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Featured Review
| Thomas Bender. A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang. 2006. Pp. xii, 349. $25.00.
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| For the past few years, historians in the United States and elsewhere have vocally advocated a transnational reorientation of their discipline. In an age of globalization, the excessive disciplinary concentration on national histories seemed limiting and insufficient. As a result, world, global and transnational histories have thrived. Wherever one looks—historical journals, the programs of the meetings of professional associations, the titles of dissertations in progress, the catalogues of publishers—one finds ample evidence for such a reorientation. With the United States as its epicenter, similar currents have emerged in Europe, Japan, China, and India, among other places, and among historians who study virtually every part of the world. Global labor is being studied in Amsterdam, global economic inequality in London, and global industrialization in Osaka. Despite the proliferation of such projects, much of the transnational reorientation of history to date has focused on programmatic, methodological, and theoretical debates. To cite just one example: when in the fall of 2005 the First European Congress of World and Global History met, most of the papers presented were of a conceptual kind—with empirical research still limited. |
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In the United States, among historians of North America, no one has been more prominent in advocating such a transnational reorientation of the discipline of history than Thomas Bender. A United States historian by training, Bender has written at great length about the need to place the history of one nation—the United States—in transnational perspective. As the principal organizer of a number of conferences at La Pietra on transnational approaches to United States history and as the editor of a volume of essays that derived from these conferences, he has done more than anyone else to awaken United States historians to the possibilities of internationalizing the study of the American past. |
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It is therefore with a sense of excitement that historians of the United States have greeted the publication of his new study of North American history in transnational perspective. This is not a narrow monograph on a particular problem of U.S. history interpreted in novel ways but an effort to reconsider substantial chunks of the core narrative of American history. The resulting volume is not only a powerful argument for the need to practice history in a cosmopolitan mode but also a deeply learned and at times brilliant retelling of key themes in U.S. history. |
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Bender begins by defining the task ahead of him as being to "mark the end of American history as we have known it" (p. 3). This is perhaps somewhat of an overstatement, considering that, as Marcus Graeser has recently pointed out, the United States can look back on a distinguished history of thinking about its own national history in transnational perspective, and on historians situated within an environment structured to be unusually conducive to such perspectives (Graeser, "Weltgeschichte im Nationalstaat: Die Transnationale Disposition der amerikanischen Geschichtswissenschaft," Historische Zeitschrift 283 [2006]: 355–382). Indeed, historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner and James Harvey Robinson shared some of Bender's concerns, the latter arguing in 1930 that "without some vivid conception of the whole sweep of civilization national history is likely to be very badly interpreted" (Robinson, "The Newer Ways of Historians," American Historical Review 35 [1930]: 247). Yet Bender employs these cosmopolitan sentiments in entirely innovative ways; his take on U.S. history has little in common with earlier generations of historians whose cosmopolitanism tended towards sweeping statements that imbued certain nations, classes, or races with ill-defined but universal traits. Bender, instead, using to good effect the rich social, intellectual, and political history produced during the past thirty years, embeds developments on the North American continent within the larger political, economic, social, and intellectual history of humanity. He does so by retelling five central episodes in the narrative of North American history: European expansion, the American Revolution, the Civil War, late nineteenth-century imperialism, and the rise of the welfare state. These examples are well chosen, both because they are so central to the traditional narrative and also because they allow for fresh perspectives once properly situated within a larger frame. |
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