, the Beards’ in 1929. 56. Even such an enthusiast of American studies as Skard had serious reservations about the American experience, worrying about the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism, “economic exploitation,” and “racial inequality”: Pells, Not like Us, 114. For other examples, see ibid., 173–74; Lundestad, “Research Trends,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:266–67. 57. “Maurizio Vaudagna Interviews Michal Rozbicki,” 151. 58. Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959). 59. E.g., Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, De Wilson à Roosevelt: la politique extérieure des États-Unis, 1913–1945 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960); René Rémond, Les Etats-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1815–1852 [The United States in French public opinion] (Paris: A. Colin, 1962); Günter Moltmann, Amerikas Deutschlandpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrig [America’s policy toward Germany in World War II] (Heidelberg: Winter-Verlag, 1958); Hans-Jürgen Schröder, Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten, 1933–39 [Germany and the United States, 1933–39] (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1970); Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, La penetración americana en España (Madrid: Edicusa, 1974). 60. Ingrid Semmingsen, Veien mot vest: Utvandringen fra Norge til Amerika, 1865–1915 [The way west: The emigration from Norway to America, 1865– 1915] (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1950); Lars Ljungmark, Den stora utvandringen, Svensk emigration till USA, 1840–1925 (Stockholm: Sveriges Radio, 1965). See also Kristian Hvidt’s quantitative study of Danish migration, The Flight to America (Aarhus: Universitetsforlag, 1971). 61. See chs. 3 and 6; Harold Runblom and Hans Norman, eds., From Sweden to America: A History of the Migration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976); Günter Moltmann, “Migrations from Germany to North America,” Reviews in American History 14 (December 1986): 583. German scholars of migration had done significant work before the Second World War, and this resumed in a serious way in the early 1970s. Beginnings were also made on Italian

224

|

Notes to Chapter 1

migration, e.g., Anna Maria Martelloni, Una Little Italy nell’Atene d’America: La Comunita italiana di Boston dal 1880 al 1920 (Naples: Guida, 1973). 62. Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954); Yves-Henri Nouailhat, “Un emprunt français aux États-Unis en juillet 1916” [A French loan to the United States in July 1916], Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 14 (October–December 1967): 356–74. 63. E.g., Marcel Giraud, Histoire de la Louisiane française, 4 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953–74); Sylvia L. Hilton, “El Misisipí y la Luisiana colonial en la historiografía española, 1940–1989” [The Mississippi and colonial Louisiana in Spanish historiography, 1940–1989], Revista de Indias 49, no. 187 (1989): 195–212; Salvador Bernabeu Albert, “Las Californias en la historiografía española (1940–1989)” [The Californias in Spanish historiography (1940–1989)], ibid., 817–28. In Spain at times, colonial history could be the biggest single subject in Americanist historiography. By contrast, Giraud ploughed a rather lonely furrow in France; see Gilles Havard, “L’historiographie de la Nouvelle-France en France au XXe siècle: nostalgie, oubli et renouveau,” in De Québec en Amérique: L’Amérique française entre histoire et mémoire, ed. Yves Frénette, Cécile Vidal, and Thomas Wien (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2006), 95–124. 64. See also Lundestad, “Research Trends,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:264. 65. Helbich, “United States History,” in Hanke, Guide, 2:85. 66. Such Italian scholars included Allesandro Portelli, Ferdinando Fasce, and Bruno Cartosio. See Fasce, “American Labor History, 1973–1983: Italian Perspectives,” Reviews in American History 14 (December 1986): 597–613. 67. Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, “American History in Russia: Retrospect and Prospect,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 524–29. 68. Reiner Schnoor, “Ideological Commitment and Intellectual Pursuit: Evolutions in East German American Studies since the 1960s” (unpublished conference paper, c. 1992, in the possession of Maurizio Vaudagna); “Maurizio Vaudagna Interviews Michal Rozbicki,” 137–53. 69. Schnoor, “Ideological Commitment and Intellectual Pursuit,” 1–2. 70. “The Soviet Union: Maurizio Vaudagna Interviews Alexander S. Manykin,” Storia Nordamericana 7, no. 1 (1990): 164–65. 71. There is a brief overview in Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, “American History in Russia: Retrospect and Prospect,” and a fuller description in Bolkhovitinov and Marin Pundeff, “The Study of the United States in the Soviet Union,” American Historical Review 74 (April 1969): 1221–42. See also Grigorii N. Sevost’ianov, “The Study of United States History in the Soviet Union: Research Trends and Accomplishments,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:526–61. 72. Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, The Beginnings of Russian American Relations, 1775–1815 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) and Russia and the American Revolution (Tallahassee, FL: Diplomatic Press, 1976). 73. E.g., Andrzej Broz˙ek on Polish Americans, Polonia amerykan´ska, 1861– 1945 (Warsaw: Interpress, 1977); Josef Polišensky, ed., Zacˇiatky cˇeskej a slovenskej emigrácie do USA [The Beginnings of Czech and Slovak emigration to the U.S.A.] (Bratislava: Slovenská akadémia vied, 1970); Júlia Puskás, “Amerikai

Notes to Chapter 1

|

225

Magyar szervezetek (Az 1880-as évektõl az 1960-as évekig)” [Hungarian organizations in America (1880–1960)],” Történelmi Szemle 13 (1970): 528–68. 74. E.g., Zofia Libiszowska, Opinia polska wobec rewolucji amerykan´skiej w XVIII [Polish public opinion on American revolution in the eighteenth century] (Lodz: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolin´skich we Wrocławiu, 1962). 75. Wawrzyczek, “The Study of U.S. History in Poland,” in van Minnen and Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe, 211. 76. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914– 1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 223. 77. Rob Kroes, “The Nearness of America,” in Image and Impact: American Influence in the Netherlands since 1945, ed. Kroes (Amsterdam: Amerika Instituut, 1981), 14. 78. Yuri N. Rogoulev, “The Study of U.S. History in Russia,” in van Minnen and Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe, 225. 79. Robert Kelley, “Teaching United States History at Moscow State University, 1979,” in Hanke, Guide, 1:106. 80. “Maurizio Vaudagna Interviews Michal Rozbicki,” 143. 81. Paul Cernovodeanu, Ion Stanciu, and Lucian Boia, “Developments in Romania on United States History,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:358. 82. Karl Drechsler, “Research Trends and Accomplishments in the Study of United States History in the German Democratic Republic,” in Hanke, Guide, 2:257; Schnoor, “Ideological Commitment and Intellectual Pursuit,” 4. 83. Vesselin Traikov, Peter Schopov, and Andrei Pantev, “Developments in Bulgaria on United States History,” in Hanke, Guide, 1:256. 84. See Lundestad, “Research Trends,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:270–71; Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, “Developments in the Netherlands Concerning United States History,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:189–90. 85. Even after the return to democracy, American history was slow to develop in Greece, where contemporary history was discouraged and a fifty-year rule kept state archives closed, so that even in the 1980s, contemporary Greek history was written mainly in American universities: John Thomas Malakasses, “Development of United States History in Greece,” in Hanke, Guide, 2:533–35. 86. Lawrence A. Cardoso, “Research Trends and Accomplishments: Publications in Spain on United States History,” in Hanke, Guide, 3:382–86; Sylvia L. Hilton, “The Study of U.S. History in Spain,” in van Minnen and Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe, 231–52, and “Identities and the Usable Pasts of Colonial Borderlands: Spanish Historians and the North Pacific Frontiers of the Spanish Empire,” in Alta California: Peoples in Motion, Identities in Formation, 1769–1850, ed. Steven W. Hackel (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 801–88. 87. The percentage of college-age western Europeans at university rose from about 7 percent in the 1960s to 15 percent in the 1980s and to between 30 and 50 percent in the mid-1990s: Pells, Not like Us, 124. 88. Schnoor, “Ideological Commitment and Intellectual Pursuit,” 3. 89. American studies and cultural history approaches are illustrated by, e.g., Mario Maffi, La giungla e il grattacielo: Gli scrittori e il “sogno americano,” 1865–1920 [The jungle and the skyscraper: Writers and the “American dream,”

226

|

Notes to Chapter 1

1865–1920] (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1980); Heinz Ickstadt, Rob Kroes, and Brian Lee, The Thirties: Politics and Culture in a Time of Broken Dreams (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1987); Kristiaan Versluys, The Poet in the City: Chapters in the Development of Urban Poetry in Europe and the United States (1800–1930) (Tübingen, Germany: John Benjamins, 1987). In 1979, Kroes became the general editor of the European Contributions to American Studies series of the Free University Press in Amsterdam, which for decades published many monographs and essay collections, sometimes two or three a year, in an array of disciplines. On late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, see, e.g., Élise Marienstras, Les Mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine: Essai sur le discours idéologique aux États-Unis à l’époque de l’indépendance, 1763–1800 (Paris: Maspero, 1976); Susanna Delfino, “Industrialization and Change of Traditional Cast and Class Relations in the Antebellum South: The Case of Tennessee, 1830–1860,” Gulliver 12 (Spring 1982): 100–112; M. J. Heale, The Presidential Quest: Candidates and Images in American Political Culture, 1787–1852 (London: Longman, 1982); Krzysztof Michałek, Dyplomaci i okre˛ty: Z dziejów polityki zagranicznej Skonfederowanych Stanów Ameryki, 1861–1865 [Diplomats and ships: Foreign policy of the Confederacy, 1861–1865] (Warsaw: Pan´stwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1987). 90. E.g., Klaus Schwabe, The World War, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacekeeping (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Detlef Junker, Kampf um die Weltmacht: Die USA und das Dritte Reich 1933–1945 [Struggle for world power: The United States and the Third Reich, 1933–1945] (Düsseldorf: Schwann-Bagel, 1988); Angel Viñas, Los pactos secretos de Franco con los EE.UU.: Bases, ayuda económica, recortes de soberanía [Franco’s secret pacts with the U.S.: Bases, economic aid, diminished sovereignty] (Barcelona: Ediciones Grijalbo, 1981). Note also such publications in eastern Europe, including Jacek Ryszard We˛drowski, Stany Zjednoczone a odrodzenie Polski, 1916–1919 [The United States and the rebirth of Poland, 1916–1919] (Wroclaw: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolin´skich, 1980); Halina Parafianowicz, Polska w europejskiej polityce Stanów Zjednoczonych w okresie prezydentury Herberta C. Hoovera (1929–1933) [Poland in the European policy of the United States during the presidency of Herbert C. Hoover (1929–1933)] (Białystok: Dział Wydawnictw FUW, 1991). 91. E.g., Göran Rystad, Ambiguous Imperialism: American Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics at the Turn of the Century (Stockholm: Esselte Studium, 1975). Such international relations scholars as Geir Lundestad and Christopher Thorne, of course, became well known on both sides of the Atlantic, and beyond. Another, Przemysław Grudzin´ski, the author of Uczeni i barbarzyn´cy: Polityka nuklearna Stanów Zjednoczonych, 1939–1945 [Scholars and barbarians: U.S. nuclear policy, 1939–1945] (Warsaw: Pan´stwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1987), became Poland’s ambassador to the United States. 92. Bolkhovitinov, “American History in Russia,” 526–27, and Rossiia otkryvaet Ameriku, 1732–1799 [Russia discovers America, 1732–1799] (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenia, 1991). 93. See ch. 6. On Poland, see Edward Kołodziej, Wychodz´stwo zarobkowe z Polski 1918–1939: Studia nad polityka˛ emigracyjna˛ II Rzeczypospolitej

Notes to Chapter 1

|

227

[Economic emigration from Poland, 1918–1939: A study on the emigration policy of the Second Republic], (Warsaw: Ksia˛z˙ka i Wiedza, 1982); Florian Stasiak, Polska emigracja zarobkowa w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki, 1865– 1914 [Polish economic emigration to the United States, 1865–1914], (Warsaw: Pan´stwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1985). On Hungary, see Julianna Puskás, Kivándorló magyarok az Egyesült Államokban, 1880–1940 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982), translated by Maria Bales as From Hungary to the United States, 1880–1914 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1983); István Rácz, A paraszti migráció és politikai megítélése Magyarországon 1849– 1914 [Peasant migrations and their political considerations in Hungary, 1849– 1914] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1980); Albert Tezla, “Valahol túl, meseországban . . .”: Az amerikás magyarok 1895–1920 [“Somewhere beyond, in the land of fairy tales . . .”: The Hungarian Americans, 1895–1920] (Budapest: Európa, 1987). 94. François Weil, “French Migration to the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries as a Historical Problem,” Studi Emigrazione 123 (September 1996): 443–60, and “Les migrants de France et leurs rêves américains,” Diasporas 9 (2007): 34–44. 95. Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer, The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981); Jürgen Kocka, White Collar Workers in America, 1890–1940: A Social-Political History in International Perspective (London: Sage, 1980). 96. E.g., Hans-Jürgen Puhle, Politische Agrarbewegungen in kapitalistischen Industriegesellschaften [Political movements of agriculture in industrial capitalism] (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975); Maurizio Vaudagna, Corporativismo e New Deal (Turin: Rosenberg and Selliet, 1981). 97. Donald J. Ratcliffe, “The Role of Voters and Issues in Party Formation: Ohio, 1824,” Journal of American History 9 (March 1973): 847–70; Arnaldo Testi, Il socialismo americano nell’età progressista: Il Social-Democratic Party del Wisconsin, 1900–1920 (Venice: Marsilio, 1980); Marianne Debouzy, “Classe ouvrière et nomadisme aux États-Unis à la fin du 19e siècle,” in Villes Ouvrières, 1900–1950, ed. Susanna Magri and Christian Topalov (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989); Alfons Lammers, Franklin D. Roosevelt, de rechters en de Democraten, 1936–1938 [Roosevelt, the justices, and the Democrats, 1936– 1938] (Leiden, Netherlands: University of Leiden, 1977); Bernd Martin and Alan S. Milward, eds., Agriculture and Food Supply in the Second World War (Ostfildern, Germany: Scripta Mercaturae, 1985); Román Gubern, La caza de brujas en Hollywood [The witch hunt in Hollywood] (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1987). 98. Raimondo Luraghi, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South (New York: New Viewpoints, 1978); Valeria Gennaro Lerda, Il populismo americano: Movimenti radicali di protesta agraria nella seconda metà dell’800 (Genoa: Mondini e Siccardi, 1981). 99. In such countries as Austria and West Germany, reflecting their traditional orientation toward central Europe, Russian and eastern European history were substantially better established than American: Siegfried Beer, “The Development of Teaching and Research on United States History in Austria,” in

228

|

Notes to Chapter 1

Hanke, Guide, 1:177–78; Helbich, “United States History,” in Hanke, Guide, 2:57. In 1980, West Germany had twenty-three full professorships in East European history and three in U.S. history. 100. Helbich, “United States History,” in Hanke, Guide, 2:115. 101. E.g., David Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 432–62; Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 102. Francesca Lidia Viano, La statua della libertà: Una storia globale (Rome: Laterza, 2011). Other studies reflecting globalizing influences include Mario Del Pero, Libertà e impero: Gli Stati Uniti e il mondo 1776–2006 [Liberty and empire: The United States and the world, 1776–2006] (Rome: Laterza, 2008); M. J. Heale, Contemporary America: Power, Dependency and Globalization since 1980 (Walden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, eds., Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). 103. Frank Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Comité International des Sciences Historiques, XIe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, Stockholm, 21–28 Août 1960, Rapports V: Histoire contemporaine (1960), 32–60. 104. The explosion of publications coincided with a reduced tendency to look to the United States for answers. Tony Judt has observed of Europe in these years that “it was no longer commonplace to hold up American institutions and practices as a source of inspiration or an object to be emulated. For a long time America had been another time—Europe’s future. Now it was just another place”: Judt, A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2006), 790. 105. V. O. Pechatnov, Ot Jeffersona do Clintona: Demokraticheskaya partiya SShA v borbe za izbiratelya [From Jefferson to Clinton: The Democratic Party of the U.S.A. in its struggle for the electorate] (Moscow: Nauka, 2008). See also V. V. Sogrin, Istoricheskii opyt SShA [The historical experience of the U.S.A.] (Moscow: Nauka, 2010). 106. As Sylvia Hilton and Cornelis van Minnen have stressed, “Many historians have been feeling increasingly dissatisfied with their role in the current USAmerican Literary-Cultural Studies paradigm, and have expressed a need to reaffirm their disciplinary identity as historians, as well as an interest in reviving or forming other academic ‘alliances’ ”: Hilton and van Minnen, “The Academic Study of U.S. History in Europe,” in their Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe, 31. 107. British Association of Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH), which founded the journal American Nineteenth Century History, and Historians of Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS). Like them, The British Group in Early American History (BGEAH) holds an annual conference. 108. European Association for American Studies, “Constituent Members of the EAAS,” www.eaas.eu/about-eaas/constituent-members.

Notes to Chapter 1

|

229

109. For conservative or neoconservative historians in Italy, see, e.g., Gaetano Quagliariello, La politica senza partiti: Ostrogorski e l’organizzazione della politica tra Ottocento e Novecento [Politics without Parties: Ostrogorski and the organization of politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries] (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1993); Massimo Teodori, Benedetti Americani: Dall’Alleanza Atlantica alla guerra contro il terrorismo [Blessed Americans: From the Atlantic Alliance to the War on Terror] (Milan: Mondadori, 2003). In Britain, see Niall Ferguson (who effectively commutes between the United States and the United Kingdom), Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2004); Timothy J. Lynch and Robert S. Singh, After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For Spain and Latin America, see Saturnino Aguado Sebastián and Rosa María García-Barroso, El triángulo económico: España, USA, América Latina [The economic triangle: Spain, U.S.A., Latin America] (Alcalá de Henares, Spain: Universidad de Alcalá, 2002). 110. E.g., Wlodzimierz Batog, Protesty studentów uniwersytetów Ivy League przeciw wojnie wietnamskiej 1965–1970 [Protests of the Ivy League universities’ students against the war in Vietnam, 1965–1970] (Kielce: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Humanistyczno-Przyrodniczego Jana Kochanowskiego, 2008); Marcin Borys, Polska emigracja do Stanów Zjednoczonych do 1914 roku [Polish emigration to the United States until 1914] (Torun´: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2011). Renata Nowaczewska, “Interview on American History Writing in Poland Given to Maurizio Vaudagna,” Florence, March 18, 2011 (notes in the possession of Vaudagna). 111. Kurilla and Zhuravleva, “Teaching U.S. History in Russia,” Sabine N. Meyer, “Transcending Intellectual Nationalism: Teaching U.S. History in German Universities,” www.journalofamericanhistory.org/textbooks/2010/meyer. html, and Paul Quigley, “Teaching Secession and the Civil War in Scotland,” www.journalofamericanhistory.org/textbooks/2010/quigley.html, Journal of American History 96 (March 2010). 112. On early convulsions in the Russian academy, see Marcus Rediker, “The Old Guard, the New Guard, and the People at the Gates: New Approaches to the Study of American History in the U.S.S.R.,” William and Mary Quarterly 68 (October 1991): 580–97. 113. Rogoulev, “The Study of U.S. History in Russia,” in van Minnen and Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe, 221–23; Olga Antsyferova, “American Studies in Russia,” European Journal of American Studies 2006, no. 1, http://ejas.revues.org/366. 114. Wawrzyczek, “The Study of US History in Poland,” in van Minnen and Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe, 212–13; Andrzej Bartnicki and Donald T. Critchlow, eds., Historia Stanów Zjednoczonych Ameryki, 1607–1996 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1995). 115. Ioana Luca, “American Studies in Romania,” European Journal of American Studies 2006, no. 1, http://ejas.revues.org/346. 116. Pierangelo Castagneto, “Warming Up the Cold War: Teaching American History at the American University in Bulgaria,” 3 (in the possession of Maurizio Vaudagna).

230

|

Notes to Chapter 1

117. Tamás Magyarics, Az Egyesült Államok külpolitikájának története [The history of U.S. foreign policy] (Budapest: Eötvös Jóüzsef Könyvkiadó, 2000); Ignác Romsics, ed., Amerikai béketervek a háború utáni Magyarországról: Az Egyesült Államok Külügyminisztériumának titkos iratai 1942–1944 [American peace plans for postwar Hungary: Secret papers of the State Department, 1942–1944] (Gödöllo˝: Typovent, 1992); Borhi László, ed., Iratok a magyaramerikai kapcsolatok történetéhez 1957–1967 [Documents on the history of Hungarian-American relations] (Budapest: Ister, 2002); Tibor Frank, ed., Discussing Hitler: Advisers of U.S. Diplomacy in Central Europe, 1934–1941 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003); Tibor Glant, Through the Prism of the Habsburg Monarchy: Hungary in American Diplomacy and Public Opinion during the First World War (Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research, 1998); Andrzej Mania, The National Security Council i amerykan´ska polityka wobec Europy Wschodniej, 1945–1960 [The National Security Council and American policy toward Eastern Europe, 1945–1960] (Kraków: Nakł. Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego, 1994); Halina Parafianowicz, Czechosłowacja w polityce Stanów Zjednoczonych w latach 1918–1933 [Czechoslovakia in U.S. Policy, 1918–1933] (Białystok: Wydawnicza Filii UW w Białymstoku, 1996). 118. E.g., V. V. Romanov, V poiskah novogo miroporyadka: Vneshnepoliticheskaya mysl SShA (1913–1921) [In search of the new world order: U.S. foreign policy thought (1913–1921)] (Tambov, Russia, 2005); V. L. Mal’kov, Rossiya i SShA v XX veke [Russia and the U.S.A. in the twentieth century] (Moscow: Nauka, 2010); I. I. Kurilla, Zaokeanskie partnery: Amerika i Rossia v 1830–1850-e gg [Partners across the ocean: America and Russia in the 1830s–1850s] (Volgograd: Izdatelstvo Volgogradskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 2005). 119. E.g., Marta Rey García, Stars for Spain: La guerra civil española en los Estados Unidos [Stars for Spain: The Spanish Civil War in the United States] (La Coruña: Ediciós do Castro, 1997); Fernando Termis Soto, Renunciando a todo: El régimen franquista y los Estados Unidos desde 1945 a 1963 [Renouncing everything: Franco’s regime and the United States from 1945 to 1963] (Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2005); Joan Maria Thomàs, Roosevelt y Franco: De la Guerra Civil Española a Pearl Harbor [Roosevelt and Franco: From the Spanish Civil War to Pearl Harbor] (Barcelona: Edhasa, 2007); Alejandro Pizarroso Quintero, Diplomáticos, propagandistas y espías: Estados Unidos y España en la Segunda Guerra Mundial [Diplomats, propagandists and spies: The United States and Spain in the Second World War] (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2009); Aurora Bosch, Miedo a la democracia: Estados Unidos ante la Segunda República y la guerra civil española [Fear of democracy: U.S. attitudes toward the Second Spanish Republic and the Spanish Civil War] (Barcelona: Crítica, 2012). 120. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 121. E.g., Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University of

Notes to Chapter 1

|

231

Kansas Press, 1996) and See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007); Nicolas Barreyre, Sectionalism and Politics in the United States: The Midwest and Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, forthcoming); Paul Schor, Compter et classer: Histoire des recensements américains (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2009); M. J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). 122. Maurizio Vaudagna, “La storia comparata degli Stati Unita dal punto di vista di un americanista europa,” in La storia Americana e le Scienze Sociali in Europa e negli Stati Unita, ed. Daniele Fiorentino (Rome: Enciclopedia Italiana, 1996), 131–37; Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Austin Sarat and Jürgen Martschukat, eds., Is the Death Penalty Dying? European and American Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Tomás Calvo Buezas and Isabel Gentil García, eds., Inmigrantes en Estados Unidos y en España: Protagonistas en el siglo XXI [Immigrants in the United States and in Spain: Protagonists of the twenty-first century] (Madrid: Eunate, 2010). See also David E. Nye, ch. 12, “Not Quite at Home: Writing American History in Denmark,” in part 4. 123. Romain Huret, La fin de la pauvreté? Les experts sociaux et la Guerre contre la pauvreté aux États-Unis (1945–1974) [The end of poverty? The social experts and the war on poverty in the United States (1945–1974)] (Paris: Editions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2008); Marcus Gräser, Wohlfahrtsgesellschaft und Wohlfahrtsstaat: Burgerliche Sozialreform und Welfare State Building in den USA und in Deutschland 1880–1940 [Welfare society or welfare state: Bourgeois social reform and welfare state building in the United States and Germany, 1880–1940] (Frankfurt: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009). 124. E.g., Jessica Gienow-Hecht’s Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945–1955 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); Kendrick Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006) and To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957–1975 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); David Nye and Carl Pedersen, eds., Consumption and American Culture (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1991); Helle Porsdam, Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Christoph Ribbat, “You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever: Popular Culture and the German Americanist,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 50 (2005): 157–81; Stefano Rosso, Un fascino osceno: Guerra e violenza nella letteratura e nel cinema [An obscene fascination: War and violence in literature and film] (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2006); Pablo León Aguinaga, Sospechosos Habituales: El cine norteamericano, Estados Unidos y la España

