Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the
Context of Empire

Ian Tyrrell

History with a capital H was present at the creation of nation-states. It seems more than accidental, says Benedict Anderson, that the notion of history as a critical body of thinking about the past appeared in the 1820s in Europe and that an organized discipline arose there and then to provide a genealogy for newly emerging nationalism. History became allied to the eliding of what needed to be forgotten and to the imagining, Anderson tells us, of spatially limited political communities called nations. It is hardly surprising that American scholars have participated in these acts. The nation-centered focus of historiography is a truism, and in the case of American history, it has become a common source of complaint.1	1
Less well known are the many patterns of transnational history that coexisted with the growing nation-centeredness of professional history. The transnational moments and possibilities explored in this essay take us back to origins and to choices not taken. Using the countermodel of French local history's connections with the journal Annales, I shall suggest how American professionalization cut off transnational and comparative alternatives even when some professionals aimed for global reach. Those alternatives included important contributions from women and minority historians on the margins of the profession and from amateurs. I suggest, too, a new chronology—from World War I to the 1960s—when nation predominated in historical thinking. That chronology reflects the contingencies of war, the New Deal, and global shifts in imperial power. I use the larger contexts to explain how national themes became dominant over amateur, local, and transnational ones. But it was not merely the national focus that triumphed during professionalization. From the 1870s, American historians forged powerful institutional and intellectual connections with state structures. Herbert Baxter Adams of Johns Hopkins University, the founder of the "scientific school" in the 1870s, followed European precedents in stressing history as past politics. For Adams, the "main current of history," including the aspects of social and intellectual life that made up "civilization," ran "through the channels ofpolitics." Though Adams advocated cooperation with amateur historians, his students, led by John Franklin Jameson, first editor of the American Historical Review, began by the 1890s to assert professional control of historiography and carried their alliance with the state apparatus and the nation still further. In doing so they appropriated earlier and more diverse amateur traditions of national history.2	2
Older amateur traditions in American historiography already promoted patriotic sentiment but did not privilege the nation-state over sectional, regional, and local themes. Leading amateur figures such as Francis Parkman found the contest of empires on the North American continent and the clash of individual wills more compelling subjects than nationalist progress. Even the work of George Bancroft, who rejoiced in the rise of a self-evident national spirit, was not necessarily bound only by nation. In the Constitution-making process, stated Bancroft, the people of the United States watched the result of the federal convention "with trembling hope." This "most cheering act in the political history of mankind" evidenced "a persistent and healthy progress." The new American nation was led by "statesmen of earnestness, perseverance and public spirit" joined organically to a people in "common aspiration." Bancroft's narrative was assimilated to an exceptionalist reading of American history, but he wrote of universal aspirations for democratic ideals being realized in a specific national context. Toward the end of his life, he remarked that "all states are beginning to form parts of one system" in which technological change annihilated distance and "the well-being" of any country founded on "justice" had "all the nations for a cloud of witnesses."3	. . .