232

|

Notes to Chapter 1

Franquista, 1939–1960 [Usual suspects: American film, the United States and Franco’s Spain, 1939–1960] (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2010); Berndt Ostendorf, Die multikulturelle Gesellschaft: Modell Amerika? [The multicultural society: America as model?] (Munich: Fink, 1994); Mel van Elteren, Imagining America: Dutch Youth and Its Sense of Place (Tilburg: Tilburg University Press, 1994); Francisco Javier Rodríguez Jiménez, ¿Antídoto contra el antiamericanismo? American Studies en España, 1945– 1969 [Antidote against anti-Americanism? American Studies in Spain, 1945– 1969] (Valencia, Spain: Universidad de Valencia, 2010.) 125. Volker Depkat, “The ‘Cultural Turn’ in German and American Historiography,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 54 (2009): 425–50. The German historian Klaus Schwabe has said of the “linguistic turn” that “for the historian, especially of foreign relations, it leads to a dead-end street”: H-Diplo roundtable review of Schwabe’s Weltmacht und Weltordnung (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2005), May 11, 2007, www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Weltmacht-undWeltordnung-Roundtable.pdf, 37. 126. Mar Vilar García, La prensa en los orígenes de la enseñanza del español en los Estados Unidos (1823–1833) [The periodical press in the origins of Spanish-language teaching in the United States (1823–1833)] (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1996) and El español, segunda lengua en los Estados Unidos: De su enseñanza como idioma extranjero en Norteamérica al bilingüismo [Spanish, the second language in the United States: From its teaching as a foreign language in North America to bilingualism] (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 2000); Luis A. Ortiz López and Manuel Lacorte, eds., Contactos y contextos lingüísticos: El español en los Estados Unidos y en contacto con otras lenguas [Linguistic contacts and contexts: Spanish in the United States and in contact with other languages] (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt, Vervuert, 2005); David Lasagabaster, Las lenguas de la diáspora vasca en el Oeste de los Estados Unidos [The languages of the Basque diaspora in the U.S. West] (Bilbao: Lete, 2006). 127. For detailed discussions of recent historiographical trends in Germany and the differences between German and U.S. historical writing, see Amerikastudien / American Studies 54, no. 3 (2009), including essays on the cultural and transnational turns. 128. See ch. 7. The Transatlantic Studies Association was founded in 2002, with its own journal. 129. Andrei V. Grinev, Indeitsy tlinkity v period Russkoi Ameriki (1741– 1867 gg.) [The Tlingit Indians in the period of Russian America (1741–1867)] (Novisibirsk: “Nauka,” Sibirskoe otd-nie, 1991) and “The Plans for Russian Expansion in the New World and the North Pacific in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in “The North-West Pacific in the 18th and 19th Centuries” special issue, European Journal of American Studies (2010), http://ejas.revues. org/7805; N. N. Bolkhovitinov, Rossiia otkryvaet Ameriku, 1732–1799 [Russia discovers America, 1732–1799] (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenia, 1991). 130. E.g., Tibor Frank, Double Exile: Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919–1945 (Berlin:

Notes to Chapter 1

|

233

Peter Lang, 2008); Anne Koops, De Dinamiek van een emigratien cultuur: De emigratie van gereformeerden, herformden en Katholieken naar NoordAmerika in vergelijkend perspectief (1947–1963) [The dynamics of an emigration culture: The emigration of Calvinists, Reformed and Catholics to North America from a comparative perspective (1947–1963)] (Hilversum, Netherlands: Verloren, 2010); Hans Krabbendamm, Freedom on the Horizon: Dutch Immigration to America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009); Raúl Sánchez Molina, Proceso migratorio de una mujer salvadoreña: El viaje de María Reyes a Washington [Migratory process of a Salvadoran woman: The journey of María Reyes to Washington] (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Siglo XXI, 2006); Julianna Puskás, ed., Overseas Migration from EastCentral and South-eastern Europe, 1880–1940 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990); Puskás, Ties That Bind, Ties That Divide: 100 Years of Hungarian Experience in the United States (New York: Holmes and Meier, 2000); Éva Eszter Szabó, U.S. Foreign and Immigration Policies in the Caribbean Basin (Szombathely, Hungary: Savaria University Press, 2007). 131. Simone Cinotto, Una famiglia che mangia insieme: Cibo ed etnicità nella comunità italoamericana di New York, 1920–1940 [A family that eats together: Food and ethnicity in the Italian American community of New York, 1920–1940] (Turin: Otto, 2001) and Terra soffice, uva nera: Viticoltori piemontesi in California prima e dopo il Proibizionismo (Turin: Otto, 2010), translated by Michelle Tarnopolski as Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 132. Spanish scholarship on Hispanic cultures and peoples in or immigrating to the United States has become something of a growth industry. See, e.g., María Jesús Buxó Rey and Tomás Calvo Buezas, eds., Las culturas hispanas en los Estados Unidos de América [Hispanic cultures in the United States of America] (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1990); Koldo San Sebastián, The Basque Archives: Vascos en Estados Unidos (1938–1943) (Donostia–San Sebastián: Txertoa, 1991); Germán Rueda Hernanz, De “dons” a “misters”: La emigración contemporánea de españoles a Estados Unidos, 1820–1950 [From “dons” to “misters”: Contemporary Spanish emigration to the United States, 1820–1950] (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre-América, 1993); Calvo Buezas, ed., Hispanos en Estados Unidos, inmigrantes en España: ¿Amenaza o nueva civilización? [Hispanics in the United States, immigrants in Spain: Threat or new civilization?] and ed., El gigante dormido: El poder hispano en los Estados Unidos [The sleeping giant: Hispanic power in the United States] (both Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 2006); Javier Pérez Segura, Scandal and Success: Picasso, Dalí y Miró en Estados Unidos [Scandal and success: Picasso, Dalí and Miró in the United States] (Madrid: Editorial Eutelequia, 2012). 133. Among many other publications, see Manfred Berg, The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007) and Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 2011); Britta Walschmitt-Nelson, From Protest to Politics: Schwarze Frauen in der Bürgerrechtsbewegung und im Kongress der Vereinigten Staaten (Frankfurt: Campus, 1998); Marie I. Diedrich, Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York:

234

|

Notes to Chapter 1

Hill and Wang, 1999); Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999); Valeria Gennaro Lerda, Dall’Arcadia alle Riforme: Studi sul Sud degli Stati Uniti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992); Ole Moen, Race, Color, and Partial Blindness: Affirmative Action under the Law (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 2001); Stephen Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Calvo Buezas, ed., El gigante dormido; José Manuel Roca, Nación negra, poder negro [Black nation, black power] (Madrid: La Linterna Sorda, 2008); Paul Quigley, “Secessionists in an Age of Secession: The Slave South in Transatlantic Perspective,” in Secession as an International Phenomenon, ed. Don H. Doyle (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 151–73, and Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jörg Nagler and Stig Förster, eds., On the Road to Total War and the German Wars of Unification (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Łukasz Niewin´ski, Obozy jenieckie w wojnie secesyjnej, 1861–1865 [The prisoner camps in the Civil War, 1861–1865] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Attyka, 2012); John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 and 2007). For a suggestive essay, see Simon Wendt, “Transnational Perspectives on the History of Racism in North America,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 54 (2009): 473–98. 134. Tony Judt has written, “The depth and breadth of anti-American feeling in contemporary Europe far exceeded anything seen during the Vietnam War or even at the height of the peace movements of the early 1980s”: Judt, History of Europe since 1945, 789. See also Nolan, Transatlantic Century, ch. 12. 135. On the European construction of American myths and the changing meaning of Americanization, see Marcus Gräser, “Model America,” trans. Christopher Gilley, in Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz, article published February 2011, www.ieg-ego.eu/graeserm-2010-en. 136. Frank Becker and Elke Reinhardt-Becker, eds., Mythos USA: “Amerikanisierung” in Deutschland seit 1900 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006); Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “Dimensionen der Amerikanisierung in der deutschen Gesellschaft,” Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte 35 (1995): 1–45, and Wiewestlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999); Reinhold Wagnleitner, CocaColonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. Diana M. Wolf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Mel van Elteren, Americanism and Americanization: A Critical History of Domestic and Global Influence (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006); “Dossier,” in “España y los Estados Unidos: interpretaciones culturales contemporáneas” [Spain and the United States: Contemporary cultural interpretations], ed. Sylvia L. Hilton, special issue, Revista Complutense de Historia de América 36 (2010).

Notes to Chapter 2

|

235

137. See ch. 6. 138. Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, and Raffaella Baritono, eds., Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective (Torino: Otto, 2013), 14. 139. Raffaella Baritono and Elisabetta Vezzosi, “Gli studi di storia americana tra Italia e Stati Uniti,” [American history studies between Italy and the United States], in A che punto è la storia delle donne in Italia? [How healthy is women’s history in Italy?], ed. Anna Rossi-Doria (Rome: I Libri Di Viella, 2003), 145–68. For American women’s history in Europe, see, e.g., Vezzosi, Madri e Stato: Politiche sociali negli Stati Uniti del Novecento [Mothers and state: Social policies in the twentieth-century United States] (Roma: Carocci, 2002); Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Anja Schüler, Frauenbewegung und soziale Reform: Jane Addams und Alice Salomon im transatlantischen Dialog 1889–1933 [Women’s movement and social reform: Jane Addams and Alice Salomon in transatlantic dialogue, 1889–1933] (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004); Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey, eds., Women, Dissent and Anti-slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Helen Laville, Cold War Women: American Women’s Organisations in the Cold War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Irmina Wawrzyczek, Planting and Loving: Popular Sexual Mores in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 1998); Sylwia Kuz´ma-Markowska, Zdrowe matki, chciane dzieci: Ruch kontroli urodzen´ w stanie Illinois (1923–1941) [Well mothers, wanted babies: Birth control in the state of Illinois (1923–1941)] (Warsaw: Neriton, 2009); Magdalena Vallejo Álvarez, Identidad afroamericana y victimización femenina: El espejo de una realidad en un mundo de ficción [Afro-American identity and female victimization: The mirror of reality in a fictional world] (Jaén, Spain: Grupo Alcalá, 2007). 140. Observation at “European Perspectives on American History,” Paris workshop organized by the Centre d’études nord-américaines, December 3–4, 2009. 141. By the end of the twentieth century, the pressure to write research monographs was augmented in a few European countries where academic appointments and promotions were coming to depend in part on recognition in the United States.

2. using the american past for the present In addition to giving thanks to all the contributors to this volume for their comments, we are particularly grateful to Mario del Pero and Helle Posdam for their insights and turns of phrase in various parts of this essay. 1. When Carl Becker asked, “What is the good of history?” in 1931, he was repeating a question that his European counterparts had first raised. See Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” presidential address to the American Historical Association, Minneapolis, December 29, 1931, from American Historical

236

|

Notes to Chapter 2

Review 37, no. 2: 221–36, accessed February 8, 2011, www.historians.org/info/ aha_history/clbecker.htm; Michael Kammen, introduction to “What Is the Good of History?” Selected Letters of Carl L. Becker, 1900–1945, ed. Kammen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), xxviii. 2. See Joyce Appleby, “Why We Began a Petition to Congress,” History News Network, George Mason University, accessed October 20, 2013, http://hnn.us/ article/940. 3. Western European historians of colonial America occupy something of a middle ground, since they also write about a territory that was part of their nation’s past—but in an imperial framework. 4. Tibor Frank, “ ‘Through the Looking-Glass’: A Century of Self-Reflecting Hungarian Images of the United States (1834–1941),” in Multicultural Challenge in American Culture, ed. Lehel Vadon (Eger: Eszterházy Károly Tanárképzo˝ Fo˝iskola, 1999), 21–36, esp. 33–34; Claus Offe, Selbstbetrachtung aus der Ferne: Tocqueville, Weber und Adorno in den Vereinigten Staaten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), translated by Patrick Camiller as Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States (Cambridge: Polity, 2005). 5. In Italy, for example, because of the postwar polarization between Christian Democrats and Communists, the impact of the Fascist experience on national pride, and the loyalty of the main public cultures to foreign references (notably the United States and the USSR), American history was a particularly heated avenue of self-perception. Two examples stand out. First, the study of the history of American constitutionalism and political culture by moderate centrist scholars (for example, Nicola Matteucci) at the end of the forties as a way to respond to the concern over the stability of the new Italian liberal democracy against the threats of Communists and Fascist nostalgia. Second, the interest of Italian radical Americanists in the International Workers of the World and the shop floor against the top-down tradition of Italian Communist labor historiography (e.g., Ferdinando Fasce and Bruno Cartosio) or in the history of popular culture and oral history at the rank-and-file level (e.g., Alessandro Portelli). 6. The politics of history is often discussed in relation to alleged partisanship in writing engaged history rather than the broader issue—under discussion here—of the motivations for writing and forms of engaged history. See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society (New York: Routledge, 1999). 7. Frank, “ ‘Through the Looking-Glass,’ ” 33. The following case study draws from ibid., 21–36. 8. Géza Závodszky, Az Amerika-motívum és a polgárosodó Magyarország a kezdetekto˝l 1848-ig [The America motif and the rise of the Hungarian middle class from the beginnings to 1848] (Budapest: Atlanti Kutató és Kiadó− Tankönyvkiadó, 1992), 118–83. 9. Sándor Bölöni Farkas, Útazás Észak Amerikában (Cluj-Napoca: Ifjabb Tilsch János, 1834), published in English as Journey in North America, ed. and trans. Arpad Kadarkay (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1978). Like some other Hungarian travelers, Farkas was in the United States at the same time as Tocqueville.

Notes to Chapter 2

|

237

10. Farkas, Journey in North America, 96. 11. Ibid., 122–23. 12. Tibor Frank, “Censorship in Metternich’s Hungary: The Case of János Reseta, 1832–1848,” in Frank, Ethnicity, Propaganda, Myth-Making: Studies on Hungarian Connections to Britain and America, 1848–1945 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1999), 197. See also Edit Mályuszné Császár, Megbíráltak és bírálók: A cenzúrahivatal aktáiból (1780–1867) [The criticized and the critics: From the papers of the Censorship Office (1780–1867)] (Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó, 1985), 232. 13. The next Hungarian of standing to visit the United States was Ágoston Haraszthy. See his Utazás Északamerkában [Journey in North America] (Pest: Heckenast, 1844). Haraszthy contrasted Americans and their lifestyle to the Hungarian equivalents. His admiration for a diligent, active, and productive elite clearly sounded with the critic’s voice that craved for change in feudal Hungary. 14. Károly Mészáros, Európa legujabb alkotmányai: Különös tekintettel Europa társadalmi állására [Europe’s most recent constitutions: With special reference to the social standing of Europe] (Pest: Magyar Mihál, 1848), 4, quote translated in Aladár Urbán, “A Lesson for the Old Continent: The Image of America in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848/49,” New Hungarian Quarterly 17, no. 63 (Autumn 1976): 90. 15. Károly Kornis, A’ kormány-rendszerro˝l: Szózat a’ néphez [On the system of government: A declaration to the people], vol. 2 (Budapest: Eisenfels Rudolf, 1848), 16, quote translated in Urbán, “A Lesson for the Old Continent,” 92. Thanks to Professor Urbán for identifying this pamphlet. 16. Urbán, “A Lesson for the Old Continent,” 93–94. 17. Kossuth’s message in 1851–52, “Up with Hungary and down with Austria,” echoed the sentiments of the War of Independence in late eighteenth-century America. Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, Christmas 1851, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, quoted in Tibor Frank, “ ‘. . . To Fix the Attention of the Whole World upon Hungary . . .’: Lajos Kossuth in the United States, 1851–52,” Hungarian Quarterly 43, no. 166 (Summer 2002): 93. 18. Hungarian observers were increasingly critical, noticing the signs and symbols of a class society where they had thought none existed. See Aurél Kecskeméthy, Éjszak-Amerika 1876-ban (Budapest: Ráth Mór, 1877); István Bernáth, Észak-Amerika: Közgazdasági és társadalmi vázlatok [North America: Economic and social sketches] (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1886), 248. 19. Emil Zerkowitz, Amerikai kereskedo˝k [American merchants] (Budapest: Singer és Wolfner, 1905), 17–20. 20. Zoltán Biró, Amerika: Magyarok a modern csodák országában (Budapest: Novák, 1929), 257–71. 21. Géza Zsoldos, Ez Amerika [This is America] (Budapest, 1942), 3–5, 75–77, 109. 22. The pioneering work in this field, written by Géza Závodszky, addresses the political role of the America motif up to 1848 (see n. 7). A long series of important studies came from István Gál (1912–82), whose complete works

238

|

Notes to Chapter 2

were published only in 2005, under the title Magyarország és az angolszász világ [Hungary and the Anglo-Saxon world], ed. Tibor Frank, Ágnes Gál, and Julianna Gál (Budapest: Argumentum OSzK, 2005). 23. Our thanks to Maurizio Vaudagna for this, and many other, observations on Italy. 24. Frontispiece of Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Imagology Revisited (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2010). 25. Ibid., 247–70. This chapter is based on Zacharasiewicz, Das Deutschlandbild in der amerikanischen Literatur (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998). 26. Daniele Fiorentino, ed., La storia Americana e le Scienze Sociali in Europa e negli Stati Uniti (Roma: Enciclopedia Italiana, 1996); see esp. Maurizio Vaudagna, “La storia comparata degli Stati Uniti dal punto di vista di un americanista europeo,” 131–37. That images of the other country go both ways and are intertwined with images of home was richly proved by another major conference in the same vein that shortly followed, this time in Vienna in 1994. It offered the American image of Central Europe and resulted in Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, ed., Images of Central Europe in Travelogues and Fiction by North American Writers (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1995). 27. Pier Paolo D’Attorre, “Sogno americano e mito sovietico nell’Italia contemporanea,” in Nemici per la pelle: Sogno americano e mito sovietico nell’Italia contemporanea, ed. D’Attorre (Florence: La Casa Usher / Ponte alle Grazie, 1991), 28 (translations by Tibor Frank); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 28. Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton, eds., Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007); Maurizio Vaudagna, “American Studies in Italy: Historical Legacies, Public Contexts and Scholarly Trends,” Storia della Storiografia 51 (2007): 17–63. 29. See www.eaas.eu. 30. Liping Bu, Making the World like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Richard T. Arndt, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005). This process has never really ended. Many European historians of the United States still pursue their research thanks to U.S. governmental programs. 31. Our thanks to Ivan Kurilla for this point. The little that was done was mostly on “safe,” uncontroversial topics. The Marxist approach in and of itself should not delegitimize such work—which, indeed, paralleled that of U.S. Marxist scholars such as Herbert W. Aptheker and Herbert Gutman. 32. As noted in ch. 1, though, there were some curious exceptions. Vernon Parrington was published in Russian in 1962–63 and Charles Beard in Polish in 1960. 33. On guest workers sending large amounts of money home from the United States, see Julianna Puskás, Ties That Bind, Ties That Divide: One Hundred Years of Hungarian Experience in the United States (New York: Holmes and

Notes to Chapter 2

|

239

Meier, 2000), 304. For the financial implications, see Neil Larry Shumsky, “ ‘Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t’: American Hostility to Return Migration, 1890–1924,” in From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR: Internationalism and Isolationism in American Foreign Policy, ed. Daniela Rossini (Keele, U.K.: Ryburn Publishing, Keele University Press, 1995), 93–112. 34. See, for example, Stefen Berger, The Contested Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 350. 35. How this worked varied from place to place, and in different times. For example, due to the Revolution of 1956 and the pioneering efforts of Professor László Országh, Hungary was to some extent an exception in Eastern Europe. The first East-West international conference on U.S. history was organized in Budapest in 1980 and resulted in Tibor Frank, ed., The Origins and Originality of American Culture (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1984). See also Fiorentino, La storia Americana; Anthony Mohlo and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Tiziano Bonazzi, “American History: The View from Italy,” Reviews in American History 14, no. 4 (December 1986): 523–41; Maurizio Vaudagna, “The American Historian in Continental Europe: An Italian Perspective,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 532–42. 36. Rainer Schnoor, ed., Amerikanistik in der DDR: Geschichte— Analysen—Zeitzeugenberichte (Berlin: Trafo Verlag, 1999); Uta Balbier and Christiane Rösch, eds., Umworbener Klassenfeind: Das Verhältnis der DDR zu den USA (Berlin: Links, 2006). For the official reception of the African American civil rights movement, for example, see Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, “Heroes of the Other America: East German Solidarity with the African American Civil Rights Struggle,” in Höhn and Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 123–42. 37. Clifford J. Levy, “Georgi A. Arbatov, a Bridge between Cold War Superpowers, Is Dead at 87,” New York Times, October 2, 2010; obituary, Telegraph, November 14, 2010; Wikipedia, s.v. “Georgy Arbatov,” accessed February 13, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Arbatov. 38. See Steve Ickringill, Zoltán Abádi-Nagy, and Aladár Sarbu, eds., The Early Republic: The Making of a Nation, the Making of a Culture (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1988). By the end of the Cold War, a number of East Central European countries had joined the EAAS. 39. The fall of the Soviet-sponsored regimes also stimulated conservative thought in East Central Europe, which gave credence to center-right and extremist right-wing policies all over the region, ultimately creating a right-wing majority there by the end of the 2000s. 40. William P. Kiehl, ed., America’s Dialogue with the World (Washington DC: George Washington University, 2006); Jan Behrends, Árpád von Klimó, and Patrice G. Poutros, eds., Antiamerikanismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Studien zu Ost- und Westeuropa (Bonn: Dietz, 2005). 41. Our thanks to Irmina Wawrzyczek and Halina Parafianowicz for this information and future references to Poland.

240

|

Notes to Chapter 2

42. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Le Défi américain (Paris: Denoël, 1967). 43. Douglas Martin, “J.-J. Servan-Schreiber, French Man of Ideas, Dies at 82,” New York Times, November 8, 2006. 44. Philipp Gassert, “Between Political Reconnaissance Work and Democratizing Science: American Studies in Germany, 1917–1953,” GHI Bulletin 32 (Spring 2003): 33–50; Wilfried Mausbach, “Erdachte Welten: Deutschland und der Westen in den 1950er Jahren,” in Deutschland und die USA in der Internationalen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Manfred Berg and Gassert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 423–48; Sabine Sielke, “Theorizing American Studies: German Interventions into an Ongoing Debate,” European Journal of American Studies 2006, no. 1, accessed February 8, 2011, http://ejas.revues. org/470. 45. See James F. Tent, “American Influences on the German Educational System,” in The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945– 1990: A Handbook, vol. 1, 1945–1968, ed. Detlef Junker, Philipp Gassert, Wilfried Mausbach, and David B. Morris (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 394–400; Karl-Heinz Füssl, “Between Elitism and Educational Reform—German-American Exchange Programs, 1945–1970,” in ibid., 409– 16; Mitchell G. Ash, “Science and Scientific Exchange in the German-American Relationship,” in ibid., 417–24. 46. See, for example, “American History in Germany: The View of the Practitioners. Norbert Finzsch, Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, Detlef Junker, and Ursula Lehmkuhl interviewed by Astrid M. Eckert,” GHI Bulletin 32 (Spring 2003): 51–84. Though as noted in ch. 1, some German historians were wary of American ideology. 47. With regard to the perception of the United States by German writers, see, for example, Michael Kimmage, “Munich/Manhattan: The Proximity of America in Wolfgang Koeppen’s Tauben im Gras,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 35, no. 2 (December 2010): 122–35. 48. For the most recent examples of this abundant literature, see Peter Kloeppel and Gregor Schöllgen, Luft-Brücken: Amerika und die Deutschen (Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe, 2004); Tom Buhrow and Sabine Stamer, Mein Amerika—dein Amerika (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006); Claus Kleber, Amerikas Kreuzzüge: Wohin treibt die Weltmacht? (Munich: Pantheon, 2008); Thomas Kausch, Dear Americans schön, dass wir euch wiederhaben (Munich: Knaur, 2010). 49. Sergio Bertelli, “Tamburi lontani” [Distant drums], in Una e divisibile: Tendenze attuali della storiografia statunitense [One and divisible: Current trends in American history writing], ed. Ester Fano (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1991), 350. 50. See Lewis Hanke, ed., Guide to the Study of United States History outside the U.S., 1945–1980, 5 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1985), in which most European countries participated. More recently, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) created awards for the best articles and books (the David Thelen Prize and the Willi Paul Adams Award, respectively) in American history published in a language other than English. The La Pietra project, led by the New York University professor Thomas Bender,

Notes to Chapter 2

|

241

attempted to foster a discussion to achieve “more complex understandings of the American nation’s relation to a world that is at once self-consciously global and highly pluralized.” Bender, “The LaPietra Report: A Report to the Profession,” September 2000, accessed January 30, 2011, www.oah.org/about/reports/ reports-statements/the-lapietra-report-a-report-to-the-profession/. See also Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Michael J. Hogan, “The ‘Next Big Thing’: The Future of Diplomatic History in a Global Age,” Diplomatic History 28, no. 1 (January 2004): 1–21; Thomas Zeiler, “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (March 2009): 1053–73. 51. The shift was partly a consequence of controversies over national standards of U.S. history. See Gary B. Nash, Charlotte A. Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Bender, Rethinking American History. 52. Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 1978); David Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar Reconstruction (London: Longman, 1992); Ellwood and Robert Kroes, eds., Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994). For recent work, see Robert L. Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., The American Century in Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Kroes, ed., Straddling the Borders: The American Resonance in Transnational Identities (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004); Vaudagna, ed., The Place of Europe in American History: Twentieth-Century Perspectives (Turin: Otto, 2007). With the growth of labor migrations into the countries of East Central Europe and especially Germany, more comparative research has been done on the history of American immigration, citizenship, and multiculturalism; see, e.g., David Abraham, “Citizenship Solidarity and Rights Individualism: On the Decline of National Citizenship in the U.S., Germany, and Israel” (CCIS Working Paper no. 53, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego, May 2002). The Transatlantic Studies Association (founded in 2002) and its periodical, the Journal of Transatlantic Studies (founded in 2009), both “provide focus for transatlantic area studies” (www. transatlanticstudies.com/2301/index.html, accessed February 13, 2011). 53. For a contemporary overview, see Philipp Gassert, “Amerikanismus, Antiamerikanismus, Amerikanisierung,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 39 (1999): 531–61. 54. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “Transatlantic Exchange and Interaction— the Concept of Westernization” (paper presented at “The American Impact on Western Europe: Americanization and Westernization in Transatlantic Perspective,” conference at the German Historical Institute[GHI], Washington DC, March 25–27, 1999). See also Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999) 55. Doering-Manteuffel, “Transatlantic Exchange,” 5. 56. Rob Kroes, “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving End,” in Bender, Rethinking American History, 296.

242

|

Notes to Chapter 2

57. Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age,” in Bender, Rethinking American History, 72. 58. See, for example, Kroes, “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism,” in Bender, Rethinking American History, 295–314. 59. Kaspar Maase, “ ‘Americanization’, ‘Americanness’, and ‘Americanisms’: Time for a Change in Perspective?” (paper presented at “The American Impact on Western Europe” conference, Washington DC, March 25–27, 1999), 6, 9 (response). 60. Ibid., 10–11. 61. Simon Newman, “Losing the Faith: British Historians and the Last Best Hope,” Comparative American Studies 6, no. 2 (June 2008): 161–78. 62. Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review 113 (June 1, 2002), accessed February 8, 2011, www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7107. On transnational history, see ch. 5, by Susanna Delfino and Marcus Gräser. 63. See, e.g., Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 64. See the works of Federico Romero, Mario Del Pero, Marco Mariano, Duccio Basosi, and Maurizio Selva. 65. See, e.g., Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 66. Stefan Berger, Christoph Conrad, and Guy Marchal, eds., Writing the Nation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 67. Padraic Kenney, “What’s New, We Knew: Twentieth-Anniversary Appraisals of 1989,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 3 (June 2011): 571–78. 68. E.g., Dirk Hörder and Diethelm Knauf, eds., Fame, Fortune and Sweet Liberty: The Great European Emigration (Bremen: Temmen, 1992); Julianna Puskás, Ties That Bind, Ties That Divide; Hörder and Horst Rössler, Distant Magnets: Expectations and Realities in the Immigrant Experience, 1840–1930 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993); Avraham Barkai, Branching Out: German-Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994); Robert P. Swierenga, Faith and Family: Dutch Immigration and Settlement in the United States, 1820–1920 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 2000); Jørn Brøndal, Ethnic Leadership and Midwestern Politics: The Scandinavian Americans and the Progressive Movement in Wisconsin, 1890–1914 (Northfield, MN: Norwegian-American Historical Association; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Dag Blanck, The Creation of an Ethnic Identity: Being Swedish American in the Augustana Synod, 1860–1917 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2006); Tibor Frank, Double Exile: Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919– 1945 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). 69. Both European and U.S. historians have studied remigration from the United States, e.g., Shumsky, “ ‘Damned If You Do,’ ” 93–112; Adam Walaszek, Reemigracja ze stanów zjednoczonych do Polski po i wojnie

Notes to Chapter 2

|

243

s´wiatowej (1919–1924) (Kraków: Nakładem Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego, 1983). As part of an international effort to reconsider immigration, Ewa Morawska provided the first comprehensive summary of immigration historiography in 1990, including the European literature on the subject. Morawska, “The Sociology and Historiography of Immigration,” in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 187–238. 70. See the journals IMIS-Beiträge (founded in 1995) and IMIS-Schriften (1996); Klaus J. Bade, Europa in Bewegung: Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000); Karl Husa, Christof Parnreiter, Irene Stacher, eds., Internationale Migration: Die globale Herausforderung des 21. Jahrhunderts? (Frankfurt: Brandes and Apsel / Südwind, 2000); Dietrich Thränhardt and Michael Bommes, eds., National Paradigms of Migration Research (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht University Press, 2010). See also ch. 6. 71. See especially Simone Cinotto, Terra soffice, uva nera: Viticoltori piemontesi in California prima e dopo il Proibizionismo (Turin: Otto, 2010), translated by Michelle Tarnopolski as Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 72. The editors of the Ellis Island series were Glazier and Luigi de Rosa. Experiences with U.S. immigration history have played a major role in shaping the relatively new field of international migration in Europe. Recently, the politics of international migration management became a novel focus of research. See, e.g., Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud, eds., The Politics of International Migration Management (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 73. Winfried Fluck, “A New Beginning? Transnationalism,” New Literary History 42 (2011): 380. Fluck is, however, intensely critical of the practice and proclamations of transnationalism nowadays. 74. Tony Badger, “Confessions of a British Americanist,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2, (September 1992): 515–23. 75. The irony was greater than the reviewer knew. “The main British buyer was the Imperial Tobacco Company,” Badger later wrote, “whose headquarters were in Bristol. I had grown up in Bristol, had played rugby on Imperial’s playing fields, and yet had not asked any serious questions about it at all.” Ibid., 517. 76. For British scholarship on Native American history, see the work of Joy Porter. 77. There has long been interest in American race: see ch. 1. But the number of British historians of the Southern civil rights movement increased dramatically since the 1980s. 78. E.g., Stephen Tuck, “Malcolm X’s Visit to Oxford University: U.S. Civil Rights, Black Britain, and the Special Relationship on Race,” American Historical Review 118 (2013): 76–103. 79. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

244

|

Notes to Chapter 3

80. For example, John Kirk moved to Alabama and Brian Ward worked for many years in Florida. Numerous British scholars of civil rights have spent sabbaticals based at U.S. universities. 81. See also Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, eds., Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: GermanSpeaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Meanwhile, in France, an inability to talk about race domestically has perhaps pushed a number of scholars of the United States to choose to work on the histories of racial minorities. French politicians routinely state that race does not exist and use a euphemism to refer to what outsiders might call postcolonial subjects: issus de l’immigration. Similarly, in academic discourse in France, the dominant method has been to construct diversity in terms of immigration—the generic term origine tends to be used rather than race. 82. Francis E. Clark, Old Homes of New Americans: The Country and the People of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Their Contribution to the New World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 170–72, quoted in Tibor Frank, “From Austria-Hungary to the United States: National Minorities and Emigration, 1880–1914,” in Frank, Ethnicity, Propaganda, Myth-Making, 81. 83. Oscar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 3–4. 84. Ibid., 4. 85. See, for example, Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., Democracy and Social Rights in the “Two Wests” (Turin: Otto, 2009); Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

3. institutions, careers, and the many paths of u.s. history in europe 1. Attempts to write exhaustive overviews have been made in the past; see Sigmund Skard, American Studies in Europe: Their History and Present Organization, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958); Lewis Hanke, ed., Guide to the Study of United States History outside the U.S., 1945– 1980, 5 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1985); Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton, eds., Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present, and Future (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007). 2. For U.S. history and international relations, see ch. 6.

Notes to Chapter 3

|

245

3. On the United Kingdom, see “UK Universities American Studies Programs,” on the British Association of American Studies’ “Links” page, accessed August 30, 2013, www.baas.ac.uk/links/. 4. The Russell Group is an alliance of twenty-four institutions in the U.K. system that advertises itself as research intensive. For PhDs, we could compile numbers only for these schools, which, however, award the majority of PhDs in U.S. history. Institute of Historical Research, History Online, “Theses,” accessed December 30, 2012, www.history.ac.uk/history-online/theses. The IHR maintains this database of history dissertations completed and in progress. Although valuable, it is not always reliable, as the universities awarding the degrees are responsible for submitting the data. Work undertaken with the database suggests that as many as 30 percent of dissertations may not have been reported. 5. We have counted 121 U.S. history dissertations in France for the period 2001–12. This includes those on historical aspects of the United States done in American studies programs. Due to the difficulty of gathering such information, however, this is probably an undercount (also true for our figures on other countries). Agence bibliographique de l’enseignement supérieur, databases at www.theses.fr/ and www.sudoc.abes.fr/; Claire Delahaye with Serge Ricard, “Répertoire des thèses soutenues en histoire et civilisation américaines, 1970– 2005,” http://serge-ricard.blogspot.fr/2007/02/thses-en-histoire-et-civilisation. html; all accessed March 30, 2013. 6. Polish numbers include dissertations in political science with a historical dimension. German numbers compiled from the annual directory of the German Association for American Studies, accessed February 20, 2013, http://dgfa. phil.uni-augsburg.de/?page_id=237 (membership required). For Sweden, see Stefan Eklöf Amirell, Svenska doktorsavhandlingar i historia 1976–2005 (Stockholm: Acta Bibliothecae Regiae Stockholmiensis, 2007). 7. The division of dissertations into three categories is admittedly crude but nevertheless provides some indication of what graduate students write about. In the first category are studies of relations between the home country and colonial North America / the United States. This includes migration and immigrant communities, transnational history, and images of the United States in the home country. The second category is U.S. foreign policy, broadly interpreted. It includes military history and foreign policy relations with and without the home country. The “other” category is everything that does not fit in the first two, including transnational history in which the home country does not figure (e.g., Brazilian perceptions of the United States). 8. Michael J. Heale, “American History in Great Britain,” in van Minnen and Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe, 138. For other countries, see other chapters in ibid. For more thoughts on this trend, see chs. 1 and 4 of the present volume. 9. Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, www.lurcy.org/; German Historical Institute, www.ghi-dc.org/; both accessed March 1, 2013. 10. See www.stint.se/en/stint, accessed March 1, 2013. 11. Irish Research Council, “Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship,” accessed August 30, 2013, www.research.ie/scheme/government-irelandpostdoctoral-fellowship.

246

|

Notes to Chapter 3

12. See ch. 4. 13. Review of Terence Graham, The “Interests of Civilization”? Reaction in the United States against the “Seizure” of the Panama Canal Zone, 1903–1904 (Lund: Esselte Studium, 1983), in Journal of American History 71, no. 3 (1984): 659–60; review of Magnus Persson, Great Britain, the United States, and the Security of the Middle East: The Formation of the Baghdad Pact (Lund: Lund University Press, 1998), in Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999), 1386– 87. It should be noted that these dissertations were reviewed in other American journals too, where they fared better. Graham was reviewed in Americas 41, no. 1 (1984): 145–47; Hispanic American Historical Review 64, no. 2 (1984): 407– 8; History 69, no. 227 (1984): 496–97; Pacific Historical Review 54, no. 3 (1985): 366–67. Persson was reviewed in History 84, no. 275 (1999): 493; Middle East Journal 53, no. 3 (1999): 497; English Historical Review 114, no. 456 (1999): 512; International Affairs 75, no. 1 (1999): 178. 14. In the mid-2000s, the Swedish Research Council’s journal Tvärsnitt debated the importance of the humanities’ turning to publishing in English. See Marika Hedin and Christer Nordlund, “Den svenska historien duger— också utomlands,” Historisk tidskrift 1999, no. 2: 340–42; Maria Ågren, “Svensk humaniora på engelska—en svår men nödvändig combination,” Tvärsnitt 2005, no. 2; Stefan Eklöf Amirell, “Svensk humsam-forskning måste återrapporteras internationellt,” Tvärsnitt 2005, no. 3; Harald Gustavsson, “Var finns det internationella—och vad ska vi med svenskan till?,” Tvärsnitt 2005, no. 4; Eklöf, “Svenska historiker lyser med sin frånvaro,” Tvärsnitt 2006, no. 1. 15. These were Jonathan Bell (Reading), Ingeborg Dornan (Brunell), Kate Dossett (Leeds), David Eldridge (Hull), Jessica Gibbs (Aberystwyth), Alex Goodall (York), Simon D. Hall (Leeds), Donna Jackson (Chester), Isaac Joel (Queen Mary), David Milne (East Anglia), Andrew Preston (Cambridge), Tim Stanley (Royal Holloway), Gabriella Treglia (Durham), and Robin Vandome (Nottingham). Several of these were in temporary employment and have since moved on. 16. Recent examples include Caroline Rolland-Diamond, Révoltes et utopies: La contre-culture américaine des années 1960 (Paris: Éditions Fahrenheit, 2012); Naomi Wulf and Élise Marienstras, The Federalist Papers: Défense et illustration de la Constitution fédérale des États-Unis (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2010). 17. These organizations are the British Group in Early American History (BGEAS), British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH), Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS), and the Réseau pour le développement européen de l’histoire de la jeune Amérique (REDEHJA). 18. Review of the institutional webpages of Peter Coates (Bristol), Anthony J. Badger (Cambridge), Michael O’Brien (Cambridge), David Reynolds (Cambridge), Howell John Harris (Durham), Frank Cogliano (Edinburgh), Simon Newman (Glasgow), Nigel Ashton (London School of Economics), Susan-Mary Grant (Newcastle), Richard Carwardine (Oxford), Pekka Hämäläinen (Oxford), Mark White (Queen Mary), Catherine Clinton (Queens University Belfast), John Oldfield (Southampton), Stephen Conway (University College London),

Notes to Chapter 4

|

247

Scott Lucas (Birmingham), and John Ashworth, Matthew Jones, and Peter Ling (all Nottingham). The last four trained as historians but hold positions in American studies.

4. straddling intellectual worlds Our warmest thanks to Isabel Soto, who participated in early iterations of this chapter. We are also grateful to Ferdinando Fasce for his very helpful comments. 1. Jackson Lears, “Divinely Ordained” (review of Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided [London: Allen Lane, 2010]), London Review of Books 33, no. 10 (May 19, 2011): 3–6; Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Jane Kamensky, “Liberties of Empire” (review of Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010]; Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010]; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011]), William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2011): 481–89. 2. Donna Merwick, “ ‘Being There’: Some Theoretical Aspects of Writing History at a Distance,” Reviews in American History 14, no. 4 (1986): 487– 500; David Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (1992): 432–62. For earlier statements concerning the problem of fragmentation and specialization, see Bernard Bailyn, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review 87, no. 1 (1982): 1–24; Thomas Bender, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 73, no. 1 (1986): 120–36. 3. Weil cited works by historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Daniel Boorstin. Weil, “Do American Historical Narratives Travel?,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 317– 42. 4. Weil used “going native” (ibid., 330) to summarize Tony Badger’s choice, which the latter explained in an article that began by recalling Marcus Cunliffe’s embarrassment at the backhanded compliment that as an outsider he possessed detachment and insights that eluded his U.S. peers in American historiography, “Confessions of a British Americanist,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (1992): 515–23. 5. Winfried Fluck, “The Modernity of America and the Practice of Scholarship,” in Bender, Rethinking American History, 343–66. 6. An arbitrary sample of books produced across Europe in the new millennium makes the point, which a similarly distinguished list of monograph articles could support: Julianna Puskás, Ties That Bind, Ties That Divide: 100 Years of Hungarian Experience in the United States, trans. Zora Ludwig (New

248

|

Notes to Chapter 4

York: Holmes and Meier, 2000); Jean Heffer, The United States and the Pacific: History of a Frontier, trans. W. Donald Wilson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); Ferdinando Fasce, An American Family: The Great War and Corporate Culture in America, trans. Ian Harvey (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002); Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); François Weil, A History of New York, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Mario del Pero, The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Simon Middleton, From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Hans Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon: Dutch Immigration to America, 1840–1940, trans. Harry Boonstra and Gerrit Sheeres (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2009); Emma Hart, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 7. James A. Henretta, for one, already lamented this trend twenty years ago in a review of a French book on historiography: “In making themselves experts in American history, the authors have imbibed the terms of reference and the intellectual assumptions of their American colleagues.” Henretta, “The Triumph of the Academy, French Style,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995): 641. 8. Weil, “Do American Historical Narratives Travel?,” 331; Michael Heale, “Writings in Great Britain on United States History: Some Reflections on a Liberal Moment,” in Guide to the Study of United States History outside the U.S., 1945–1980, 5 vols., ed. Lewis Hanke (White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1985), 2:363–72. See also Badger, “Confessions of a British Americanist,” 515, 517. 9. The British Association of American Studies (BAAS), founded 1955, and the British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH), founded in the early 1990s, are well established. Newer bodies include the British Group of Early American Historians (BGEAH), created in 1997, and Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS), established in 2007. Every European country also has an association of American studies, federated into the European Association of American Studies (EAAS). Historians of the colonies created the European Early American Studies Association (EEASA), another continent-wide group, in 2008. 10. We are thankful to Ferdinando Fasce, who, during a round table on October 28, 2011, organized by Maurizio Vaudagna in Trento, Italy, phrased the project as mobilizing “conventional knowledge that often escapes the eye.” 11. Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), 11; Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 5; Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (New

Notes to Chapter 4

|

249

York: Knopf, 1955), vii; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 3–18; John P. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 3. 12. Examples of personal narrative weaved into historical analysis do exist in Europe. Most often, they can be found in fields more directly linked to the epistemological discussions of history and subjectivity that underpinned the turn to personal narrative in the United States. Such is the case of women’s history in Italy: see Luisa Passerini, Autoritratto di gruppo (Florence: GiuntiAstrea, 1988), translated by Lisa Erdberg as Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Passerini, Storia e soggettività: Le fonti orali, la memoria (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1988). 13. See, inter alia, Timothy H. Breen, American Insurgents—American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 10. 14. Richard Evans, “The Wonderfulness of Us (the Tory Interpretation of History),” London Review of Books 33, no. 6 (March 17, 2011): 9–12. See also Lloyd Bowen, Kate Bradley, Simon Middleton, Andrew Mackillop, and Nicola Sheldon, “History in the UK National Curriculum: A Discussion,” Cultural and Social History 9, no. 1 (2012): 125–43. 15. Carla L. Peterson, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 31. 16. Manfred Berg, “The Ticket to Freedom”: Die NAACP und das Wahlrecht der Afroamerikaner (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000) and “The Ticket to Freedom”: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). 17. Alice Kessler-Harris, then the president of the OAH, reported on the debates in the organization about whether history was a literary discipline or part of the social sciences: round table, Trento, Italy, October 28, 2011. 18. Nicola Gallerano, “Fine del caso italiano? La storia politica tra ‘politicità’ e ‘scienza,’ ” Movimento operaio e socialista, n.s., 10, nos. 1–2 (1987): 5–25. Many thanks to Maurizio Vaudagna and Ferdinando Fasce for this point. 19. Some authors have suggested the use of USAmerican: see the introduction to Sylvia L. Hilton and Cornelius van Minnen, eds., Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007), 9n3. 20. Alessandro Portelli, “Culture popolari e culture di massa,” in Il mondo contemporaneo: Gli strumenti della ricerca 2: Questioni di metodo, ed. Giovanni De Luna et al. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983), 1470–90. Thanks to Ferdinando Fasce. 21. For older German histories of the United States, see Erich Angermann, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika seit 1917 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1966); Udo Sautter, Geschichte der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975), esp. 230–33. For more recent books that grapple with translating the American discourse on race into German, see Britta Waldschmitt-Nelson, From Protest to Politics: Schwarze Frauen in der Bürgerrechtsbewegung und im Kongress der Vereinigten Staaten (Frankfurt: Campus,

250

|

Notes to Chapter 4

1998), 19–24, 30–33; Norbert Finzsch, James O. Horton, and Lois E. Horton, Von Benin nach Baltimore: Eine Geschichte der African Americans (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), 11–14. This last book was coauthored by two American historians and one German (Finzsch), who also translated it into German. 22. See Alain Blum, “Resistance to Identity Categorization in France,” in Census and Identity: the Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses, ed. David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 121–47; Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin, eds., De la question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société française (Paris: Découverte, 2006). Many thanks to Paul Schor. 23. Joshua Goode, Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Jo Labanyi, ed., Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Many thanks to Isabel Soto. 24. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), quote on ix; John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin, 2004), esp. 5–24. 25. On comparison, see ch. 5. 26. Email from Rob Kroes to Nicolas Barreyre, March 4, 2013. Rob Kroes, Nederlandse pioniers in het Amerikaanse Westen: De geschiedenis van Amsterdam, Montana (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1989), translated by the author as The Persistence of Ethnicity: Dutch Calvinist Pioneers in Amsterdam, Montana (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Kroes, De leegte van Amerika: Een massacultuur in de wereld (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1992), translated by the author as If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). 27. See, e.g., Christof Mauch, ed., Die amerikanischen Präsidenten: 44 historische Porträts von George Washington bis Barack Obama, 5th ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009); Jörg Nagler, Abraham Lincoln: Amerikas großer Präsident (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009); Georg Schild, Abraham Lincoln: Eine politische Biographie (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009). 28. See chs. 1 and 6. 29. See Volker Depkat, ed., “American History/ies in Germany: Assessments, Transformations, Perspectives,” special issue, Amerikastudien / American Studies 54, no. 3 (2009). 30. Raimondo Luraghi, Storia de la guerra civile americana (Turin: Einaudi, 1966). The analytical payoff of this masterwork of fourteen hundred pages found its way to the United States distilled into an article and an impressively concise book: “The Civil War and the Modernization of American Society: Social Structure and Industrial Revolution in the Old South before and during the War,” Civil War History 18, no. 3 (1972): 230–50; The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South (New York: New Viewpoints, 1978). 31. Paul Schor, Compter et classer: Histoire des recensements américains (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2009). 32. The main figure in this field was Alain Desrosières. See his seminal La politique des grands nombres: Histoire de la raison statistique (Paris: La

Notes to Chapter 5

|

251

Découverte, 1993), translated by Camille Naish as The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 33. Max Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 34. Pap Ndiaye, Du nylon et des bombes: Du Pont de Nemours, le marché et l’État américain, 1900–1970 (Paris: Belin, 2001), translated by Elborg Forster as Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 35. Pap Ndiaye, La condition noire: Essai sur une minorité française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008). Ndiaye reflects on this journey in “Chemins de traverse américanistes: Contributions à l’histoire afro-américaine” (habilitation thesis, University of Paris 1, 2011). 36. Michal Jan Rozbicki, Culture and Liberty in the Age of American Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). Thanks to Irmina Wawrzyczek for this example. 37. There is a whole body of literature about how concepts travel and transform, stemming from Edward Said’s “Traveling Theory,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226–47. On how the U.S. academy imports and appropriates European thought, see for instance François Cusset, French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (Paris: La Découverte, 2003), translated by Jeff Fort with Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones as French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 38. Ron Robin, “The Exhaustion of Enclosures: A Critique of Internationalization,” in Bender, Rethinking American History, 367–80, quotes on 377–78.

5. writing american history from europe 1. See, for example, M. Aymard, “Histoire et comparaison,” in Marc Bloch aujourd’hui : Histoire comparée et sciences sociales, ed. H. Atsma and A. Burguiere (Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1990), 271–78; Pietro Rossi, La storia comparata: Approcci e prospettive (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1990); M. Salvati, “Storia contemporanea e storia comparata oggi: Il caso dell’Italia,” Rivista di storia contemporanea 21, nos. 2–3 (1992): 486–510; Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Geoffrey Crossick, and Jürgen Kocka, “La storia comparata,” Passato e Presente 11, no. 28 (1993): 20–51; George M. Fredrickson, “Comparative History,” in The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 457–73; Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (February 2006): 30–50; Hartmut Kaelble, Der historische Vergleich: Eine Einführung zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999); Kaelble and Jürgen Schriewer, eds., Vergleich und Transfer:

252

|

Notes to Chapter 5

Komparatistik in den Sozial-, Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003); Jürgen Osterhammel, “Transkulturell vergleichende Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats: Stuien zu Beziehungsgeschichte und Zivilisationsvergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001), 11–45; Margrit Pernau, Transnationale Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2011). 2. C. Vann Woodward, ed., The Comparative Approach to American History (New York: Basic Books, 1968). 3. Marcus Gräser, “World History in a Nation-State: The Transnational Disposition in Historical Writing in the United States,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (March 2009): 1038–52. 4. See James W. Ceaser, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 19–42. 5. See Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 1770–1800: A Sociohistorical Investigation of Late Eighteenth-Century Political Thinking, trans. Bernhard A. Uhlendorf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Marcus Gräser, “Modell Amerika,” in Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz, article published December 3, 2010, www.ieg-ego.eu/graeserm-2010-de (in German; English at www.ieg-ego.eu/graeserm-2010-en); Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Observations sur le gouvernement et les lois des États-Unis d’Amérique, in Collection complete des oeuvres de l’Abbé de Mably, vol. 8 (Paris: Debrières, 1794), 337–486. Mably conceived his Observations, which was first published in Amsterdam in 1784, as a series of letters addressed to Adams, who, between 1783 and 1784, was the plenipotentiary minister of the United States in the Low Countries and in charge of the peace negotiations following the defeat of Britain in the American war for independence. Apparently, the two men never met, but they exchanged some correspondence. Adams appended one letter in particular to his Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America (London: C. Dilly, 1787). Much different was the relationship between Jefferson and Mazzei, whose friendship was made closer by the fact that Mazzei also owned property and a house in Virginia. The two men shared the same ideas about the constitutional arrangement of the United States, which were different from those that Adams and Mably held. In his Recherches historiques et politiques sur les États Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale, par un citoyen de Virginie (Paris, 1788), Mazzei refuted Mably’s arguments, much to the satisfaction of his friend Jefferson. For a thorough rendition of the debate, see Fernanda Mazzanti Pepe, “L’evoluzione del costituzionalismo in Francia: L’esempio americano e le Observations del Mably,” in Annali della Facoltà di Scienze Politiche, Università di Genova, 1976–77 (Milan: Giuffrè, 1977), 1027–81. 6. Mably, Observations sur le gouvernement; Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville and Étienne Clavière, De la France et des États-Unis (London, 1787; repr., Paris: Editions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1996); Brissot de Warville, Nouveau Voyage dans les États-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale fait en 1788, 3 vols. (Paris: Chez Buisson, 1791); Carlo Botta, Storia della guerra di indipendenza degli Stati Uniti, 4 vols. (1809; repr., Milan: V.

Notes to Chapter 5

|

253

Ferrario, 1819); Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Paris, 1835; repr., New York: Vintage, 1961), 2 vols., ed. Phillips Bradley. For a thorough rendition of the French engagement in the debate on the United States as a political/institutional model, see Fernanda Mazzanti Pepe, Il nuovo mondo di Brissot: Libertà e istituzioni tra antico regime e rivoluzione (Turin: Giappichelli, 1996); Pepe, Mably: Principi, regole e istituzioni per una democrazia a misura d’uomo (Rome: Aracne, 2010). Botta’s work was reprinted several times in Italy and France and was praised by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Its most recent reprint (Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino, 2010), edited by Antonella Emina and with a preface by Ugo Cardinale and an introduction by Luca Codignola, marked the bicentennial of its first publication. 7. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. (London, 1888; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1910). Brunialti was essentially a propagator of American political culture through his edited translations of Tocqueville, Thomas Erskine May, and Woodrow Wilson’s The State in the Biblioteca di Scienze Politiche series, published in Turin from the 1880s through the 1910s. See Susanna Delfino, “Un ‘mugwump’ all’italiana: Attilio Brunialti e la democrazia statunitense tra modello e realtà,” in Modelli nella storia del pensiero politico, ed. Carlo Carini and Vittor Ivo Comparato (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 369–86. 8. Several authors have documented the intimate connections among U.S. and European intellectual circles from the revolution and throughout the nineteenth century, from J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Yale University Press, 1975), to Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For a detailed description of the European influences on Southern thought, see Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); for the period between the end of the Civil War and the early twentieth century, see Tiziano Bonazzi, ed., Potere e nuova razionalità: Alle origini delle scienze della società e dello stato in Germania e negli Stati Uniti (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1982); Axel R. Schafer, American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875–1920: Social Ethics, Moral Control, and the Regulatory State in a Transatlantic Context (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000). 9. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 31. On comparing the constitutional cultures of the United States and Europe, see Fernanda Mazzanti Pepe, ed., Culture costituzionali a confronto (Genoa: Name, 2004). 10. For this very sketchy summary we have mainly relied on Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes—The Short Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), part 1. 11. Roy Nichols, A Historian’s Progress (New York: Knopf, 1968), 49–51. 12. Novick, That Noble Dream, 158. Even the genuine interest that Carl Becker and Charles Beard showed in the contemporary European intellectual and philosophical ferments revealed itself to be quite superficial. Beard’s fascination with the thought of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, with whom he shared an antipathy toward both Fascism and Marxism, influenced his writing,

254

|

Notes to Chapter 5

but the modest impact on his intellectual formation of Hegelian philosophy, in which Croce’s extreme idealism was deeply rooted, meant that he did not fully engage with Croce’s ideas and cited his works only “very selectively” (ibid.). Ellen Nore, Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1983), 158–62; Novick, That Noble Dream, 154–58. 13. Maurizio Vaudagna, Corporativismo e New Deal (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1981), esp. 197–223. 14. Classic examples of consensualist historiography are Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948); Louis Harz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1955); Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 15. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975). 16. Novick, That Noble Dream, 421–22. 17. Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (White Plains, ME: Sharpe, 1976). 18. Two particularly praiseworthy efforts to rewrite U.S. history as part of world history are Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 19. Eugene D. Genovese, L’economia politica della schiavitù (Turin: Einaudi, 1972), translation by Vittorio Ghinelli of The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Random House, 1967); Genovese, Neri d’America (Rome: Riuniti, 1977), translation by Giulia Calvi of In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971); George P. Rawick, Lo schiavo americano dal tramonto all’alba: La formazione della comunità nera durante la schiavitù negli Stati Uniti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973), translation by Bruno Cartosio of From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972); Eric Foner, La storia della libertà americana (Rome: Donzelli, 2000), translation by Annalisa Merlino of The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998). 20. Bender, Nation among Nations, 5. 21. In this way, the students of the several European countries are equally familiar with, say, the importance of Francis Bacon in the founding of the scientific method, the impact of Dante’s Divina Commedia, and the philosophies of G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. 22. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; repr., Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1968). 23. Michael Kammen, “Historical Knowledge and Understanding” (paper presented at a 1986 symposium at the University of Chicago), 27, cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, 593–95. 24. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 427–33;

Notes to Chapter 5

|

255

Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic, 1974– 89). Inspired by Fernand Braudel’s many works, especially Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle, vol. 3, Le temps du monde (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1979), Wallerstein developed an integrated theory of the economic development of the world based on the interrelation between centers, semiperipheries, and peripheries. 25. Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Vintage, 1990); Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an Industrial Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). 26. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1920); Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes,” Revue de synthèse historique 46 (1928): 15–50. 27. Pietro Rossi, Storia e storicismo nella filosofia contemporanea (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1991). 28. Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes.” 29. Jürgen Kocka, “I nuovi interrogativi della storiografia tedesca,” Passato e presente 11, no. 28 (1993): 42–51, quote on 43 (translation by chapter authors). See also Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, “The Use of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980): 174–97; Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984). Skocpol and Somers make a distinction between “parallel demonstration” and “contrasting type” and Tilly between “encompassing comparison” and “variation-finding comparison.” 30. On this distinction between a genuinely comparative work and one simply highlighting communication and cultural/intellectual exchanges between areas, see Salvati, “Storia contemporanea,” 491; Jürgen Osterhammel, “Transferanalyse und Vergleich im Fernverhältnis,” in Kaelble and Schriewer, Vergleich und Transfer, 439–66. 31. Kocka, “I nuovi interrogativi,” 45–46. 32. See William H. Sewell, “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” History and Theory 6, no. 2 (1967): 208–18, esp. 211. 33. Jürgen Kocka, Angestellte zwischen Faschismus und Demokratie: Zur Politischen Sozialgeschichte der Angestellen: USA 1890–1940 im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977); Hans-Jürgen Puhle, Politische Agrarbewegungen in kapitalistischen Industriegesellschaften: Deutschland, USA und Frankreich im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975). See also Puhle, “Comparative Approaches from Germany: The ‘New Nation’ in Advanced Industrial Capitalism, 1860–1940— Integration, Stabilization and Reform,” Reviews in American History 14, no. 4 (December 1986): 613–28. 34. Besides Kocka’s above-cited Angestellte zwischen Faschismus und Demokratie, see also his “The Middle Classes in Europe,” Journal of Modern

256

|

Notes to Chapter 5

History 67, no. 3 (1995): 16; Kocka and Alberto M. Banti, eds., Borghesie europee dell’Ottocento (Venice: Marsilio, 1989); Arnold J. Heidenheimer, “The Politics of Public Education: Health and Welfare in the USA and Western Europe: How Growth and Reform Potentials Have Differed,” British Journal of Political Science 3 (1973): 315–40; G. A. Ritter, Der Sozialstaat: Entstehung und Entwicklung im internationalen Vergleich (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988); Christiane Eisenberg, Deutsche und englische Gewerkschaften: Entstehung und Entwicklung bis 1878 im Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986); Peter Flora, ed., Growth to Limits: The Western European Welfare States since World War II, 5 vols. (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1986–87); Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of our Changing Social Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 35. See, for example, Vaudagna, ed., Corporativismo e New Deal; Vaudagna, ed., L’Estetica della politica: Europa e America negli anni Trenta (Bari: Laterza, 1989); Federico Romero, Gli Stati Uniti e il sindacalismo europeo, 1944–1951 (Rome: Lavoro, 1989); the recent Alice Kessler-Harris and Vaudagna, eds., Democracy and Social Rights in the Two Wests (Turin: Otto, 2009). For a thorough discussion of Italian historiographic developments in relation to the comparative perspective, see Salvati, “Storia contemporanea.” 36. In his Cosmopolitan Islanders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Richard J. Evans argues that most British historians are attracted by “cataclysmic events” in continental European history, such as the French Revolution, fascism, etc. Among the vast British economic historical literature of a comparative character, the works by N. F. R. Crafts deserve special mention, especially “Industrial Revolution in England and France: Some Thoughts on the Question, ‘Why Was England First?,’ ” Economic History Review 30 (1977): 429–41; British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). Also notable are the works by P. K. O’Brien, in particular his (cowritten with C. Keyder) Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780– 1914: Two Paths to the Twentieth Century (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1978). In the field of urban history, see D. Cannadine, “Urban Development in England and America in the 19th Century: Some Comparisons and Contrasts,” Economic History Review 33 (1980): 309–25; Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States and France, 1780–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981). For a thorough rendition of the state of comparative history in Britain, see Geoffrey Crossick, “E che cosa si può sapere dell’Inghilterra? La storia comparata in Gran Bretagna,” Passato e presente 11, no. 28 (1993): 30–41. 37. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “La Francia: Una tradizione persa,” Passato e presente 11, no. 28 (1993): 23–28. For French comparative studies, see François Crouzet, De la supériorité de l’Angleterre sur la France: L’économique et l’imaginaire, XVIIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1985), translated by Martin Thom as Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); J. L. Pinol, Le monde des villes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1991). 38. Aleksander Gerschenkron, “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective,” in The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas, ed. Bert F. Hoselitz

Notes to Chapter 5

|

257

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 3–29, repr. in Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), 3–30; W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). 39. Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 40. E. P. Hennock, British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance, 1880–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Hennock, The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer, eds., The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981); Heidenheimer, “Politics of Public Education”; Heidenheimer, Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in Europe and America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1990); Marcus Gräser, Wohlfahrtsgesellschaft und Wohlfahrtsstaat: Burgerliche Sozialreform und Welfare State Building in den USA und in Deutschland 1880–1940 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009). 41. See, e.g., Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry (New York: Wiley, 1956); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Tilly, Big Structures. 42. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). 43. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2001). 44. Among the most recent literature, it is important to remember Stanley Engerman, “Europe, the Lesser Antilles, and Economic Expansion, 1600–1800,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Engerman (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 1996), 147–64; Engerman, “France, Britain and the Economic Growth of Colonial North America,” in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 227–49; Engerman, Slavery, Emancipation and Freedom: Comparative Perspectives (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, Economic Development in the Americas since 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989); Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon, 1969); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966); Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Frederickson, The

258

|

Notes to Chapter 5

Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988). 45. Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987); Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters and Lords: Mid-Nineteenth-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Don H. Doyle, Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002). See also David Carlton and Peter Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Brian Shoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); James C. Cobb and William Stueck, eds., Globalization and the American South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). 46. Such inspirations sprang from two conferences, the first organized by Doyle in Naples in 1997 and the second by Rick Halpern, then of University College London, in 1999, under the auspices of the Commonwealth Fund. The proceedings of the latter have been published as Halpern and Enrico Dal Lago, eds., The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History (New York: Palgrave, 2002). See also Susanna Delfino, “The Idea of Southern Economic Backwardness: A Comparative View of the United States and Italy,” in Delfino and Gillespie, Global Perspectives, 105–30; Delfino, “The Toll of Reconciliation: North and South in Post-unification Italy and the Post–Civil War United States,” in Reconstructing Societies in the Aftermath of War: Memory, Identity, and Reconciliation, ed. Flavia Brizio-Skov (Boca Raton, FL: Bordighera, 2004), 103–17; Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). 47. Franklin Mendels, “Proto-industrialization: The First Phase of the Process of Industrialization,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 241–61; Pollard, Peaceful Conquest. 48. See Tom Downey, Planting a Capitalist South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Bruce W. Eelman, Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry: Commercial Culture in Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1845–1880 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); J. D. Wells and J. Green, eds., The Southern Middle Classes in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 2011). 49. On the renewed interest in the political constellation of the welfare state, see Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). 50. Theda Skocpol, Boomerang: Clinton’s Health Security Effort and the Turn against Government in U.S. Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). 51. Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890– 1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Gräser, Wohlfahrtsgesellschaft und Wohlfahrtsstaat.

Notes to Chapter 6

|

259

52. For a similar approach, see Mario Del Pero’s Libertà e Impero: Gli Stati Uniti e il mondo, 1776–2006 (Bari: Laterza, 2008). 53. Deborah Cohen, “Comparative History: Buyer Beware,” GHI Bulletin 29 (Fall 2001): 23. 54. The most thoroughgoing critique is Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung. Der Ansatz der Histoire croisée und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen,” in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 607–36, esp. 609–12. See also Werner and Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison.” 55. Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 81. 56. Werner and Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison,” 38. 57. Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” in In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 170–71. 58. For example, Barrington Moore Jr., Charles Tilly, and Theda Skocpol. 59. Peter Baldwin, “Comparing and Generalizing: Why All History Is Comparative, yet No History Is Sociology,” in Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor (New York: Routledge, 2004), 7. 60. Bender, Nation among Nations, 4. 61. Thomas Bender, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 73, no. 1 (June 1986): 120–36. 62. Dipesh Chakrabarty has rightly mentioned the “asymmetric ignorance” among European (and other Western) historians and their colleagues in other parts of the world, in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 28. We should not forget the enormous amount of “asymmetric ignorance” among Westerners who are split because of language differences and asymmetric access to resources. 63. Johann N. Neem, “American History in a Global Age,” History and Theory 50, no. 1 (February 2011): 41–70. 64. Theodor W. Adorno argued that if something perpetuates then it is universal. Adorno, Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und der Freiheit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 22.

6. american foreign relations in european perspectives 1. For example, René Rémond, Les Etats-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1815–1852 [The United States in French public opinion] (Paris: A. Colin, 1962); André Kaspi, La libération de la France [The liberation of France] (Paris: Perrin, 1995); Yves-Henri Nouailhat, Les Américains à Nantes et Saint-Nazaire, 1917– 1919 [Americans in Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, 1917–1919] (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1972); Nouailhat, France et États-Unis, août 1914–avril 1917 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995); Pierre Mélandri, Les États-Unis et le défi

260

|

Notes to Chapter 6

européen (1955–1958) [The United States and the European challenge (1955– 1958)] (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1975). One can also mention the publications of Frédéric Bozo, who followed the same path though belonging to the next generation of French historians of the United States: La France et l’OTAN: De la guerre froide au nouvel ordre européen [France and NATO: From the Cold War to the new European order] (Paris: Masson, 1991); Deux stratégies pour l’Europe: De Gaulle, les États-Unis et l’Alliance Atlantique (1958–1969) [Two strategies for Europe: De Gaulle, the United States and the Atlantic Alliance (1958–1969)] (Paris: Plon, 1996); Histoire secrète de la crise irakienne: La France, les Etats-Unis et l’Irak, 1991–2003 [The secret history of the Iraq crisis: France, the United States and Iraq, 1991–2003] (Paris: Perrin, 2013). 2. For example, H. C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of Anglo-American Relations, 1763–1952 (London: Odhams, 1954); H. G. Nicholas, Britain and the United States (London: Chatto, 1963); Alexander E. Campbell, Great Britain and the United States, 1895–1903 (London: Longman, 1960). 3. For example, Günter Moltman, Amerikas Deutschlandpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg [America’s Germany policy in World War II] (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1958); Hans-Jürgen Schröder, Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten, 1933– 39 [Germany and the United States, 1933–39] (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970); Mario Toscano, Corsivi di Politica Estera, 1949–1968 [Foreign policy writings, 1949–1968] (Rome: Giuffré, 1981); Ottavio Barié, Gli Stati Uniti nel secolo XX tra leadership e guerra fredda [The United States in the twentieth century between leadership and the Cold War] (Milan: Marzorati, 1983). For two more recent works on U.S.-Italian relations, both based on impressive archival research, see Alessandro Brogi, L’Italia e l’egemonia americana nel Mediterraneo [Italy and American hegemony in the Mediterranean] (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996); Leopoldo Nuti, Gli Stati Uniti e l’apertura a sinistra: Importanza e limiti della presenza americana in Italia [The United States and the opening to the left: The importance and limits of the American presence in Italy] (Rome: Laterza, 1999). Some recent, important works of Portuguese scholars have discussed the relationship between their country and the United States. See, for example, Luis Nuno Rodrigues, Salazar-Kennedy: A crise de uma aliança: Relações luso-americanas entre 1961 e 1963 [Salazar and Kennedy: The crisis of an alliance: U.S.-Portuguese relations between 1961 and 1963] (Lisbon: Notícias Editorial, 2002); Bernardino Gomes and Tiago Moreira de Sá, Carlucci vs. Kissinger: Os EUA e a Revoluçao Portuguesa [Carlucci vs. Kissinger: The United States and the Portuguese revolution] (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2008). 4. Tiziano Bonazzi, “Europa, Zeus e Minosse, ovvero il labirinto dei rapporti euro-americani,” Ricerche di Storia Politica 1 (2004): 3–24; Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); David Ellwood, The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Rob Kroes, ed., Straddling Borders: The American Resonance in Transnational Identities (Amsterdam: VU University Press,

Notes to Chapter 6

|

261

2004); Richard Pells, Not like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 5. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003); Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Penguin, 2005); Civilization: The West and the Rest (London: Penguin, 2011). 6. National Archives, London (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/); U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (www.archives. gov/). 7. Marco Marino, ed., Defining the Atlantic Community: Culture, Intellectuals, and Policies in the Mid-Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2010); C. J. Bartlett, “The Special Relationship”: A Political History of Anglo-American Relations since 1945 (London: Longman, 1992); John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Antoine Capet and Aïssatou Sy-Wonyu, eds., The “Special Relationship”: La “relation spéciale” entre le Royame-Uni et les ÉtatsUnis (Rouen: Université de Rouen, 2003); Priscilla Roberts, “Lord Lothian and the Atlantic World,” Historian 66, no. 1 (2004): 97–127; Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (London: Little Brown, 2007). 8. László Borhi, Magyarország a hidegháborúban: A Szovjetunió és az Egyesült Államok között, 1945–1956 [Hungary in the Cold War: Between the Soviet Union and the United States, 1945–1956] (Budapest: Corvina, 2005); Borhi, Megalkuvás és ero˝szak: Az Egyesült Államok és a szovjet térhódítás Magyarországon, 1944–1949 [Opportunism and violence: The United States and the Soviet penetration in Hungary, 1944–1949] (Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó, 1997); Marek Kazimierz Kamin´ski, W obliczu sowieckiego ekspansjonizmu: Polityka Stanów Zjednoczonych i Wielkiej Brytanii wobec Polski i Czechosłowacji 1945–1948 [In the face of Soviet expansionism: The policy of the United States and Great Britain in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1945–1948] (Warsaw: Instytut Historii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2005); Longin Pastusiak, 400 lat stosunków polsko-amerykan´skich, 1608–2008 [400 years of PolishAmerican relations, 1608–2008] (Warsaw: Adam, 2010). 9. For illustrations, see Robert J. McMahon, “Diplomatic History and Political History: Finding Common Ground,” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 1 (2005): 93–109; Andrew J. Wilson, Irish America and the Ulster Conflict, 1868–1995 (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Michael E.

262

|

Notes to Chapter 6

Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University  Press, 2011); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 10. Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945– 1951 (London: Methuen, 1984). 11. For additional examples, see Elena Aga Rossi, ed., Il Piano Marshall e l’Europa [The Marshall Plan and Europe] (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1983); Gérard Bossuat, La France, l’aide américaine et la construction européenne [France, American aid and the construction of Europe] (Paris: Comité pour l’Histoire économique et financière de la France, 1992); Rene Girault and Maurice Levy-Leboyer, Le plan Marshall et le relèvement économique de l’Europe [The Marshall Plan and the economic recovery of Europe] (Paris: Comité pour l’Histoire économique et financière de la France, 1993); Gerd Hardach, Der Marshall Plan: Auslandhilfe und Wiederaufbau in Westdeutschland, 1948–1952 [The Marshall Plan: Foreign aid and reconstruction in West Germany, 1948–1952] (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1994); Carlo Spagnolo, La stabilizzazione incompiuta: Il Piano Marshall in Italia [The incomplete stabilization: The Marshall Plan in Italy] (Rome: Carocci, 2001); Mauro Campus, L’Italia, gli Stati Uniti e il Piano Marshall [Italy, the United States and the Marshall Plan] (Rome: Laterza, 2008); Francesca Fauri, Il Piano Marshall e l’Italia [The Marshall Plan and Italy] (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010). On the case of Portugal, see M. Fernando Rollo, Portugal e o Plano Marshall [Portugal and the Marshall Plan] (Lisbon: Estampa, 1994). 12. For an early paean to this new Cold War history, see John L. Gaddis, We Now Know: Re-thinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). For an excellent history of the Cold War that incorporates new archival findings, see Federico Romero, Storia della Guerra Fredda: L’Ultimo conflitto per l’Europa [History of the Cold War: The last conflict over Europe] (Turin: Einaudi, 2009). See also Romero and Silvio Pons, eds., Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations (London: Cass, 2005). 13. Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC, www.wilsoncenter.org/program/cold-war-international-historyproject. 14. Melvin P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Cold War History is based at the London School of Economics (www.tandfonline. com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=fcwh20#. UjMPmmSwUxU), while the Journal of Cold War Studies has its base at Harvard University (www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/jcws). 15. Thomas Zeiler, “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (March, 2009): 1053–73; Mario Del Pero, “On the Limits of Thomas Zeiler’s Historiographical Triumphalism,” ibid., 1079–82.

Notes to Chapter 6

|

263

16. Michael Cox, “Another Transatlantic Split? American and European Narratives and the End of the Cold War,” Cold War History 7, no. 1 (February 2007): 121–46, quotes on 127, 137. On the centrality of Europe as both the object and the actor of the Cold War, see Romero, Storia della Guerra Fredda. For different approaches, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); John L. Harper, The Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 17. We thank Rasmus Mariager, our colleague at the University of Copenhagen, for calling our attention to this. 18. “About the Project,” on the website of the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen, accessed September 13, 2013, http://epokeskiftet.saxo.ku.dk/english/om_kopi/. Supporting evidence is in Kim van den Wijngaart, Nederland als trouwe bondgenoot: Nederlands-Amerikaanse betrekkingen 1969–1975 (Hilversum, Netherlands: Verloren, 2011). 19. Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Angela Romano, From Détente in Europe to European Détente: How the West Shaped the Helsinki CSCE (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008). See also Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 20. Romero, Storia della Guerra Fredda, 282–334; John W. Young, “Western Europe and the End of the Cold War,” in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, Endings, 289–310; Helga Haftendorn, “The Unification of Germany, 1985–1991,” in ibid., 333–55. See also Frédéric Bozo, Mitterrand, la fin de la guerre froide et l’unification allemande: De Yalta à Maastricht [Mitterand, the end of the Cold War and the unification of Germany: From Yalta to Maastricht] (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005); Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, N. Piers Ludlow, and Leopoldo Nuti, eds., Europe and the End of the Cold War: A Reappraisal (London: Routledge, 2008). 21. “Ameri-Danes,” on the University of Southern Denmark website, last modified October 5, 2012, accessed September 13, 2013, www.sdu.dk/en/Om_ SDU/Institutter_centre/Ihks/Forskning/Forskningsprojekter/C_+Amerikansk_ paa_dansk. 22. For recent works on this complex interplay, see Nolan, Transatlantic Century; Ellwood, Shock of America. On the French and Italian Lefts, see Alessandro Brogi, Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 23. Federico Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944–51 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Mario Del Pero, L’alleato scomodo: Gli USA e la DC negli anni del centrismo, 1948–1955 [The inconvenient ally: The U.S.A. and the Italian Christian Democrats in the age of centrism, 1948–1955] (Rome: Carocci, 2001); Matthias Schulz and Thomas Schwartz, eds., The Strained Alliance: U.S.-European Relations from Nixon to Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);

264

|

Notes to Chapter 6

Kaeten Mistry, “La Dinamiche delle relazioni italo-statunitensi nel dopoguerra, l’interventismo americano e il ruolo di James C. Dunn” [The dynamics of U.S.Italian relations in the postwar period, U.S. interventionism and the role of James C. Dunn], Ricerche di Storia Politica 10, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. 24. Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001), 344. 25. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London: Cass, 2003). 26. See, e.g., Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-war American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002); Scott-Smith and H. Krabbendam, eds., The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960 (London: Cass, 2003). 27. Scott Lucas, “Beyond Freedom, Beyond Control: Approaches to Culture and the State-Private Network in the Cold War,” in Scott-Smith and Krabbendam, Cultural Cold War, 60. Other telling examples are the fates of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in various European countries. Dutch intellectuals’ absence from political debates, their isolation, and their ambivalence toward American culture cut short the CCF’s role in the Netherlands. Similarly, the Danish branch of the CCF resisted the direction of the Parisian headquarters. See Tity de Vries, “The Absent Dutch: Dutch Intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in ibid., 254–66; Ingeborg Philipsen, “Out of Tune: The Congress for Cultural Freedom in Denmark, 1953–1960,” in ibid., 237–53. 28. Ludovic Tournès, L’argent de l’influence: La philanthropie américaine et ses réseaux en Europe, 1900–2000 (Paris: Autrement, 2010). Somewhat similar points are made in Giuliana Gemelli and Roy MacLeod, eds., American Foundations in Europe: Scientific Policies, Cultural Diplomacy and Transatlantic Relations, 1920–1980 (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2003); John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 29. This definition originates with Milton C. Cummings—see John Hemming, “Comment on Cultural Diplomacy,” on the website of the Institute of Cultural Diplomacy, accessed September 13, 2013, www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/ index.php?Comment-on-Cultural-Diplomacy-4. See also “What Is Cultural Diplomacy?,” accessed December 18, 2011, www.culturaldiplomacy.org/index. php?en_culturaldiplomacy. 30. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999). A thorough study of the Spanish case is Francisco Javier Rodríguez Jiménez, ¿Antídoto contra el antiamericanismo? American Studies en España, 1945–1969 [An antidote against anti-Americanism? American studies in Spain, 1945–1969] (Valencia: Publicacions de La Universitat de Valéncia, 2010). 31. Kirsten Bound, Rachel Briggs, John Holden, and Samuel Jones, “Culture Is a Central Component of International Relations. It’s Time to Unlock Its Full Potential . . . Cultural Diplomacy” (London: Demos, 2007), accessed December 18, 2011, www.demos.co.uk/files/Cultural%20diplomacy%20-%20web.pdf. 32. Helle Porsdam, ch. 7, “Transatlantic Dialogues on Copyright: Cultural Rights and Access to Knowledge,” in From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues

Notes to Chapter 6

|

265

on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2009). 33. From the 1970s, the European community has attempted to promote its own form of cultural diplomacy aimed at influencing U.S. policymakers and future elites. See Giles Scott-Smith, “Mending the ‘Unhinged Alliance’ in the 1970s: Transatlantic Relations, Public Diplomacy, and the Origins of the European Union Visitors Programme,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 16, no. 4 (December 2005): 749–78; Alessandra Bitumi, “Building Bridges across the Atlantic: The European Union Visitors Program—A Case Study for Public Diplomacy and the Transatlantic Relationship in the Seventies,” International History Review, forthcoming; Bitumi, Il Programma di Visitatori della Comunità Europea: La diplomazia pubblica comunitaria e le relazioni transatlantiche negli anni Settanta [The European Visitors Program: EC public diplomacy and transatlantic relations in the 1970s] (Bologna: Il Mulino, forthcoming). 34. For two Italian examples, see Duccio Basosi, Il governo del dollar: Interdipendenza economica e potere statunitense negli anni di Richard Nixon (1969–1973) [The dollar government: Economic interdependence and U.S. power in the Richard Nixon years (1969–1973)] (Florence: Polistampa, 2006); Mario Del Pero, Libertà e Impero: Gli Stati Uniti e il mondo, 1776–2011 [Empire and liberty: The United States and the world, 1776–2011] (Rome: Laterza, 2011). 35. See, e.g., Sandra Scanlon, “The Conservative Lobby and Nixon’s Peace with Honor in Vietnam,” Journal of American Studies 43 (August 2009): 255– 76; Scanlon, The Pro-war Movement: Vietnam and the Making of Modern American Conservatism (forthcoming). On the Italian case and the different generations of U.S. historians, see the very thorough analyses of Maurizio Vaudagna, “American Studies in Italy: Historical Legacies, Public Contexts and Scholarly Trends,” Storia della Storiografia 51 (2007): 17–64. See also Ferdinando Fasce, “American Studies in Italy, Part 2: U.S. History in Italy at the Beginning of the 21st Century,” European Journal of American Studies 2006, no. 1, published January 13, 2006, accessed September 13, 2013, http://ejas. revues.org/404. 36. Pierre Mélandri and Serge Ricard, eds., La politique extérieure des EtatsUnis au XXe siècle: Le poids des déterminants intérieurs [The foreign policy of the United States in the twentieth century: The importance of domestic factors] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007). 37. See Isabelle Vagnoux, “Washington-La Havane: Une relation sous influence” [Washington-Havana: A relationship under influence], in ibid., 187–204; Justine Faure, “Les Américains originaires d’Europe centrale, les élections et la politique étrangère américaine” [Americans of central European descent, elections and American foreign policy], in ibid., 223–40; Pauline Peretz, “Les batailles non-israéliennes du lobby juif aux Etats-Unis” [The non-Israel-related battles of the Jewish lobby in the United States], in ibid., 273–88. 38. Justin Vaïsse, Histoire du néo-conservatisme aux États-Unis (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008), translated by Arthur Goldhammer as Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

266

|

Notes to Chapter 6

39. Pauline Peretz, Le combat pour les Juifs soviétiques: WashingtonMoscou-Jérusalem, 1953–1989 [The struggle for the Soviet Jews: WashingtonMoscow-Jerusalem, 1953–1989] (Paris: Armand-Colin, 2006); Peretz, “Let My People Go!”: The Transnational Politics of Soviet Jewish Emigration during the Cold War (Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner, 2012). 40. See, e.g., Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac, Le CRIF: De la résistance juive à la tentation du lobby, de 1943 à nos jours [The CRIF: From the Jewish resistance to the temptation of the lobby, from 1943 to today] (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2011). 41. Florence Vychytil-Baudoux, “Le Comité électoral des Polonais naturalisés (1953–1976): Une expérience polonienne en France” [The electoral committee of the naturalized Poles (1953–1976): A Polish experience in France], Relations internationales 1 (2010) : 65–81. 42. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2008); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). See also Snyder, Human Rights Activism; Umberto Tulli, Tra diritti umani e distensione: L’amministrazione Carter e il dissenso in Urss [Between human rights and détente: The Carter administration and dissent in the Soviet Union] (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2013). 43. Gary J. Bass, “The Old New Thing,” New Republic, October 20, 2010, www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/78542/the-old-new-thing-humanrights. 44. William A. Schabas, “Samuel Moyn, Peng-chun Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” May 13, 2012, accessed December 20, 2012, http://humanrightsdoctorate.blogspot.de/2012/05/samuel-moyn-peng-chunchang-and.html. 45. Robin Blackburn, “Reclaiming Human Rights,” New Left Review 69 (May–June 2011), accessed December 20, 2012, http://newleftreview.org/II/69/ robin-blackburn-reclaiming-human-rights. 46. Toward the end of his book, Moyn argues that human rights have become that to which they were originally an alternative: an ideology with a distinct political agenda. The human rights movement has become so ambitious and successful that its ability to appeal to a wide range of people from all sorts of political backgrounds and faiths is disappearing. Moyn hints that if the movement is to survive, its present tendencies toward constant expansion—toward calling everything a human right—must stop. The reader gets the impression that (at least certain) economic, social, and cultural rights are among those that could well be dispensed with, in Moyn’s opinion. See Moyn, “Epilogue: The Burden of Morality,” in Last Utopia, 212–29. 47. Blackburn, “Reclaiming Human Rights.” 48. Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted June 25, 1993, by the World Conference on Human Rights, accessed December 20, 2012, www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/%28Symbol%29/a.conf.157.23.en. 49. Porsdam, ch. 5, “Divergent Transatlantic Views on Human Rights: Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” in From Civil to Human Rights, 92–113,

Notes to Chapter 6

|

267

discusses one major difference between European human rights talk and American rights talk: the kinds of (human) rights emphasized and valued. 50. Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 51. Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 52. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955). 53. See, e.g., Orm Overland, Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 1870–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Walter T. K. Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Edward N. Saveth, American Historians and European Immigrants, 1875–1925 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948). 54. An early example is William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918). 55. Frank Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Comité International des Sciences Historiques, XIe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, Stockholm, 21–28 Août 1960, Rapports V: Histoire contemporaine (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1960), 32–60. 56. Harald Runblom, “A Brief History of a Research Project” in From Sweden to America: A History of the Migration, ed. Runblom and Hans Norman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Uppsala: Acta Universitata Upsaliensis, 1976), 11–18; Dag Blanck, introduction to Scandinavians in Old and New Lands: Essays in Honor of H. Arnold Barton, ed. Philip Anderson, Blanck, and Byron Nordstrom (Chicago: Swedish-American Historical Society, 2004), ix–xv; Norman, “Nordic Emigration in a European and Global Perspective,” in Transatlantic Connections: Nordic Emigration to the New World after 1800, ed. Norman and Runblom (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1988), 24–34. 57. Christoph Strupp and Kai Dreisbach, German Americana, 1956–2005: A Comprehensive Bibliography of German, Austrian, and Swiss Books and Dissertations on the United States (Washington DC: German Historical Institute, 2005); Wolfgang Helbich, “German Research on German Migration to the United States,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 54 (2009): 383–404. In the long run and in light of other topics related to America, the immigration studies are a modest 3 percent of the almost twenty-one thousand publications on the U.S. from German-speaking countries between 1956 and 2005: 287 dealt with emigration, 302 with the German American experience, and 155 with exiles. 58. P. R. D. Stokvis, De Nederlandse trek naar Amerika, 1846–1847 [The Dutch migration to America, 1846–1847] (Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden, 1977), viii. For a historiographical overview of Dutch emigration, see Hans Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon: Dutch Immigration to the United States, 1840–1940 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 363–75.

268

|

Notes to Chapter 6

59. Anna Maria Martellone, “Italian Emigration to the United States: Italian Perspectives,” Storia Nordamericana 1 (1984): 183–96; European Journal of American Studies 2006, no. 1, http://ejas.revues.org/193, esp. Fasce, “American Studies in Italy, Part 2” ; Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton, eds., Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007); Simone Cinotto, Una famiglia che mangia insieme: Cibo ed etnicità nella comunità italoamericana di New York, 1920–1940 [A family that eats together: Food and ethnicity in the Italian American community of New York, 1920–1940] (Turin: Otto, 2001); Ilaria Serra, The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009). 60. See Ivan Kurilla’s ch. 9, in part 4. 61. See, for example, the series Studien zur Historischen Migrationsforschung [Historical studies of migration research], ed. Klaus J. Bade and Jochem Oltmers (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh). 62. See, e.g., Dietrich Thränhardt and Michael Bommes, eds., National Paradigms of Migration Research (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2010); Tibor Frank, Double Exile: Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919–1945 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2008); Enne Koops, De Dynamiek van een emigratiecultuur: De emigratie van gereformeerden, hervormden en Katholieken naar Noord-Amerika in vergelijkend perspectief (1947– 1963) [The dynamics of an emigration culture: The emigration of Calvinists, Reformed and Catholics to North America from a comparative perspective (1947–1963)] (Hilversum, Netherlands: Verloren, 2010); Tomás Calvo Buezas and Isabel y Gentil García, eds., Inmigrantes en Estados Unidos y en España: Protagonistas en el siglo XXI [Immigrants in the United States and in Spain: Protagonists of the 21st century] (Madrid: Eunate, 2010); Julianna Puskás, Ties That Bind, Ties That Divide: 100 Years of Hungarian Experience in the United States (New York: Holmes and Meier, 2000); Calvo Buezas, ed., Hispanos en Estados Unidos, inmigrantes en España: ¿Amenaza o nueva civilización? [Hispanics in the United States, immigrants in Spain: Threat or new civilization?] (Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 2006); Cinotto, Una famiglia che mangia insieme; Serra, Imagined Immigrant; Brian McCook, The Borders of Integration: Polish Migrants in Germany and the United States, 1870–1924 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011); McCook, “Becoming Transnational: Continental and Transatlantic Polish Migration and Return Migration, 1870– 1924,” in European Mobility: Internal, International, and Transatlantic Moves in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries, ed. Annemarie Steidl, Josef Ehmer, Stan Nadel, and Hermann Zeitlhofer (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2009), 151–74. 63. Mark Wyman, “Emigrants Returning: The Evolution of a Tradition,” in Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000, ed. Marjory Harper (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 16–31; Dennis Conway and Robert B. Potter, “Caribbean Transnational Return Migrants as Agents of Change,” Geography Compass 1 (2007): 25–45; Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 306–37.

Notes to Chapter 7

|

269

64. See Michael Boyden, Hans Krabbendam, and Liselotte Vandenbussche, eds., Tales of Transit: Narrative Migrant Spaces in Atlantic Perspective, 1850– 1950 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). 65. For example, see Pierre-Michel Durand, “Le Peace Corps en Afrique française dans les années 1960: Histoire d’un succès paradoxal” [The Peace Corps in French Africa in the 1960s: History of a paradoxical success], Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 217 (2005): 91–104; François Durpaire, Les États-Unis ont-ils décolonisé l’Afrique noire francophone? [Have the Americans played a role in the decolonization of Francophone Black Africa?] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005); Isabelle Vagnoux, Les États-Unis et l’Amérique latine [The United States and Latin America] (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1994); Vagnoux, Les États-Unis et le Mexique: Histoire d’une relation tumultueuse [The United States and Mexico: History of a tumultuous relationship] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003); Laurent Cesari, L’Indochine en guerres, 1945–1993 [Indochina at war, 1945–1993] (Paris: Belin, 1995); Ulbe Bosma, Jan Lucassen, and Gert Oostindie, eds., Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics: Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States in Comparison (New York: Berghahn, 2012). 66. See, e.g., Catherine Hynes and Sandra Scanlon, eds., Reform and Renewal: Transatlantic Relations during the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009); Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller, and Mark Ledwidge, eds., New Directions in US Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2009); Marco Mariano, ed., Defining the Atlantic Community: Culture, Intellectuals, and Policies in the Mid-Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2010).

7. location and the conceptualization of historical frameworks 1. C. W. J. Withers, “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (October 2009): 637–58; Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann, “Global History and the Spatial Turn: From the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalization,” Journal of Global History 5, no. 1 (March 2010): 149–70. 2. See chs. 1 and 6 for the transatlantic history of migrations and international relations in the modern period. 3. Daniel T. Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). For works that argue for a very long time frame for Atlantic history, see Donna Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in the Wider World,” Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 1–27; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007); Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts, eds., The Atlantic World, 1450–2000 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 4. Bernard Bailyn, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review 87, no. 1 (1982): 1–24; Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Joyce Appleby, “A Different

270

|

Notes to Chapter 7

Kind of Independence: The Postwar Restructuring of the Historical Study of Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 2 (April 1993): 245–67; Darrett B. Rutman, “The ‘New Social History,’ ” in Small Worlds, Large Questions: Explorations in Early American Social History, 1600–1850 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 16–33; Gordon Wood, “A Century of Writing Early American History: Then and Now Compared; Or How Henry Adams Got It Wrong,” American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (June 1995): 678–95; Wood, “The Relevance and Irrelevance of Colonial American History,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 144–63; Michael Zuckerman, “Regionalism,” in A Companion to Colonial America, ed. Daniel Vickers (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 310–33. 5. Daniel H. Usner Jr., “Borderlands,” in Vickers, Companion to Colonial America, 408–24. 6. Among many works, see, for example, Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Aaron Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). 7. Jack P. Greene, “Interpretative Frameworks: The Quest for Intellectual Order in Early American History,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1991): 515–30. For his attempt to propose another framework, see Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 8. Silvia Marzagalli, “Sur les origines de l’ ‘Atlantic History’: Paradigme interprétatif de l’histoire des espaces atlantiques à l’époque moderne,” Dix-Huitième Siècle 33 (2001): 17–31; William O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic History,” Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 66–84; Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 9. Philip D. Morgan and Jack P. Greene, “Introduction: The Present State of Atlantic History,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Greene and Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–4. 10. “About the Seminar,” last modified February 24, 2011, www.fas.harvard .edu/~atlantic/. 11. Jack P. Greene, “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 17–42, quote on 30; Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, “Introduction: The Making and Unmaking of an Atlantic World,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450–1850, ed. Canny and Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2. 12. According to Nicholas Canny, “There are as many varieties of Atlantic history as there are Atlanticists” (“Atlantic History and Global History,” in Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 317).

Notes to Chapter 7

|

271

13. For some critiques of Atlantic history, see Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 169–82; “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (October 2006): 675–742; Pierre Gervais, “Neither Imperial, nor Atlantic: A Merchant Perspective on International Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” History of European Ideas 34, no. 4 (December 2008): 465–73; Patrick Griffin, “A Plea for a New Atlantic History,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (April 2011): 236–39. 14. Aside from the articles and books already noted, see in particular Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 741–57; Games and Adam Rothman, eds., Major Problems in Atlantic History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008); Bernard Bailyn, ed., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 15. On the one side, David Armitage and Alison Games have deplored the fact that “Circum-Atlantic history,” or pan-Atlantic history, is the least developed; on the other side, John Elliott considers that too many works have already been devoted to these connections and that it is necessary to explore their impact more thoroughly. Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 16; Games, “Atlantic History,” 745–46, 754–55; Elliott, “Afterword: Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation,” in Armitage and Braddick, British Atlantic World, 237–38. 16. Canny, “Atlantic History and Global History,” 320. 17. Morgan and Greene, introduction to Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 4. 18. Cécile Vidal, “For a Comprehensive History of the Atlantic World or Histories Connected in and beyond the Atlantic World?,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales (English) 67, no. 2 (2012): 279–300. 19. Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of British Colonial America,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1093–114. 20. Canny and Morgan, Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World. Before this appeared, several textbooks had been published, such as Douglas R. Egerton, Alison Games, Jane G. Landers, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright, The Atlantic World: A History, 1400–1888 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2007); Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 21. For a comparison of these differentiated impacts, see Amy Turner Bushnell, “Indigenous America and the Limits of the Atlantic World, 1493–1825,” in Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 189–221; Philip D. Morgan, “Africa and the Atlantic, c. 1450 to c. 1820,” in ibid., 223–48; Carla Rahn Phillips, “Europe and the Atlantic,” in ibid., 249–75. 22. For a synthesis of the debate on the impact of the New World or the Atlantic world on early modern Europe, see Roger Schlesinger, In the Wake of

272

|

Notes to Chapter 7

Columbus: The Impact of the New World on Europe, 1492–1650 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1996). On the impact of the slave trade and the colonial trade on European economies, see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Barbara L. Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Pieter Emmer, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, and Jessica Roitman, eds., A Deus Ex Machina Revisited: Atlantic Colonial Trade and European Economic Development (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2006); Jan Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a US-based British scholar advocating that British historians take a wider approach, see David Armitage, Greater Britain, 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History (London: Ashgate, 2004). Other historians have been less sure that an Atlantic as opposed to a national or a European approach offers as much as Armitage suggests. For a sensitive appraisal, see Richard Bourke, “Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History,” Historical Journal 53, no. 3 (September 2010): 747– 70. 23. The most important promoters of this first Atlantic history were H. Hale Bellot (England), Jacques Godechot (France), Jacques Pirenne (Belgium), Vitorino Magalhaes Godhino (Portugal), Max Silberschmidt (Switzerland), Pierre Chaunu (France), and Charles Verlinden (Belgium). For their works, see Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Atlantic History, 3–30. 24. H. C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of AngloAmerican Relations (1783–1952) (London: Odhams, 1954); Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959). 25. Jacques Godechot and Robert Palmer, “Le problème de l’Atlantique du XVIIIe au XXe siècle,” in Relazioni del X° Congresso internazionale di Scienze storiche, vol. 5 (Florence: Sansoni, 1955), 175–239; Godechot, Les Révolutions (1770–1792) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963); Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760– 1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959–64); Godechot, L’Europe et l’Amérique à l’époque napoléonienne (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967). See also Godechot, Histoire de l’Atlantique (Paris: Bordas, 1947). 26. Bernard Bailyn, preface to Armitage and Braddick, British Atlantic World, xviii–xix. 27. Cécile Vidal, “The Reluctance of French Historians to Address Atlantic History,” in “Imagining the Atlantic World,” special issue, Southern Quarterly 43, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 153–89. 28. Silvia Marzagalli, “L’histoire atlantique en Europe,” in “Workshops,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, September 24, 2008, http://nuevomundo .revues.org/42463. 29. For noticeable works from North or Latin Americanists working in Spain or Italy with an Atlantic perspective, see, for example, Gene Allen Smith and Sylvia L. Hilton, eds., Nexus of Empire: Negotiating Loyalty and Identity in the Revolutionary Borderlands, 1760s–1820s (Gainesville: University Press

Notes to Chapter 7

|

273

of Florida, 2010); Federica Morelli, Clément Thibaud, and Geneviève Verdo, eds., Les empires atlantiques des Lumières au libéralisme, 1763–1865 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009). In Portugal, Atlantic history is expanding quickly, at the initiative of historians of Portugal and the Portuguese empire, who combine an Atlantic and a global approach. See the website of the Centro de História de Além-Mar at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa: http://cham.fcsh .unl.pt/. 30. However, some Europe-based specialists of Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America also played an important role in the initial development of Atlantic studies. See “Round Table Conference: The Nature of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 48–176; Marcel Dorigny, ed., “L’Atlantique,” special issue, Dix-Huitième Siècle 33 (2001); Horst Pietschmann, ed., Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580–1830 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002). 31. Canny, “Writing Atlantic History”; O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic History”; Allan Potofsky, ed., “New Perspectives in the Atlantic,” special issue, History of European Ideas 34, no. 4 (2008); Cécile Vidal, ed., “L’histoire atlantique de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique,” Nuevo Mundo Nuevos Mundos, September 2008, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/10233#l-histoire-atlantique-depart-et-d-autre-de-l-atlantique; Vidal, ed., “L’Atlantique français,” special issue, Outre-Mers: Revue d’Histoire 97, nos. 362–63 (2009); Trevor Burnard and Potofsky, eds., “The French Atlantic and the Caribbean, 1600–1800,” special issue, French History 25, no. 1 (2011). 32. “Summer Academy of Atlantic History (SAAH),” accessed September 17, 2013, www.fruehe-neuzeit.uni-bayreuth.de/en/workshops/SAAH/index. html. 33. Some representative works by Britain-based early North Americanists: Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2003); Ben Marsh, Georgia’s Frontier Women: Female Fortunes in a Southern Colony (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Matthew C. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, 1759 (Stroud, U.K.: Tempus, 2009); Simon Middleton, From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution in EighteenthCentury Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Tim Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750– 1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Emma Hart, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). For works by France-based historians of early British North America, see Nathalie Caron, Thomas Paine contre l’imposture des prêtres (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999); Caron and Naomi Wulf, “American Enlightenments: Continuity and Renewal,” Journal of American History 99, no. 4 (2013): 1072–91; Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, “Lire et écrire la fuite d’esclaves dans le monde atlantique: Essai d’interprétation comparée et

274

|

Notes to Chapter 7

‘coopérante’ à partir des annonces d’esclaves en fuite, Louisiane, Jamaïque, Caroline du Sud, 1801–1815” (PhD thesis, Université de Paris VII, 2007); Élise Marienstras, Les Mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine: Essai sur le discours idéologique aux États-Unis à l’époque de l’indépendance, 1763–1800 (Paris: F. Maspéro, 1976); Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, L’Amérique avant les ÉtatsUnis: Une histoire de l’Amérique anglaise, 1497–1776 (Paris: Flammarion, 2013); Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, Le ferment nationaliste: Aux origines de la politique extérieure des États-Unis, 1798–1812 (Paris: Belin, 1994), translated by Lillian A. Parrott as The Nationalist Ferment: The Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789–1812 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). 34. See, for example, Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Georg Fertig, Lokales Leben, Atlantische Welt: Die Entscheidung zur Auswanderung vom Rhein nach Nordamerika im 18. Jahrhundert, Studien zur Historischen Migrationsforschung 7 (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 2000); Hermann Wellenreuther, ed., Die Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Mu˝hlenbergs: Aus der Anfangszeit des Deutshen Luthertums in Nordamerika, 5 vols. (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2002); Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots in Colonial South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006); Sabine Heerwart and Claudia Schnurmann, eds., Atlantic Migrations: Regions and Movements in Germany and North America / USA during the 18th and 19th Centuries (Hamburg: Lit, 2007); Susanne Lachenicht, ed., Religious Refugees in Europe, Asia and North America (6th–21st Century) (Hamburg: Lit, 2007); Mickaël Augeron, Didier Poton, and Van Ruymbeke, eds., Les Huguenots et l’Atlantique (Paris: Les Indes Savantes and Presses Universitaires de ParisSorbonne, 2009); Lachenicht, Hugenotten in Europa und Nordamerika: Migration und Integration in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Campus, 2010); William O’Reilly, Selling Souls: The International Trade in German Migrants, 1680– 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 35. Joseph Zitomersky, French Americans—Native Americans in EighteenthCentury French Colonial Louisiana: The Population Geography of the Illinois Indians, 1670s–1760s: The Form and Function of French-Native Settlement Relations in Eighteenth Century Louisiana (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1994); Gilles Havard, Empire et métissage: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut, 1660–1715 (Sillery, Quebec: Septentrion; Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003); Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française (Paris: Flammarion, 2003); Arnaud Balvay, L’épée et la plume: Amérindiens et soldats des troupes de la Marine en Louisiane et au Pays d’en Haut (1683–1763) (Sainte-Foy, Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2006); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 36. Apart from the above-mentioned works on migrations, see, for instance, Simon P. Newman, ed., Europe’s American Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 37. “L’impact du monde atlantique sur les ‘Anciens Mondes’ africain et européen du XVe au XIXe siècle,” international conference organized by Guy

Notes to Chapter 7

|

275

Saupin and Cécile Vidal at the University of Nantes, June 7–9, 2010; “The European Backcountry and the Atlantic World: Knowledge, Migrations, Wars, Economies,” workshop organized by Susanne Lachenicht at the University of Bayreuth, July 19–22, 2012; “Africa and the Atlantic World, 1450–1850,” international conference organized by Edmond Smith, Richard Blakemore, and Joshua Newton at Cambridge University, June 22–23, 2012. 38. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 39. Robin Law and Kristin Mann, “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 307–34, quote on 310. 40. John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 41. For instance, after a first special issue on the French Atlantic in 2009, Annales published a series of reviews and three new articles on Atlantic history in spring 2012: “Atlantic History” section, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales (English) 67, no. 2 (2012): 217–300. 42. Atlantic World series page, www.brill.nl/publications/atlantic-world; Atlantic Studies page, www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14788810.asp. 43. In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, most programs with Atlantic or transatlantic in their title partake not in the new Atlantic history but in the study of transatlantic relations between Europe and North America restricted to connections such as migrations and international relations in the modern period. See Marzagalli, “L’histoire atlantique en Europe.” 44. “Atlantic History” subject page, http://aboutobo.com/atlantic-history/. 45. They are part of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS). See its website, www.eaas.eu/. 46. Timothy Lockley, “Aims,” on the European Early American Studies Association website, last modified September 28, 2009, http://www2.warwick .ac.uk/fac/arts/cas/eeasa/aims/. 47. Emma Rothschild, “Late Atlantic History,” in Canny and Morgan, Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 635–74. 48. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press; Oxford, U.K.: James Currey, 2007); Claire Laux, François-Joseph Ruggiu, and Pierre Singaravélou, eds., Au sommet de l’empire: Les élites européennes dans les colonies, XVIe–XXe siècle [At the top of the empire: European elites in the colonies, 16th– 20th century] (Brussels: PIE–Peter Lang, 2009); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Huw Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John Reid, eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Oceanic Worlds, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 49. Morgan and Greene, introduction to Atlantic History, 23. 50. Trevor Burnard, “The British Atlantic,” in Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 129–30. 51. Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Durba Ghosh,

276

|

Notes to Chapter 7

“Another Set of Imperial Turns?,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 772–93; Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 52. Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 23–67. 53. Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles: La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard, Éditions du Seuil, 1996). 54. Roger Louis, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99). 55. Gilles de Gantes, “De l’histoire coloniale à l’étude des aires culturelles: La disparition d’une spécialité du champ universitaire français,” Outre-Mers: Revue d’histoire 90, nos. 388–89 (2003): 7–20; Frederick Cooper, “The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Colonial Studies, 1951–2001,” in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 33–55. 56. Centre International de Recherches sur les Esclavages (CIRESC): www. esclavages.cnrs.fr/; Wilberforce Institute: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/wise .aspx; Gilder Lehrman Center: www.yale.edu/glc/index.htm. 57. Laurent Dubois, “La République Métissée: Citizenship, Colonialism, and the Borders of French History,” Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2000): 15–34; Cottias, “Et si l’esclavage colonial faisait histoire nationale?,” Revue d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine 52, no. 4 bis (2005): 59–62; Françoise Vergès, La mémoire enchaînée: Questions sur l’esclavage (Paris: Albin Michel, 2006); Vergès, “Esclavage colonial: Quelles mémoires? Quels héritages?,” in Les guerres de mémoire: La France et son histoire: Enjeux politiques, controverses historiques, stratégies médiatiques, ed. Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 137–64; Christine Chivallon, “Mémoire de l’esclavage et actualisation des rapports sociaux,” in Les traites et les esclavages: Perspectives historiques et contemporaines, ed. Cottias, Élisabeth Cunin, and Antonio de Almeida Mendes (Paris: Karthala and CIRESC, 2010), 335–55. 58. Claudio Saunt, “ ‘Our Indians’: European Empires and the History of the Native American South,” in Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman, Atlantic in Global History, 60–75; Paul Cohen, “Was There an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the Limits of a Historiographical Concept,” History of European Ideas 34 (2008): 388–410; Bushnell, “Indigenous America”; Pekka Hämäläinen, “Lost in Transitions: Suffering, Survival, and Belonging in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (April 2011): 219–22. 59. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 41. See also Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 60. For the growing historiography on Indians in Europe, see, for example, Eric Hinderacker, “The ‘Four Indian Kings’ and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (July 1996):

Notes to Chapter 7

|

277

487–52; Alden Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 61. Paul W. Mapp, “Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2006): 713–24; Peter H. Wood, “From Atlantic History to a Continental Approach,” in Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 279–98. For an example of continental history, see Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 62. On Spanish colonies, see Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700– 1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). On Russian colonies, see John R. Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Gwenn A. Miller, Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Elena Govor, Twelve Days at Nuku Hiva: Russian Encounters and Mutiny in the South Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010); Ilya Vinkovetsky, Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire, 1804–1867 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011). 63. Jack P. Greene, “Comparing Early Modern American Worlds: Some Reflections on the Promise of a Hemispheric Perspective,” History Compass 1 (2003), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1478–0542.026/full; Greene, “Hemispheric History and Atlantic History,” in Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 299–315, quote on 308. See also Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Eric Hinderaker and Rebecca Horn, “Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 3 (July 2010): 395–432. 64. Carole Shammas, introduction to The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Shammas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 3–5; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Some Caveats about the ‘Atlantic’ Paradigm,” History Compass 1 (2003): 1–4, available at http:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1478–0542.004/full; Games, “Atlantic History,” 744, 750, 754. 65. For the transimperial conceptualization, see Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 764–86. For criticisms, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?,” ibid., 787–99; James H. Sweet, “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (April 2009): 283n14. 66. Games, “Atlantic History,” 747, 751–52. 67. Simon P. Newman, “Making Sense of Atlantic World Histories: A British Perspective,” in “Workshops,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, September 24, 2008, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/42413. See also Newman, “Brave

278

|

Notes to Chapter 7

New World: Beyond the English Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 2 (April 2006): 380–84. 68. Trevor Burnard, “Review: Empire Matters? The Historiography of Imperialism in Early America, 1492–1830,” History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 87–107; Jean-Paul Zuñiga, “L’histoire impériale à l’heure de l’ ‘histoire globale’: Une perspective atlantique,” Revue d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine 54, no. 5 (2007): 54–68; Christopher Grasso and Karin Wulf, “Nothing Says ‘Democracy’ like a Visit from the Queen: Reflections on Empire and Nation in Early American Histories,” Journal of American History 93, no. 3 (September 2008): 764–81; Cécile Vidal, “Le(s) monde(s) atlantique(s), l’Atlantique français, l’empire atlantique français,” Outre-Mers: Revue d’Histoire 97, nos. 362–63 (2009): 7–37. See also the call for papers for the December 13–15, 2012, conference of the EEASA, on “empires and imagination in early America and the Atlantic world,” held at the University of Bayreuth: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/cas/eeasa/conferences /bayreuth2012/. 69. On these Francophone migrations and diasporas, see François Weil, “French Migration to the Americas in the 19th and 20th Centuries as a Historical Problem,” Studi Emigrazione 123 (1996): 443–60; Rafe Blaufarb, Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); Jean-François Mouhot, Les réfugiés acadiens en France, 1758–1785: L’impossible réintégration? (Quebec: Septentrion, 2009); Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 70. See, e.g., Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations. 71. See, for instance, Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). However, there are some important exceptions, such as John Robert McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002);

Notes to Chapter 7

|

279

Lou H. Roper and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds., Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500–1750 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2007). 72. “Forum: Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 710–99; “AHR Exchange,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (December 2007): 1415–31. 73. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “The Core and Peripheries of Our National Narratives: A Response from IH-35,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (December 2007): 1423. 74. Fernando Coronil, “After Empire: Reflections on Imperialism from the Américas,” in Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue, Imperial Formations, 241–71. 75. Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: On the Inadequacy and Indispensability of the Nation,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2. 76. Catherine Hall, “Commentary,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 452–68, quote on 452–53. 77. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 78. On the debate about the memory of the colonial past and the necessary integration of colonial and national history in France, see Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Sandrine Lemaire, La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de son héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005); Romain Bertrand, Mémoire d’empire: La controverse autour du “fait colonial” (Bellecombe-en-Bauges: Éditions du Croquant, 2006); Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Enjeux politiques de l’histoire coloniale (Marseilles: Agone, 2009); Sophie Dulucq and Colette Zytnicki, “Penser le passé colonial français: Entre perspectives historiographiques et résurgence des mémoires,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire 86, no. 2 (2005): 59–69; Claude Liauzu and Gilles Manceron, eds., La colonisation, la loi et l’histoire (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2006). 79. See, for example, the place reserved to the Caribbean in Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World. On the British West Indies, see, among other works, Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Natalie Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); S. D. Smith, Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Christer Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Age of Abolition (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). On the French Antilles, see Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue

280

|

Notes to Chapter 7

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Rebecca Harkopf Schloss, Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). On the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolution in the Lesser Antilles, see Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); David P. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds., The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 80. David Todd, “From Saint-Domingue to Algeria: The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on French Imperialism,” paper presented at “L’impact du monde atlantique” conference; David Todd, “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1970,” Past and Present 210, no. 1 (2011): 155–86. On the eighteenthcentury origins of nineteenth-century French imperialism, see also Pernille Røge, “ ‘La Clef de Commerce’—The Changing Role of Africa in France’s Atlantic Empire c. 1760–1797,” History of European Ideas 34 (2008): 431–43; Røge, “Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, 1756– 1802” (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2010). 81. It is possible to minimize these differences by underlining that the treatment and exploitation of people of Native and African descent in the United States and in Brazil after independence constituted a kind of internal colonialism and that the continental territorial expansion of both countries resembled imperialism. However, the rupture of independence should not be underevaluated, even if the economic and cultural dependency on the former metropole or other European nation lasted for a long time. 82. J. R. McNeill, “The End of the Old Atlantic World: America, Africa, Europe, 1770–1888,” in Atlantic American Societies from Columbus through Abolition, 1492–1888, ed. Allan Karras and McNeill (London: Routledge, 1992), 245–68; Aaron Spencer Fogleman, “The Transformation of the Atlantic World, 1776–1867,” Atlantic Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 5–28; Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (August 2009): 627–50; James E. Sanders, “Atlantic Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century Columbia: Spanish America’s Challenge to the Contours of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 20, no. 1 (March 2009): 131–50. 83. Michael Warner, “What’s Colonial about Colonial America?,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Roger Blair St. George (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 49–70; Jack P. Greene, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 2 (April 2007): 235–50.

Notes to Chapter 8

|

281

84. Sylvia Frey, “Beyond Borders: Revisiting Atlantic History,” Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, ed. Cécile Vidal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 185.

8. positionality, ambidexterity, and global frames 1. Thomas Bender, “The LaPietra Report: A Report to the Profession,” September 2000, accessed January 30, 2011, www.oah.org/about/reports/reports-statements/the-lapietra-report-a-report-to-the-profession/; Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 2. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 3. Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age,” in Bender, Rethinking American History, 63–99. 4. For an excellent history of twentieth-century Atlantic history, see Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 5. Another factor in the privileging of American studies may have been the degree to which European history departments, much more than U.S. history departments, focused most of their professorships on their national history. So it may have been harder to add the history of a foreign nation, whatever the foundations intended. The diversity of fields in U.S. departments derives in large part from the availability of children of immigrants with the interest and the languages to study various parts of the world. 6. See chs. 1 and 6. 7. Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 21–46. 8. In part because of the books on New York that I have written, I am thought to be completely assimilated to New York and am often so characterized. Yet my being a native Californian shows up again and again in small ways. One is my willingness without a second thought to drive one hundred miles (two hundred round trip) for dinner or a lake, while most Easterners would consider such a thing only as a weekend project. 9. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5–7. His targets are Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault, but he also challenges the classic epistemologists who believe in a “mirror of nature.” The historian Thomas Haskell makes a similar argument, using the word detachment rather than Nagel’s spatial metaphor. See his Objectivity Is Not Neutrality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), ch. 6. 10. Perhaps the most dramatic examples are Robert O. Paxton’s book and testimony concerning the Vichy regime in France. Paxton, Vichy France: Old

282

|

Notes to Chapter 8

Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Paxton and Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981). 11. Thomas Bender, “The Cultures of Intellectual Life: The City and the Professions,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 181– 95. See also Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), chs. 1–3. 12. Freud, quoted in Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 99. 13. C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960). See also Wolfgang Schivelbush, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003). Of course, since Woodward wrote, the United States suffered defeat in Vietnam and is living through ambiguous (at best) presumptions of success in Iraq and Afghanistan. 14. See Thomas Bender, Philip Katz, and Colin Palmer, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-First Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 17–18. One impressionistic index of the change is the invisibility of citations of the historian William Sewell by Americanists as compared with Europeanists, who engage his social theory–infused history. 15. Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), ch. 1. 16. I tell students interested in transnational or global approaches to begin with an important historical question without deciding in advance whether it warrants a transnational research project. If it becomes clear in seeking an answer that transnational connections are pertinent, then cross the necessary borders. Otherwise, stay home. 17. See Wai Chee Dimock, “Deep Time: American Literature and World History,” American Literary History 14 (2001): 755–75. 18. For a critique, see Micol Seigel, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); for a good example of using subunits (though not U.S. ones), see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 19. Bender, Nation among Nations, ch. 5. 20. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Own Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See ch. 6, n. 16. 21. James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 22. Rodgers; Atlantic Crossings; Nolan, Visions of Modernity; Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Volker Berghahn, America

Notes to Chapter 9

|

283

and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 23. See Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), for an outline of the field; for rich examples (ending in 1830, however), see Bailyn and Patricia Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 24. Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the AngloAmerican World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

9. reflections from russia 1. A. Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii (Moscow: NLO, 2001), 20. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. 2. French edition of Katchenovsky’s book: Daniel Webster, sa vie et ses oeuvres: Aperçu de l’histoire des États-Unis (Paris: n.p., 1858); Maxim Kovalevsky, Istoriya amerikanskoy konstitutsii [History of the American Constitution] (Moscow: n.p., 1890); Kovalevsky, Proiskhozhdenie sovremennoy demokratii [Origins of modern democracy], 4 vols. (Moscow: K. T. Soldatenkov, 1895–99). 3. See, for example, A. Efimov, K istorii kapitalizma v SShA [To the history of the capitalism in the USA] (Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1934). 4. In Britain too, wartime experiences left some veterans with an admiration for the United States and contributed to their subsequent promotion of the academic study of American history. M. J. Heale, “The British Discovery of American History: War, Liberalism and the Atlantic Connection,” Journal of American Studies 39 (December 2005): 357–69. 5. See, for example, T. Timofeev, Negry SShA v borbe za svobodu: Negrityanskoe dvizhenie v SShA posle vtoroy mirovoy voyny [Negroes of the U.S.A. in the struggle for freedom: Negro movement in the U.S.A. after the Second World War] (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1957). 6. For a detailed analysis of the current state of U.S. history education in Russia, see Ivan I. Kurilla and Victoria I. Zhuravleva, “Teaching U.S. History in Russia: Issues, Challenges, and Prospects,” Journal of American History 96 (March 2010): 1138–44. 7. No exact figures are available. When the Institute of Universal History of the Russian Academy of Sciences gathered a conference of Russian historians of the United States in November 2009 explicitly to consider the current state of the field, there were more than seventy participants, from many Russian cities. Many of them represented local groups of scholars working on different aspects of U.S. history, and many supervised postgraduate work on U.S. topics. Thus it is safe to suppose that there are more than one hundred Russian scholars working in the field of North American and U.S. history. See Vladimir Sogrin, ed., Amerikanskii ezhegodnik 2008/2009 (Moscow: IVI RAN, 2010). 8. The Bologna Process promotes the comparability of higher education standards across Europe.

284

|

Notes to Chapter 10

10. doing u.s. history in australia 1. “List of Universities in Australia,” Australian Education Network University and College Guide, accessed September 30, 2013, www.australianuniversities.com.au/list/. 2. Johan Huizinga, Amerika Levend en Denkend (Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, 1926), translated by Herbert H. Rowen as America: A Dutch Historian’s Vision, from Afar and Near (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 3. Note that prior to Nevins’s visit, the main focus had been on the British Empire, which included the study of colonial North America. David Goodman, “Location, Location: American History in Australia,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 23 (December 2004): 51–64. 4. E.g., Chris Dixon, Shane White, and Clare Corbould. 5. E.g., Donna Merwick, Joseph Siracusa, Don DeBats, and Dennis Phillips. 6. This work can be sampled at www.anzasa.arts.usyd.edu.au/a.j.a.s/docs /contents.htm (accessed March 14, 2012). 7. See, e.g., Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 8. See the United States Studies Centre website: http://ussc.edu.au/. 9. The work on U.S. slavery of Shane White and his associates at the University of Sydney is emblematic of the best in this tradition. See, e.g., Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Beacon, 2005). 10. Donald Denoon, “The Isolation of Australian History,” Historical Studies 22 (October 1987): 253. 11. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008); Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106 (June 2001): 866–905. See also Fiona Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘ i Press, 2009). 12. See chs. 6–7. 13. Patrick Wolfe, “After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy,” Settler Colonialism Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 13–51; Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Ian Tyrell reviews the older corpus of Australian comparative settler societies history in “Comparing Comparative Histories: Australian and American Modes of Comparative Analysis,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 9 (December 1990): 1–11. 14. David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 15. Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

Notes to Chapter 11

|

285

16. The U.K. government has introduced a modified form of Australia’s Higher Education Contribution Scheme, in which students run up debts that they then repay according to income and which partially funds higher education teaching. 17. Ann Curthoys and Paula Hamilton, “What Makes History Public,” Public History Review 1 (1993): 8–13. 18. Ian Tyrrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

11. viewing american history from japan 1. Natsuki Aruga, “Japan: U.S. History in Isolation,” OAH Newsletter 21, no. 4 (November 1993): 12. 2. Perhaps their first source of information about the United States was the first Chinese-language U.S. history, Mei le ko ho sang kuo che leo [A brief history of the United States of America] (Singapore, 1838), by Elijah C. Bridgman, the first American missionary to China. Quite a few essays have been written about American studies in Japan. Some of the more recent are Makoto Saito, “Nihon niokeru Amerika Kenkyu: Sono Rekishi to Kongo no Kadai” [American studies in Japan: Its history and perspective], Rikkyo American Studies 22 (March 2000): 7–32; Saito, “Senzen Nihon no Amerika Kenkyu: Sobyo” [American studies in prewar Japan: A sketch], Gakushiin Kiyo 55, no. 2 (2000): 81–103; Saito, “Nihon no Amerika Kenkyu Zenshi: Nichibei Kankei no Hazama de” [Prehistory of American studies in Japan: In relations between the United States and Japan], in Amerika Kenkyu Annai [Guide to American studies], ed. Hitoshi Abe and Takeshi Igarashi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1998), 253–70; Tadashi Aruga, “Japanese Scholarship and the Meaning of American History,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 504–14. This chapter’s description of the historiography of U.S. history in Japan comes largely from these works. 3. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America appeared as Jiyu Genron [The principle of liberty] and Bryce’s The American Commonwealth as Heimin Seiji [Commoners’ government]. It is interesting that the Japanese titles do not use the word American, which suggests the translators’ intention to describe American society as an ideal model of abstract and universal democracy. Saito, “Nihon niokeru Amerika Kenkyu,” 86–87. 4. In the meantime, some of the socialist movement leaders in Japan went to the United States to study as working students. The United States often served as an asylum for Japanese radicals. Saito, “Nihon niokeru Amerika Kenkyu,” 16; Saito, “Senzen,” 86–87. 5. This chair was funded by A. Barton Hepburn, an American banker and a relative of James C. Hepburn, a missionary to Japan. 6. Takagi had worked with Frederick Jackson Turner at Harvard University. Saito, “Senzen,” 92; Aruga, “Japanese Scholarship,” 506. 7. The Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, some American universities and libraries, and the Episcopal Church of America, which had founded the university in 1874, assisted in the institute’s establishment. Torao

286

|

Notes to Chapter 11

Tomita, “Sosetsu-ki no Rikkyo Daigaku Amerika Kenkyujo: Shiryo-shu Hoi” [The Institute of American Studies at Rikkyo University in its founding period: A collection of documents], Amerika Kenkyu Shiriizu [America studies series] 17 (1995): 58, supplement to Tomita and Hiroshi Shimizu, eds., “Sosetsu-ki no Rikkyo Daigaku Amerika Kenkyujo: Shiryo-shu Hoi,” special issue (tokushugo), Amerika Kenkyu Shiriizu 16 (1994). 8. Japanese Association for American Studies, ed., Genten Amerikashi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten), vols. 1–5 (1950–64), vols. 6–7 (1981–82), vols. 8–9 (2006), Social History Documents (2006). See also Marius B. Jansen, “American Studies in Japan,” American Historical Review 70, no. 2 (January 1965): 413–17. 9. These include the American Studies Foundation (est. 1962), the Nitobe Fellowship of the International House of Japan (1976–2006), and the Abe Fellowship (est. 1991). 10. “Amerika Kenkyu Sogo Hokoku Chosa Projekuto Sokatsu Hokoku” [A summary of the project of a comprehensive survey of American studies], Kokusai Bunka Kaikan Kaiho [International House newsletter] 2 (August 1998): 10–11. 11. The second oldest to the JAAS is the International Institute of American Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, founded in 1958, the center of American studies activities in the Kansai area. The Center for Pacific and American Studies at the University of Tokyo, established in 1967 as the Center for American Studies, is the largest. In 1976, Nanzan University in Nagoya founded another Center for American Studies. In 1987 the Sophia University Institute of American and Canadian Studies appeared. 12. The Tokyo-Stanford seminar brought such prominent American scholars as C. Vann Woodward, Merrill Jensen, and Henry Nash Smith to Japan to give lectures, and its Japanese participants became leaders in promoting American studies and history. Sengo Nihon no “Amerika Kenkyu Semina” no Ayum: Amerika Kenkyu Sogo Chosa [The trajectory of postwar American studies seminars: Report of a comprehensive survey of American studies] (Tokyo: International House of Japan, 1998). 13. Japanese Association for American Studies, “Outline” and “History,” accessed April 15, 2013, www.jaas.gr.jp/english/. 14. Koreans have also joined these workshops. Since 1997, the commission has funded the Japan Residencies Program of the JAAS and the Organization of American Historians, which sends two American scholars for a two-week stay at Japanese universities every year. 15. Satoshi Nakano, “Amerika Kenkyu no Genjo to Kadai” [The current state and issues of American history], Rikkyo American Studies 32 (March 2010): 9. Recently a few Japanese college graduates have gone native after obtaining PhDs from American universities, doing research and teaching in the United States. Akira Iriye, the best-known Japanese historian of the United States, may not be considered as having gone native, because he has retained his Japanese identity despite having studied and spent his career in the United States since college. 16. William H. Sewell Jr., “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” in Enterprise and Secular Change, ed. Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, (Homewood, IL: R. D. Irwin, 1953), 214–15; Marc Bloch, “Toward

Notes to Chapter 12

|

287

a Comparative History of European Societies,” in ibid., 496–98; Raymond Grew, “The Comparative Weakness of American History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 95. For the debate on definition, see Natsuki Aruga, “Is a Japanese Standpoint Useful for Studying about America?: Child Labor during World War II Uncovered in Comparative Perspective,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 22 (2011): 29–33. 17. William H. Sewell Jr., “Marc Bloch,” History and Theory 6, no. 2 (1967): 213–15, esp. 218. Raymond Grew has also questioned the widely accepted view of the advantage of comparisons between similar cultures, stating that “there may even be a general law that the comparison of cases distant in cultural context is more likely than other comparisons to produce a fresh perspective and thus questions to explore” (“Comparative Weakness,” 95). 18. Natsuki Aruga, “ ‘An’ Finish School’: Child Labor during World War II,” Labor History 29, no. 4 (1988): 498–530; Aruga, “The Mobilization of Women and Child Labor during World War II in the United States: Women’s Roles Reconsidered,” Reports of Saitama University 18 (1982): 1–16. 19. Natsuki Aruga, “Patriots or Hard-Working Young Consumers?: Teenage Employment during World War II in Berkeley, California,” Saitama University Review 36, no. 1 (2000): 45. This was originally a paper presented at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, St. Louis, March 31, 2000. 20. Grew, “Comparative Weakness,” 95. 21. Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History and Theory 42, no. 1 (February 2003): 40. 22. Ian Tyrrell, “Comparative and Transnational History,” Australian Feminist Studies 22, no. 52 (March 2007): 49.

12. not quite at home 1. Sigmund Skard, American Studies in Europe: Their History and Present Organization, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958), 423–26. 2. Jørn Brøndal, “The Study of US History in Denmark,” in Teaching and Studying US History in Europe: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Cornelis A. Van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007), 83–100. 3. David E. Nye, ed., Beyond the Crisis in US American Studies: Scandinavian Perspectives (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2007), 85–90. 4. David E. Nye and Mick Gidley, eds., American Photographs in Europe (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994). 5. “The United States and the World,” 14th biennial conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies, University of Oslo, August 9–13, 1995; see Nye, Beyond the Crisis, 173. 6. Orm Øverland, ed., Not English Only: Redefining “American” in American Studies (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2001). 7. For a critique, see Alan Wolfe, “Anti-American Studies,” New Republic, February 10, 2003, 25–32.

288

|

Notes to Chapter 13

8. David E. Nye, “The Rapprochement of Technology Studies and American Studies,” in A Concise Companion to American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 320–33. 9. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Nye, Consuming Power: A Cultural History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 10. David E. Nye, Contemporary American Society, 8th ed. (Copenhagen: Academic Press, 2013). 11. David E. Nye, Denmark and the Danes, 2nd ed. (Odense: University of Southern Denmark Press, 2012). 12. See Dale Carter, ed., Marks of Distinction: American Exceptionalism Revisited (Århus: Århus University Press, 2001); Russell Duncan and Clara Juncker, eds., Transnational America: Contours of Modern U.S. Culture (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004).

13. american history in the shadow of empire 1. On American exceptionalism, see esp. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991): 1031–55; Daniel T. Rogers, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 21–40. 2. See ch. 1. 3. Tony Badger was surprised to learn that many Northerners, like many Britons, thought of the South as a foreign land. Badger, “Confessions of a British Americanist,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (1992): 517. 4. My thanks to David Bell for his thoughts on this chapter and his contributions to this paragraph in particular. 5. See the preface. 6. “Grinnell College: FY 2012 Budget—Major Allocation and Decision Summary,” accessed April 16, 2013, www.grinnell.edu/files/downloads/Major%20 Allocation%20And%20Decision%20Summary.pdf. 7. Université de Montréal, “Budget de fonctionnement, 2011–2012,” accessed April 16, 2013, www.umontreal.ca/budget/Budget-UdeM-2011–12. pdf, 11, 7. 8. Indeed, the connections between the defense establishment and the university establishment run deep. Since Sputnik, the national defense budget has been a central source of funding for U.S. academic institutions. 9. The Ohio State University has twenty-six faculty members working on the United States in its History Department, not to mention the twenty-eight Americanists (by my count) in its English Department. That totals fifty-four Americanists in just two departments. By contrast, France has a total of fifty Americanists, of whom seven are in history departments (see ch. 3). 10. Works that emphasize the risks include Louis A. Pérez Jr., “We Are the World: Internationalizing the National, Nationalizing the International,”

Notes to Chapter 13

|

289

Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (2002): 558–66; Ian K. Steele, “Bernard Bailyn’s American Atlantic,” History and Theory 46 (2007): 48–58; Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (2002): 169–82; Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 725–42; Silvia Marzagalli, “Sur les Origines de l’Atlantique history,” Dix-huitième siècle 33 (2001): 17–31; Johann N. Neem, “American History in a Global Age,” History and Theory 50 (2011): 41–70. 11. Badger, “Confessions of a British Americanist,” 519. 12. Pérez, “We Are the World,” 564. 13. Steele, “Bernard Bailyn’s American Atlantic,” 56, 54. 14. Marzagalli, “Sur les Origines,” 20, 31.

This page intentionally left blank

Selected Bibliography

This is a list relevant to the historiographical nature of this volume rather than one of American histories by European authors (those cited in the chapter notes are only a fraction of the whole). Adams, David K., Gunther H. Lenz, Peter J. Ling, and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds. Transatlantic Encounters: Public Uses and Misuses of History in Europe and the United States. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2000. Amerikastudien / American Studies 54, no. 3 (2009). [This issue contains several articles on German approaches to American history.] Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob. Telling the Truth about History. New York: Norton, 1994. Badger, Tony. “Confessions of a British Americanist.” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 515–23. Bender, Thomas, ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. [Sixteen chapters (plus an introduction) by participants in the 1997–2000 La Pietra conferences on internationalizing the study of American history.] Berger, Stefan, ed. Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Bolkhovitinov, Nikolai N. “American History in Russia: Retrospect and Prospect.” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 524–29. Bolkhovitinov, Nikolai N., and Marin Pundeff. “The Study of United States History in the Soviet Union.” American Historical Review 74, no. 4 (April 1969): 1221–42. Bu, Liping. Making the World like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Casper, Scott E., ed. “Textbooks and Teaching” section. Journal of American History 96, no. 4 (March 2010): 1085–144. [Ten articles reflecting on the 291

292

|

Selected Bibliography

challenges and opportunities of teaching U.S. history outside the United States.] Conway, Martin, and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds. Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Debouzy, Marianne. “From American Studies to American History: A French Point of View.” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 491–98. Eckert, Astrid M. “American History in Germany: The View of the Practitioners—Norbert Finzsch, Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, Detleft Junker, and Ursula Lehmkuhl.” GHI Bulletin 32 (Spring 2003): 51–84. European Journal of American Studies 2006, no. 1. [This issue, available online at http://ejas.revues.org/193, contains several brief essays on American studies in various European countries.] Evans, Richard. “The Wonderfulness of Us: The Tory Interpretation of History.” London Review of Books 33, no. 6 (March 17, 2011): 9–12. Fasce, Ferdinando, Maurizio Vaudagna, and Raffaella Baritono, eds. Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective. Turin: Otto, 2013. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, eds. Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society. New York: Routledge, 1999. Frank, Tibor. “ ‘Through the Looking-Glass’: A Century of Self-Reflecting Hungarian Images of the United States (1834–1941).” In Multicultural Challenge in American Culture, edited by Lehel Vadon, 21–36. Eger, Hungary: Eszterházy Károly Tanárképzo˝ Fo˝iskola, 1999. Fuchs, Eckhardt, and Janine S. Micunek Fuchs, eds. American History in Europe: A Directory of Academic Programs and Research Institutes. Washington DC: German Historical Institute, 2007. Giles, Paul. “European American Studies and American American Studies.” European Journal of American Culture 19, no. 1 (2000): 12–16. Giles, Paul, and R. J. Ellis. “E Pluribus Multitudinum: The New World of Journal Publishing in American Studies.” American Quarterly 57 (December 2005): 1033–78. [This article lists and analyzes American studies journals published outside the United States.] Gräser, Marcus. “World History in a Nation-State: The Transnational Disposition in Historical Writing in the United States.” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (March 2009): 1038–52. Hanke, Lewis, ed. Guide to the Study of United States History outside the U.S., 1945–1980. 5 vols. White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1985. [An exhaustive guide, with essays on countries around the world and listings and synopses of non-U.S. publications on American history.] Havard, Gilles, and Cecile Vidal. “Making New France New Again: French Historians Rediscover their American Past.” Common-place 7, no. 4 (July 2007). www.common-place.org/vol-07/no-04/harvard/. Heale, Michael. “The British Discovery of American History: War, Liberalism and the Atlantic Connection.” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 3 (December 2005): 357–69.

Selected Bibliography | 293

Hilton, Sylvia L. “Identities and the Usable Pasts of Colonial Borderlands: Spanish Historians and the North Pacific Frontiers of the Spanish Empire.” In Alta California: Peoples in Motion, Identities in Formation, 1769–1850, edited by Steven W. Hackel, 801–88. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Hilton, Sylvia L., and Cornelis A. Van Minnen, eds. Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007. [Fifteen essays (the first, a general introduction) arising from a 2005 conference on teaching and researching American history in different European countries.] Ickstadt, Heinz. “American Studies as Area Studies in Transnational Studies?” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 3 (2007): 633–40. Iriye, Akira. “The Internationalization of History.” American Historical Review 94, no. 1 (February 1989): 1–10. Kempf, Jean, and Paul Schor. “American Studies in France.” In Encyclopedia of American Studies. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. http://eas-ref .press.jhu.edu/. [Subscription required.] Kennedy, Liam. “Spectres of Comparison: American Studies and the United States of the West.” Comparative American Studies 4 (2006): 135–50. Kirkendall, Richard Stewart. The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Korner, Axwl, Nicola Miller, and Adam I. P. Smith, eds. America Imagined: Explaining the United States in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Kutler, Stanley I., and Stanley N. Katz, eds. “The View from Abroad: The Bellagio Conference on American History.” Special issue, Reviews in American History 14, no. 4 (December 1986). [Twelve essays arising from a 1984 conference on how different countries practice American history.] McGirr, Lisa, and Eric Foner, eds. American History Now. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. Molho, Anthony, and Gordon S. Wood, eds. Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Neem, Johann N. “American History in a Global Age.” History and Theory 50, no. 1 (February 2011): 41–70. Newman, Simon. “Losing the Faith: British Historians and the Last Best Hope.” Comparative American Studies 6, no. 2 (June 2008): 161–78. Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pells, Richard H. Not like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Schor, Paul, ed. “Études nord-américaines en France.” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, 2010. http://nuevomundo.revues.org/57905#etudes-nord-americaines-en-france.

294

|

Selected Bibliography

Skard, Sigmund. American Studies in Europe: Their History and Present Organization. 2 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958. ———. The American Myth and the European Mind: American Studies in Europe, 1776–1960. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961. Thelen, David, ed. “Toward the Internationalization of American History: A Round Table.” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 432–542. ———. “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on U.S. History.” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 965–76. Tuck, Stephen. “The New American Histories.” Historical Journal 48, no. 3 (September 2005): 811–32. Weil, François. “Les études américaines en France: un essai d’analyse.” Bulletin du CENA-EHESS 5 (February 1999): 95–100. van der Linden, Adrianus A. M. A Revolt against Liberalism: American Radical Historians, 1959–1976. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Vaudagna, Maurizio. “The American Historian in Continental Europe: An Italian Perspective.” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 532–42. ———. “American Studies in Italy: Historical Legacies, Public Context and Scholarly Trends.” Storia della Storiografia 51 (2007): 17–63.

Contributors

natsuki aruga is a professor emerita at Saitama University in Japan. Her interest is in multiple approaches to U.S. history, including gender, disability, comparative, and transnational. Her books include Amerika no 20-seiki (America’s twentieth century), 2 vols. (2003). nicolas barreyre is an associate professor in American history at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Recent publications include L’or et la liberté: Une histoire spatiale des États-Unis après la guerre de Sécession (2014) and “The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics,” Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10, no. 4 (October 2011). thomas bender is a university professor of the humanities and a professor of history at New York University. An intellectual historian, he is currently focused on transnational and global approaches to the history of the United States. He is the editor of Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) and the author of A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006). manfred berg is the Curt Engelhorn Professor of American History at the Universität Heidelberg in Germany. His books include The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (2005) and Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (2011). trevor burnard is a professor and the head of school at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the professor of history of the Americas at the University of Warwick. His latest book is Hearing Slave Voices: Slave Testimony from Berbice (2010). susanna delfino is a professor emerita of American history at the Università degli Studi di Genova in Italy. She is the author or editor of several books, 295

296

|

Contributors

including Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South (2005), in collaboration with Michele Gillespie, and Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860 (2011) in collaboration with Gillespie and Louis Kyriakoudes. mario del pero is a professor of international history at the Institute d’Études Politiques / SciencesPo in Paris. His work includes The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (2009) and “The United States and ‘Psychological Warfare’ in Italy, 1948–1955,” Journal of American History 87 (March, 2001): 1304–34. max edling is a lecturer in North American history at King’s College London and was previously a research fellow and university lecturer at Uppsala Universitet in Sweden. He is the author of A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (2003). tibor frank is a professor of history in the Department of American Studies and the director of the School of English and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. His latest books include Double Exile: Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919– 1945 (2009) and Disputed Territories and Shared Pasts: Overlapping National Histories in Modern Europe, coedited with Frank Hadler (2011). françois furstenberg is an associate professor of history at the Université de Montréal and the author of In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (2006). In 2014 he is joining Johns Hopkins University. marcus gräser is a professor of modern and contemporary history at Johannes Kepler Universität Linz in Austria. His most recent publications include ”World History in a Nation-State: The Transnational Disposition in Historical Writing in the United States,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 1038–52. michael heale is an emeritus professor of American history at Lancaster University and a Supernumerary Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. His latest book is Contemporary America: Power, Dependency and Globalization since 1980 (2011). sylvia l. hilton teaches U.S. and Spanish American history at the Complutense University in Madrid. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including Nexus of Empire: Negotiating Loyalty and Identity in the Revolutionary Borderlands, 1760s–1820s (2010). martin klimke is an associate professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (2010) and a coauthor of A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany (2010). hans krabbendam is the assistant director of the Roosevelt Study Center in Middleburg, the Netherlands. He is the author and editor of several books on migration and Dutch-American relations, most recently Freedom on the

Contributors | 297

Horizon: Dutch Immigration to America, 1840–1940 (2009) and Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609–2009, coedited with Cornelis A. van Minnen and Giles Scott-Smith (2009). ivan kurilla is a professor of history and the History Department chair at Volgograd State University in Russia. He is the author of Zaokeanskie partnery: Amerika i Rossiia v 1830–1850-e gody (Partners across the ocean: The United States and Russia, 1830s–1850s) (2005), the editor of the annual collection Americana, and the coeditor, with Victoria Zhuravleva, of Russia and the United States: Mutual Representations in Textbooks (2009). vincent michelot is a professor of American studies at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Lyons, France. He is the author of numerous books on the American presidency, including Le président des États-Unis: Un pouvoir impérial? (2008). simon middleton is a senior lecturer in American history in the History Department at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (2006) and the coeditor, with Billy G. Smith, of Class Matters (2008). jörg nagler is a professor of North American history at the Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena in Germany. He has authored and edited a number of books (in both German and English), including On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (1997). His latest book is an Abraham Lincoln biography published in German (2009). david e. nye is a professor of American studies at the University of Southern Denmark. His books include When the Lights Went Out: A History of American Blackouts (2010) and Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (2006). halina parafianowicz is a professor and the chair of world history, 1919– 1945, at Uniwersytet w Białymstoku in Poland. She is the author of biographies of Herbert Hoover and Eleanor Roosevelt in addition to two volumes on cultural and diplomatic relations between the United States and, respectively, Poland and Czechoslovakia in the interwar period. pauline peretz is an associate professor of modern history at Université de Nantes in France. She is the author of Le combat pour les Juifs soviétiques: Washington-Moscou-Jérusalem, 1953–1989 (2006; forthcoming in English from Lynne Rienner Publishers), the coauthor of Le Dossier Secret de L’affaire Dreyfus (2013), and the editor of New York: Histoire, Promenades, Anthologie & Dictionnaire (2009). helle porsdam is a professor of American studies and American history at the Saxo Institute and in the Department of History at Københavns Universitet in Denmark. Her recent publications include From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe (2009). sandra scanlon is a lecturer in American history at University College Dublin’s School of History and Archives. She is the author or The Pro-war Movement: Domestic Support for the Vietnam War and the Making of Modern American Conservatism (2013).

298

|

Contributors

paul schor is an associate professor of American civilization at the Université Paris–Diderot. He is the coauthor, with Nicolas Barreyre, of De l’émancipation à la ségrégation: Le Sud des États-Unis après la guerre de Sécession, 1865–1896 (2009) and the author of Compter et classer: Histoire des recensements américains, 1790–1940 (2009; forthcoming in English). stephen tuck is a university lecturer in American history at the University of Oxford. He is the author of We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (2010) and Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940–1980 (2003). ian tyrrell is an emeritus Scientia professor of history at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. His most recent book is Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (2010). maurizio vaudagna is a professor of contemporary history at the Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale in Italy. He is a coeditor of Transatlantic Encounters: Public Uses and Misuses of History in Europe and the United States (2000) and The Place of Europe in American History: Twentieth Century Perspectives (2007). cécile vidal is an associate professor of history and the director of the Center for North American Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her main research interest is the social history of the French Empire and the Atlantic world. She is the coauthor, with Gilles Havard, of Histoire de l’Amérique française (2003) and the editor of Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World (2013). irmina wawrzyczek is a professor of Anglo-American cultural history at Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej w Lublinie in Poland. Her recent publications include “American Historiography in the Making: Three EighteenthCentury Narratives of Colonial Virginia,” Polish Journal for American Studies 5 (2011).

Index

References in boldface indicate pages where an entry corresponds to the topic of an entire chapter. abolitionism, 19 Adams, Henry, 208 Adams, Herbert Baxter, 209 Adams, John, 98 Adams, Willi Paul, xv, 14, 15 Africa, 116, 139; and Atlantic history, 142, 144, 146–50, 152–53, 157, 160–62 African Americans, 15, 17, 19, 52, 83, 136 Agamben, Giorgio, 208 Aldrich, Richard J., 129 Algeria, 159–60 Allen, Frederick L., 15, 192 Allen, Harry Cranbrook, 13 American Committee on United Europe, 129 American Council of Learned Societies, 204 American Historical Review, 158 American Nineteenth Century History, 69 American Relief Administration, 8 American studies departments, American history and, 4, 11, 21–22, 25–26, 28, 43–44, 59–60, 68–69, 72, 151–52, 167, 172, 187, 190, 192, 198–99, 204. See also language: role of; outsiders, non-U.S. based Americanists as American Studies in Scandinavia, 202 Americanization, 30, 48–49, 55, 73, 77, 87, 111, 127–28, 132, 200

Amerika Hauses, 47 Amerika Kenkyu (American review), 193 Amerikakunde (genre), 8–9 Amerikashi Kenkyu (Studies of American history), 193 Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 103 anti-Americanism, 5–6, 11–12, 17, 20, 26, 30–32, 40, 44–45 Appleby, Joyce, 38 Aptheker, Herbert W., 21 Arbatov, Georgiy, 18, 44–45 Arendt, Hannah, 208–9 Ariès, Philippe, 208 Aron, Raymond, 14 Asia, 109, 118, 139, 156, 160, 174, 185–86; migration from, 29, 51, 139, 161 associations, professional: American Historical Association, x, 38, 170, 209, 215n3; American Studies Association (USA), 194; Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA), 183–85; Australian Historical Association, 185; British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH), 69; British Association for American Studies, 13; British Group of Early American History (BGEAH), 152; European

299

300

|

Index

associations (continued) Association for American Studies (EAAS), 43, 45; European Early American Studies Association (EEASA), 69, 152; Hungarian Association for American Studies, 26; Japanese Association for American History (previously Society of American Historical Studies), 193; Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS), 185, 192–95; Nordic Association for American Studies, 200; Organization of American Historians (OAH), 38, 76, 240n50; Polish Association for American Studies, 26; Russian Association for the Study of the United States, 26; Society of American Historical Studies (now Japanese Association for American Studies), 193, 195; Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), 131; Spanish Association for Anglo-North American Studies, 21 Atlantic history, xvi–xvii, 21, 23, 29, 95, 109–11, 113, 141–62, 172, 180, 212–13; International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500–1825 (Harvard University), 144, 148–49 Atlantic Studies, 150 audiences, x, xiv–xv, xvii, 5, 23, 31–32, 52, 64–73, 75–92, 147, 165, 167, 169–70, 183, 185, 190 See also public role of historians Australasian Journal of American Studies, 183 Australia, xvii, 181–88 Austria, 9, 41, 43, 70, 108, 149, 227n99 Bade, Klaus, 50 Badger, Anthony, 52, 61–62, 201, 212 Baehr, Bob, 200 Bailyn, Bernard, 143, 148, 206, 212 Balkans, 19 Bancroft, George, 208 Bancroft Prize in American History, 27, 172 Baritono, Raffaella, 31 Bartnicki, Andrzej, 20, 46–47 Bass, Gary J., 134 Bauman, Zygmunt, 90 Baumgarten, Eduard, 9 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 46, 202 Beard, Charles and Mary, 15

Beaumont, Gustave de, 98 Belich, James, 172 Bell, Roger J., 185 Bellot, H. Hale, 9, 13, 219n21 Bender, Thomas, xvii, 24, 102, 206 Bendix, Reinhard, 109 Berg, Manfred, 53–54, 81 Berghahn, Volker, 172 Berlin, Ira, 109 bilateral relations between European countries and America, xvi, 4–5, 16, 19, 22, 27, 41, 62–63, 65, 119–25, 176, 185. See also foreign relations, history of Biró, Zoltán, 41 Bjerre-Poulsen, Niels, 204 Blackburn, Robin, 135 Blair, Tony, 124 Bloch, Marc, 90, 105–7, 196, 208 Bolkhovitinov, Nikolai N., 18–19 Bonazzi, Tiziano, 14 Bonnot de Mably, Gabriel, 98 Boorstin, Daniel, 13, 221n38 borderlands, 143, 155–56 Borgwardt, Elizabeth, 134 Borstelmann, Thomas, 136 Bosscher, Doeko, 11 Botta, Carlo, 98 Bound, Kirsten, 130 Bourdieu, Pierre, 90, 208 Boutmy, Émile, 5, 218n5 Bowers, Claude, 15 Braudel, Fernand, 115 Bridenbaugh, Carl, 79 Briggs, Rachel, 130 Bright, Charles, 166 Brill Publishers, 150 Brion Davis, David, 109 Brissot de Warville, Jacques-Pierre, 98 Brøndal, Jørn, 204 Brookings Institution, 71 Brunialti, Attilio, 99 Bryce, James, ix, 7, 99, 182, 191 Bulgaria, 21, 27. See also Soviet bloc Burnard, Trevor, 153 Bush, George W., 30, 45, 49–50, 132 Cahill, David, 183 Canada, xvii, 182, 211 Canny, Nicholas, 151 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, 158 careers, xv, 56–58, 65–74, 85–86, 90–91, 183, 206 Caribbean, 147–49, 156, 159, 160, 162

Index Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 8 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, National Center for Scientific Research), 155 Chartier, Roger, 208 Chesapeake, 143 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 129–30 circulations: intellectual and institutional, xii, 47, 51, 54–55, 87–91, 96, 98–99, 103–5, 133, 208–9; as research topic, 29, 48, 50–51, 87, 106, 109, 113–14, 139, 142, 145–46;. See also connections between Europe and America civil rights movement, 30, 51–54, 62, 87, 136 Civil War, American, 19, 30, 41, 75, 88, 176 Clark, Francis E., 54 Clavière, Étienne, 98 Clinton, Bill, 112, 124 Clinton, Hillary, 112 Coalition for a Democratic Majority, 132 Cold War, history of, 27, 125–28, 132, 179–80; impact on American history writing, xiv, 3, 10–23, 27, 32, 42–46, 174–77 Cold War History, 126 Cold War International History Program (CWIHP), 126 Collingwood, Robin George, 208 colonial history. See early American history; imperial history Committee on the Present Danger, 132 communism, 5–6, 10–13, 18–21, 23, 40, 128, 235n5. See also ideology and American history writing comparative history, xvi, 22–23, 25, 28, 32, 42, 95–117, 137–38, 141, 170–71, 195–97; implicit, x, xvi, 22, 38, 41, 84, 97, 104, 111, 114, 116, 171, 177, 203; U.S. South and, 110–11, 170, 179 Comte, Auguste, 99 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), 127–28 connections between Europe and America, 16–18, 23, 27, 29, 32, 38, 51, 156, 168 consensus history, 14–17, 100, 195 Constitution (U.S.), 40, 89, 191 continental history, 142, 147, 153, 155–56, 162 conventions, in writing history, xv, 64, 79–82 Cooke, Alastair, 46 Council of Europe, 118, 140

|

301

councils, research: Australian Research Council, 188; Danish Research Council for the Humanities, 127; Irish Research Council, 63; U.S. National Research Council, 170; Swedish, 66 Cox, Michael, 127 Critchlow, Donald, 46 croisée, histoire, xvi, 95, 113–14, 171 Cronon, David, 20 Cronon, William, 79 cultural diplomacy, 11, 21–22, 43, 45, 101, 116, 121, 130 cultural history, 4, 22, 28, 87, 106, 115, 131, 138, 171, 199, 201 Cumings, Bruce, 186 Custer, George, 27 Czechoslovakia, 8–9, 19, 135 Davis Bowman, Shearer, 110 De Gaulle, Charles, 56 Declaration of Independence (U.S.), 4, 191 Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) , 5 Denmark, xvii, 127–28, 131, 149, 198–205 Depkat, Volker, 28 Diggins, John, 80 diplomatic history. See foreign relations, history of Doyle, Don H., 110 Duncan, Russell, 198 Durkheim, Émile, 105 Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste, 118 Dutch Royal Academy, 204 Dyboski, Roman, 9 Dyserink, Hugo, 42 Eagleton, Terry, 90 early American history, xvii, 5, 16, 21–22, 29, 54, 141–64, 176, 216n6 Eco, Umberto, 17 economic history, 16, 22, 105 Edling, Max, 89 Efimov, Aleksei Vladimirovitch, 10, 176 Elkins, Stanley, 209 empire, xii, 137–38, 141–64, 172; French, 8; Spanish, 7, 16, 21, 44; U.S. as, 7–8, 30, 209, 212. See also imperial history Engels, Friedrich, 20 Engerman, Stanley, 109 Enlightenment, 7, 97–98, 191 entangled history, 95, 109, 113–14, 171 Erasmus program, 200 ethnohistory, 144. See also Native Americans Eurasian Economic Community, 174

302

|

Index

Eurocentrism, 102, 144, 147, 156–57, 161, 199 European Court of Human Rights, 140 European Science Foundation (ESF), 50 European Union, 27, 32, 46, 50, 55–56, 69, 73–74, 103, 118, 120, 128, 139–40, 149, 161, 175, 178, 180 Ewen, Elizabeth, 79 exceptionalism, 102–3; American, xiv, 32, 42, 51, 99–100, 102, 168, 170, 206–8; challenged, 14–15, 17, 30, 124–30, 135–36, 141–42, 179–80; European, 107–8, 111, 149 Farkas, Sándor Bölöni, ix, 39–40, 218n8 Faÿ, Bernard, 9 Flora, Peter, 22 Fluck, Winfried, 51, 77–78, 92 Fogel, Robert W., 109 Fohlen, Claude, 221n38 Foner, Eric, 102 Ford Foundation, 47, 167 foreign relations, history of, xvi–xvii, 16, 21, 27, 45, 49–50, 54, 118–40, 179. See also power, U.S. Foreman, Amanda, 75 Foster, William Z., 21 Foucault, Michel, 90, 208 France, 7–11, 13–14, 16, 24, 31, 40, 44, 46, 58, 60–65, 67–71, 80, 83, 86, 88, 98, 101–2, 107–8, 121–22, 131–33, 149, 151, 153, 162, 183, 211; race, slavery, and public debates in, 89–90, 154–55, 158–59, 244n81. See also empire Franco, Francisco, 12, 84 Fredrickson, George, 109 Freud, Sigmund, 170 Frey, Silvia, 161 frontier thesis (Frederick Jackson Turner), 19, 199, 209 frontiers, 19, 29, 155–56, 179, 191, 199, 209 Fukuzawa, Yukichi, 191 Fulbright Program, 10, 20, 26, 43, 47, 131, 138, 167, 184, 198–99, 202 funding, xii, 11, 13, 46–47, 50, 56, 63, 69, 129–30, 139, 161, 167, 177, 181–82, 186–88, 192, 194, 210–11. See also individual programs Furet, François, 208 Furstenberg, François, xvii gender history. See women’s history Gennaro Lerda, Valeria, 23

Genovese, Eugene D., 18, 102, 109 Georges Lurcy Trust, 63 Germany, 5, 7–9, 16, 24, 27–28, 31, 37, 50, 53, 58–60, 63–64, 66–67, 69–71, 80–81, 86–88, 96, 98–99, 102, 111–12, 121–22, 124, 127, 137–38, 149, 178, 190–91, 209, 227n99, 232n127; and comparative history, 22–23, 25, 28, 107–8; East, 18, 20–21, 126; West, 11, 14–17, 22–23, 42–44, 46–48, 137 Gerschenkron, Aleksander, 108 Geyer, Michael, 166 Gilroy, Paul, 53, 150 Ginzburg, Carlo, 170, 208 Glazier, Ira A., 51 global history, xvi–xvii, 28–29, 33, 47–51, 82, 91–92, 95, 110–11, 119, 153, 165, 168, 170–73; and Atlantic history, 141–42, 147; and comparative history, 113–17 globalization, 30, 48, 51, 54, 113, 141, 212; of academia, xi–xii, xv, 65 Godechot, Jacques, 148 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 124, 180 Goubert, Pierre, 208 Gould, Eliga, 158 Gramsci, Antonio, 9, 21, 88, 208, 219n19 Grazia, Victoria de, 172 Greece, 21, 225n85 Greene, Jack, 143, 153 Guthey, Eric, 198 Gutman, Herbert, 17, 104 Habermas, Jürgen, 208 Habsburgs, 39–41, 54 Hall, Stuart, 53 Hanke, Lewis, 21, 24, 47 Haraszthy, Ágoston, 237n13 Harper, Norman, 182, 185 Hartley, Leslie Poles, 38 Hartz, Louis, 15, 195, 209 Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, 108 Heale, Michael, 78 hegemony of American academy, xi–xii, xv, 51–52, 54, 96, 117, 161, 166, 183, 210–11 Heidenheimer, Arnold J., 22 Helbich, Wolfgang, 23 Helsinki Accords, 20, 127 hemispheric history, 119, 142, 153, 156, 162 Hennock, E. P.,108 Henretta, James A., 248n7 Hershberg, James, 126

Index higher education, reforms in European systems, xii, 21, 56, 72–74, 89–90, 178, 186 H-Net, 150 Hobsbawm, Eric, 20 Hoerder, Dirk, 14 Hofstadter, Richard, 15, 195, 199 Hogan, Michael, 125 Holden, John, 130 Hollywood, 23, 43, 184, 192 Holst, Hermann von, 7 Hoover, Herbert, 8 Huizinga, Johan, 8–9, 182 human rights, 50, 127–28, 130, 133–36 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 116 Hungary, 19, 22, 26–27, 37, 39–41, 45, 54, 122 Hunt, Lynn, 134 ideology and American history writing, xiv, 5–6, 9–12, 18–21, 32, 40, 43–45, 137, 174–77. See also communism; Nazism imagology, 42 imperial history, xvii, 53, 141–62, 172, 216n6 Information Agency (U.S.), 47, 200 institutions, role of, x, xiv–xv, xvii, 4, 56–74, 85, 150–51, 155, 169, 172, 178, 183–88, 203, 206, 210–11. See also universities; individual institutions interdisciplinarity, 24, 28, 59, 111, 117, 138 International Bill of Rights, 134 International Herald Tribune, 202 International Monetary Fund, 26 International Relations (discipline), 22, 27–28, 58, 63, 119–20, 131, 137, 190. See also foreign relations, history of internationalization of American history, xiv, xvi–xvii, 24, 26, 47–51, 72, 76–77, 82, 91–92, 117, 127, 139, 141–42, 168, 171–73, 179–80, 194, 206–9, 212–13; American history as common field, xiii, 31, 77, 85, 91; by incorporating foreign scholarship, x, xii, 31, 165–68, 207. See also La Pietra project Iraq (war in), 38, 124 Ireland, 58–59, 63, 68–69, 71, 122, 149, 151 Isaac, Rhys, 183 Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 42 Italy, 11–12, 14, 18, 22–24, 31, 37, 49–50, 58, 60, 67, 80–82, 86, 98, 102, 121–22,

|

303

131, 138, 149, 170; compared, 22–23, 28, 41–42, 107, 110, 179; fascism in, 6, 9–10, 100, 107, 235n5 Jackson, Thomas F., 136 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, 132 Japan, xvii, 116, 189–97 Japanese Journal of American Studies, 193 Jászi, Oscar, 54 Jefferson, Thomas, 98, 191 Jelenski, Constantin, 130 Jellinek, Georg, 5, 218n5 Johnson, Paul E., 104 Jones, Samuel, 130 Journal of American History, x, 24, 64 Journal of Cold War Studies, 126 Journal of Early American History, 69 Judt, Tony, 228n104 Kachenovsky, Dmitry, 176 Kagan, Robert, 49 Kamensky, Jane, 75 Kammen, Michael, 104, 115 Kelley, Robert, 20 King, Martin Luther Jr., 136 Kingsley, Charles, 3 Kloppenberg, James, 172 Kocka, Jürgen, 22, 106–7, 196 Kolchin, Peter, 110 Koselleck, Reinhardt, 208 Kossuth, Lajos, 41 Kovalevskii, Maxim M., 7, 176 Kroes, Rob, 20, 200 Kurilla, Ivan I., xvii, 25 La Pietra project, 24, 165–66, 168, 240n50 labor history, 15, 19, 23, 32, 43, 101, 103–4, 195, 235n5 Laboulaye, Édouard de, 7 Labra, Rafael María de, 7 Lake, Marilyn, 185 language: English, 4, 12, 23, 27, 63–64, 78, 96, 116, 188, 211, 213; languages other than English, 31, 70, 76, 121, 186, 193; role of, xv, 25, 28, 43, 66–67, 82–84, 102–3, 150, 154, 170, 179, 182–83. See also translation Latin America, 109, 118, 139, 146–49, 152, 158–9, 162, 183; migration from, 28–29, 51, 139 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 208 Lears, Jackson, 75 Leclerc de Buffon, George-Louis, 97 Leerssen, Joep, 42

304

|

Index

Leffler, Melvyn P., 126 Lenin, Vladimir Illych, 20 Leverhulme Trust, 204 Lieber, Franz, 208 Lincoln, Abraham, 45, 191 Linebaugh, Peter, 109 Ljungmark, Lars, 16 location, ix–xvii, 4, 77–79, 82, 85, 88, 90–92, 117–20, 139–40, 143, 147, 153, 162, 167, 172, 189 Loria, Achille, 209 Lucas, Scott, 129 Lundestad, Geir, 15 Luraghi, Raimondo, 23, 88 Maase, Kaspar, 49 Mania, Andrzej, 61 Margazalli, Silvia, 148, 213 Marshall Plan, 10, 16, 125, 129 Martellone, Anna Maria, 138 Marx, Karl, 20, 208 Marxist approach to American history, 7, 9, 12, 15, 17–19, 43, 101, 176–77, 194–95 Mazzei, Filippo, 98 McDonnell, Michael, 75 Meaney, Neville, 185 Meiji era (Japan), 191 Mélandri, Pierre, 132 Mendels, Franklin, 110 Merwick, Donna, 76 Metternich, Prince Klemens von, 39 Meyer, Sabine, 25 microhistorical approach, 103–4 Middle East, 45, 118, 133 migration history, xvi, 16, 19, 22, 25, 29, 44, 50–51, 62, 118–40, 144. See also multiculturalism Mihaila, Rodica, 26 Milward, Alan, 125 Mitterrand, François, 133 model, America as, 6–10, 30, 38–44, 97–99, 101, 133, 138, 166, 176, 191, 200, 218n8 modernization, 48, 104, 110–11, 166, 191 modernization theory, 101, 107–8, 110–12, 114, 125, 129 Mondaini, Gennaro, 9 Montgomery, David, 17, 104 Moore, Barrington Jr., 104, 109 Morelli, Giovanni, 170 Morgan, Philip D., 109, 151 Motomura, Hiroshi, 79

Moyn, Samuel, 134–35 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 208 multiculturalism, 53–54, 136–39, 143–44, 158–61 Murdoch, Rupert, 184 Mussolini, Benito, 10, 100 Myrdal, Gunnar, 4, 209 Nagel, Thomas, 169 Nagoya Summer Seminar, 192 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 81, 136 National Endowment for the Humanities, 187 national history: as frame of reference, xi, 50, 102–4, 114–17, 138, 141–43, 145–46, 148, 153, 156, 159, 162, 171–72; of U.S., xvi, 23, 51, 63, 75–76, 125–26, 131; U.S. history and European, 44, 59, 62, 72, 106–8, 121. See also Eurocentrism; exceptionalism National History Standards, 187 native, going, 32, 52, 73, 76, 78, 87–88, 130–33, 168–69, 194, 201 Native Americans, 17, 52–53, 62, 141, 144, 147, 155–56, 184 NATO, 148 Nazism, 6, 9–11, 40, 43, 83–84, 100, 137. See also ideology and American history writing Ndiaye, Pap, 90 neoconservatives, 25, 132 Netherlands, 24, 42, 58–60, 87, 122, 131, 138, 149, 200 networks, 23, 68–71, 73, 76, 78, 152, 180, 183, 185, 190, 192–93, 200, 204; in Atlantic history, 151–52. See also associations, professional; research centers and seminars Nevins, Allan, 182 New Deal, 52, 84, 100 New England, 143 New Left history, 15, 17–18, 22, 28, 32, 101, 195 Nicolas I of Russia, 3, 175–76 1968, May, 17 Nolan, Mary, 172 Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, 204 North Carolina, 52 Norway, 11, 14–16, 24, 199, 203–4 Novick, Peter, 99, 101 Nowaczewska, Renata, 25 Nugent, Walter, 46

Index

|

number and concentration of Americanists, 58–61, 166, 181, 190, 193, 202, 211, 215n1, 283n7 Nye, David E., xvii, 17

85–88, 90–91, 111, 170, 184, 187, 203–4 Puerto Rico, 21, 158 Puhle, Hans-Jürgen, 107

OAH Newsletter, 190 Obama, Barack, 24, 186 Ostermann, Christian, 126 Ostrogorski, Moisey, 7 outsiders, non-U.S based Americanists as, ix–x, xii, xv, 12, 23, 31, 38, 75–80, 87, 91, 96, 117, 168–69, 188–90, 195–97, 200–205, 212. See also American studies departments, American history and; native, going Øverland, Orm, 201 Oxford Bibliographies Online, 151

quantitative methods, 137–38 Quigley, Paul, 25

Pacific history, 29, 156, 160, 180, 185–86 Palmer, Robert, 148 Pechatnov, Vladimir O., 24 Pedersen, Carl, 202 Pelling, Henry, 15 Pennington, Jody, 198 Peretz, Pauline, 132 Pérez, Bernard Jr., 212 Perry, Matthew, 191 Peterson, Carla, 81 PhD, xv, 7, 57–65, 78, 86, 131, 150, 181, 188, 190, 202 Philippines, 158 Pirenne, Henri, 105 Pocock, John G. A., 109 Poland, 5, 8–9, 15, 18–20, 22, 24–27, 31, 37, 45–47, 58–66, 70, 72, 86, 90, 121–22. See also Soviet bloc political history, xiv, 4–7, 14–15, 23–24, 27–28, 31, 39–43, 98–99, 101, 194, 199, 218n8 political science, 7, 22, 45, 59, 89, 99, 108, 111, 190 politics and American history writing, xiv–xvi, 5–12, 25, 32, 37–55, 98–101, 105, 123–24, 132–33, 149, 153–54, 189–92. See also ideology and American history writing Pollard, Sidney, 110 Ponte, Lorenzo Da, 208 Porsdam, Helle, 130, 202 Portugal, 6, 21, 27, 121, 149, 156 positionality. See location power, U.S., xvi, 27, 119, 125, 128, 139–40, 179–80 public role of historians, 37, 45–47, 71–72,

305

race, xiv–xv, 4, 23, 29–30, 32, 52–54, 83–84, 87, 89–90, 101, 109, 125, 159, 161, 170, 179, 184, 194 Ranke, Leopold von, 7, 99 Ratzel, Friedrich, 209 Rawick, George, 18, 102 Reagan, Ronald, 45, 50, 124, 132 Rediker, Markus, 109 research centers and seminars: American Institute (Prague, Czech Republic), 8; American Seminar at Schloss Leopoldskron (Salzburg, Austria), 43; American Studies Center (Warsaw University, Poland), 20, 47; Center for American Studies (Denmark), 202; Centre d’études nord-américaines (CENA, Center for North American Studies), EHESS, 21, 151; Centre International de recherches sur les esclavages (CIRESC, International Research Center on Slaveries), France, 155; Centro Interuniversitario di Storia e Politica Euro-Americana (CISPEA), 60; Danish Center for American Studies, 198; Doshisha American Studies Summer Seminar, 192; Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation for the Study of U.S. History (Moscow University), 26; German Historical Institute (GHI), 63, 71; Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (Yale University), 155; Hepburn Chair of the American Constitution, History and Diplomacy (University of Tokyo), 191; Institut für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück (Germany), 50, 138–39; Institute for American Studies, Rikkyo University (Japan), 192; Institute for Historical Research in London, American seminar, 60; Institute for United States Studies (London), 13; Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora, Jagiellonian University (Poland), 61; Institute of U.S and Canadian Studies at the Soviet Academy

306

|

Index

research centers (continued) of Sciences, 18, 44; John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (Free University of Berlin), 14, 26; Kyoto Summer Seminar, 192; Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, 200; Program in Atlantic History and Culture (Johns Hopkins University), 144; Roosevelt Center in Middleburg (Netherlands), 60, 201; Rothermere American Institute (Oxford University), 60; Summer Academy of Atlantic History, 69, 149; Tokyo-Stanford University Seminar in American Studies, 192; United States Studies Center (University of Sydney), 185; Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (University of Hull), 155; Woodrow Wilson Center (Washington, D.C.), 126 research councils. See councils, research Research Excellence Framework (U.K.), 66 revolution: age of, 98, 159; American, 5, 8, 14, 21, 40, 75, 80, 88, 90, 98, 134, 143; French, 108, 134; Haitian, 160 Ricard, Serge, 132 Rio Grande, 156 Risorgimento, 41, 218n8 Robin, Ron, 91 Rockefeller Foundation, 47, 130, 167 Rodgers, Daniel T., 109, 142, 168, 172 Rodolpi Editions (Netherlands), 42 Roediger, David R., 80 Romania, 20, 26. See also Soviet bloc Romano, Angela, 127 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 14–15, 23, 100 Rostow, Walt W., 108 Rozbicki, Michal, 4, 15, 90 Russia, xvii, 5, 7, 19, 22, 24–27, 29, 37, 110, 121, 156, 174–80 Russian Academy of Sciences, 178 Rystad, Göran, 61–62 Sachsenmaier, Dominic, 114 Said, Edward, 174 Sapporo Cool Seminar, 192 Scandinavian countries, 11, 59, 137–38, 200, 204, 199–200. See also individual countries Schabas, William A., 134–35 Schönemann, Friedrich, 8–9 Schor, Paul, 88–89 scientific empiricism, 6

self-perception, American history and European, xvi, 15, 25, 31–32, 38–42, 51–55, 116, 132, 166, 175–77, 179. See also comparative history: implicit; multiculturalism Semmingsen, Ingrid, 14, 16 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, 46 settler society: comparative study of, 185–86; as framing device, 172 Sewel, William H., Jr., 195 Shaw, George Bernard, xv Siegfried, André, 14 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, ix, 218n8 Skard, Sigmund, 11 Skocpol, Theda, 109, 111 slavery, 4, 18–19, 30, 43, 75, 109–11, 142, 154–55, 160–61, 170, 176–77, 184, 194 Smith, Adam, 171 social history, 4, 17, 22, 103, 106, 115, 131, 144, 195, 199, 201 social sciences, 105–6, 108, 111, 115, 170–71 Socrates program, 200 Sombart, Werner, 7, 9, 15, 101 Sonderweg. See exceptionalism sources, 99, 123, 133, 138, 150, 154, 183, 212; in Europe, 4, 16, 21, 26, 119, 121, 126; in U.S., 47, 63, 177; South, U.S., 23, 30, 52–53, 62, 110–11, 170, 179, 184 Soviet bloc, xiv, 12–15, 22, 25–27, 43–46, 50, 124, 126, 166. See also ideology and American history writing; Marxist approach to American history; individual countries Soviet Union, 8, 10–13, 19–20, 26, 45, 127, 175–77. See also Russia Spain, 4, 6–7, 10–12, 27–28, 31, 82–84, 121–22, 149; former colonies and borderlands of, 16, 21, 44, 143, 156. See also empire spatial turn, xiii, xvi, 141, 153, 156, 169 specialization, in American history, 76–77, 102–3, 115, 117, 167 Stalinism, 6, 18. See also communism Steele, Ian, 212 Stein, Gertrude, 9 Stonor Saunders, Frances, 130 Studia Imagologica, 42 Sweden, 11, 58, 60–63, 149, 203–4; migration history in, 16, 22, 137–38 Swierenga, Robert P., 138 Taisho era, 191 Takagi, Yasaka, 191–92

Index Taylor and Francis Group, 150 technology, role of, 23, 78, 202, 212 Thatcher, Margaret, 124 Thelen, David, 23–24, 76–77, 79, 206 Third Way summits, 124 Thistlethwaite, Frank, 13, 16, 24, 137, 140, 168 Thomas, Daniel C., 127 Thompson, Edward Palmer, 103, 208 Thornton, John, 150 threat, America as, 7–11, 46 Tilly, Charles, 109 Tocqueville, Alexis de, ix, 6, 40, 98, 166, 182, 191 Toklas, Alice B., 9 Tokugawa bakufu (government), 191 Tournès, Ludovic, 129–30 translation, xv, 76, 78, 82–84, 102, 179, 188, 192–94 transnational history, xvi–xvii, 24, 28–29, 49–51, 54, 82, 91–92, 95, 105–6, 110–11, 119, 136, 138–42, 153, 162, 165, 168, 170–72, 185, 196–97; and comparative history, 113–17 Tunc, André, 14 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 15, 19, 199, 209. See also frontiers Tyrrell, Ian, xvii, xix, 172, 206 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 104 United Kingdom, 9, 14, 16, 22, 24–25, 31, 39, 51–53, 58–63, 66–72, 78, 80, 86, 107–8, 122, 141–62; “special relationship,” xiv, 12–13, 52, 54, 121, 123–24, 149 United Nations, 134 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 134 universities: Århus, 198; Cambridge, 3, 5, 13, 53, 58, 60–62, 66; Charles, 57; City University of New York, 71; Columbia, 71, 208; Copenhagen Business School, 198, 202; Copenhagen, 198–99; École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), 21, 58, 60, 151; European University Institute, 57; Free University of Berlin, 14, 60; Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, 59; Georgetown, 71; Grinnell College, 210; Harvard, 3, 71, 144, 210; Heidelberg, 60; Indiana, 71; Jagiellonian, 58, 60–61; Johns Hopkins, 144, 208; Kristianstad, 57; London Metropolitan, 57; London School of Economics, 27, 57; Moscow State, 7, 20,

|

307

26; Odense (now University of Southern Denmark), 198, 202; Oxford, 13, 58, 60–61; Pázmány Péter, 8; Princeton, 208, 210; Russell Group Universities, 60, 62, 72; Silesian, 57; Sorbonne (University of Paris), 13, 14, 221n38; Stanford, 210; University College Cork, 58, 62; University College Dublin, 58, 62; University College London, 9, 58; University of California-Berkeley, 71; University of California-Los Angeles, 208; University of Chicago, 208; University of East Anglia, 58; University of Edinburgh, 58; University of Heidelberg, 58, 60; University of Hull, 155; University of Lund, 57, 60; University of Melbourne, 182; University of Montreal, 210; University of Newcastle, 58; University of Nottingham, 58; University of Oslo, 11; University of Osnabrück, 50; University of Paris-Diderot, 60; University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne, 60; University of Paris Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 60; University of Pennsylvania, 208; University of Rome, 9; University of Sheffield, 58; University of South Carolina, 208; University of Southern Denmark, 198, 202; University of Sydney, 182, 184; University of Texas, 210; University of Tokyo, 191; University of Virginia, 71; Uppsala, 16; Warsaw, 20; Yale University, 155, 210. See also research centers and seminars Vaïsse, Justin, 132 Vezzosi, Elisabetta, 31 Viano, Francesca, 24 Vichy regime, 9, 83 Vienna Declaration, 135 Vietnam War, 17, 20, 198–99 Vittorini, Elio, 10 Vychytil-Baudoux, Florence, 133 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 104, 115 Warren, Robert Penn, ix Washington, George, 3, 191 Webb, Walter P., 15 Weber, Max, 105, 208 Weil, François, 61–62, 76–78, 92, 151 welfare, in comparative perspective, 22, 28, 87, 107–8, 111–12 Wendt, Simon, 53 West Indies (British), 143

308

|

Index

Westad, Odd Arne, 27 Westernization, 30, 48, 101 White, Hayden, 104 Wilford, Hugh, 129 Wilson, Woodrow, 8, 100 Witherspoon, John, 208 Wolfe, Patrick, 185 Wolgast, Eike, 11 women’s history, 17, 22–23, 30–31, 87, 101, 125, 138 Woodward, C. Vann, 96, 170

world history. See global history World wars, impact of on American history writing: World War I, 8, 99, 116; World War II, 10, 116 Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar, 42 Zahedieh, Nuala, 75 Zerkowitz, Emil, 41 Zhuravleva, Victoria I., 25 Žižek, Slavoj, 208 Zsoldos, Géza, 41