|
|
|
Implementing the La Pietra Report: Internationalizing Three Topics in the United States History Survey Course
Thomas J. Osborne
Santa Ana College, California
|
ACROSS THE SPECTRUM of academic disciplines, history is one of the few to be organized largely on the basis of the nation-state. With a few notable exceptions, only since the 1960s have American historians begun to see the limitations that this nation-bounded approach has imposed on our field. Since then a movement to internationalize the study and teaching of United States history, by de-provincializing and recentering the field, has been gaining momentum.1 Significantly, this movement is not aimed at supplanting the nation-state as a major unit of historical inquiry; rather it aims at supplementing that unit of inquiry with others that are smaller or larger spatially, which in some cases requires enlarging temporal parameters as well. The Organization of American Historians has been playing a leading role in this movement, in part by its involvement in the recently completed La Pietra Project. Drawing on the work and results of that Project, this article offers history instructors three examples, each of which relates to a specific episode in America's past, of how we can internationalize our college-level United States history survey courses. However, before taking up the teaching applications of the La Pietra Project, a few words of explanation are in order about the origins, nature, and results of that Project. |
1
|
| | |
The La Pietra Project and Report | |
|
In the late 1990s leaders in the OAH embarked on an innovative, systematic, four-year endeavor (1997–2000), undertaken jointly by that organization and New York University, to recontextualize the way historians think about and teach United States history. This ambitious project included seventy-eight historians from the United States and other countries who specialize in the study of America's past. They represented all continents. Often they provided rich insights into the cosmopolitan dimensions of United States history. Thomas Bender of NYU served as the project director, raising funds and organizing a series of conferences, all held at his university's facilities at Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy. I had the privilege of participating in the third and last of these conferences, held in early July 2000. |
2
|
|
The three conferences (1998, 1999, and 2000) grew out of initial planning undertaken by Bender, David Thelan, editor of the Journal of American History, and Linda Kerber, President of the Organization of American Historians.2 Bender raised funds from the Gladys Kriebel Delmas Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. A planning meeting was held at NYU's Villa La Pietra during the summer of 1997 to organize the three conferences mentioned above. The director of the Project selected about half of the participating historians, while a national competition was held to fill the remaining slots. Those participating in the conferences came from a diverse range of specializations and academic institutions throughout the world including research universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, high schools, and public history institutions. For purposes of continuity, at least two foreign and two United States scholars, plus the director, were participants from one of the previous conferences. The third conference had a strong representation from earlier La Pietra meetings because one of its goals was to develop recommendations that would form the basis of a report to the profession.3 |
3
|
|
Following the 1997 planning session, each of the conferences had a special focus. The first, in 1998, centered on an exploration of theoretical matters integral to an internationalized approach. For example, participants discussed papers that had earlier been commissioned by Bender on the challenges of expanding the spatial and temporal boundaries beyond the traditional national narratives.4 The second, in 1999, discussed previously prepared essays on various themes exemplifying a reframed American history.5 At the final conference held in Florence in 2000 amid the backdrop of the Fourth of July holiday, the participants compiled a set of practical recommendations for implementing ideas developed in the earlier La Pietra conferences, recommendations about how these could be applied in teaching United States history and how graduate school requirements could accordingly be adapted. In addition, we discussed the possible implications of internationalization for history departments, including the benefits of bilateral faculty exchange programs.6 Within a year of the last conference, Bender assembled the recommendations of participants, organized and wrote a report on the entire Project, and oversaw the distribution by the OAH of the La Pietra Report: Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History (c. 2000). |
4
|
|
After laying out the reasons for reconceptualizing American history along global, comparative lines while reformulating temporalities as well, the Report addresses the issues and challenges involved in restructuring the history curricula at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Most importantly for purposes of this article, the Report specifically addresses "The U.S. History Survey Course," stating: "The United States history survey course is properly a focal point for the creation of an internationalized American history. If in the survey course one embraces the simple advice to follow the people, the money, the knowledges [ideas and information], and the things, one would quite easily—on the basis of pure empiricism—find oneself internationalizing the study of American history. One might reasonably anticipate that constructing and teaching such survey courses would stimulate new research and interpretations, as has happened with world history."7 |
5
|
|
In the remainder of this essay, I will apply the statement just quoted to three topics ordinarily covered in our United States history survey courses, showing and suggesting how an internationalized treatment of the subject matter might work. In each instance, I followed the people, the money, and the ideas. I picked topical areas that lend themselves fairly easily to transnational coverage and recommend that those just starting down this road do likewise. Here I will look at the American Revolution, Romanticism and Reform in the Antebellum Era, and American Imperialism in the 1890s. My comments are based on my teaching and on work that I am doing in conjunction with three other historians on a college-level survey textbook that situates American history in a global context. |
6
|
| | |
Internationalizing United States History: My Method | |
|
In both my teaching and writing I have developed a method for internationalizing my American history survey courses, an endeavor that is still in progress. With variations, I follow four basic steps for each topic that I am internationalizing. First, I prepare and distribute global and national chronologies for the topic about to be covered. Second, I usually open each new topic with a vignette that lifts the subject matter out of its traditional context and situates it in a broader, spatially and temporally expanded, international framework. Third, I search out links or connections between happenings in the United States and developments—sometimes parallels—beyond America's borders. Fourth, when bringing my material on a given theme to a close, I consider the question of American exceptionalism by exploring historical features that may be unique or merely distinctive, defining, or unusual regarding the United States. |
7
|
|
The term "exceptionalism" requires a brief explanation.8 I use it in the sense that a given feature of American history is unique only in some limited and specific way because I cannot imagine using the term to suggest that our nation somehow stands outside the sweep of global history, exempt from its encounters and tribulations. From its inception, America has been connected to the international milieu, be it the continent it straddles, the Caribbean Basin, or the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. In short, exceptionalism should be viewed within the larger context of international connections in order to avoid enshrining United States history in narratives remarkable only for their provincialism. So viewed, I employ the term "exceptionalism" to mean unique or virtually one of a kind, but (again) only in a limited, and appropriately nuanced sense. To communicate the idea of important though lesser degrees of difference than exceptionalism implies, I utilize such terms as "distinctive," "defining," or "unusual." As a result of interrogating exceptionalism in this fashion, students gain a clearer understanding of how the United States is both similar to and different from other nations. Only against such a backdrop of connections and comparisons, can students gauge the meaning of episodes and developments in America's past. |
8
|
|
Applying this or virtually any other methodology to internationalize our United States history survey courses raises the issue of what gets left out of our course in order to make room for the new transnational coverage. However, new course content and perspectives have been a perennial challenge for history teachers especially since the 1960s when gender and multicultural considerations, and more recently, environmental issues began to be factored into survey textbooks. They have managed somehow, and when our survey textbooks are sufficiently internationalized the problem of what classroom material to retain and what to discard will be greatly minimized, particularly for those instructors who adhere closely to the textbook. Until then, teachers will be on their own to determine how far and how fast to internationalize their courses. While awaiting the publication of more fully internationalized survey textbooks, teachers might want to consider using an abridged textbook, which allows for adding new internationalized content to lectures and handouts without putting the students on information overload, and possibly assigning a supplemental internationalized reader. Two such readers, both of which are useful, include Carl J. Guarneri's two-volume edited work, America Compared: American History in International Perspective (1997), and Gerald M. Greenfield and John D. Buenker's two-volume edited work, Those United States: International Perspectives on American History (2000). Guarneri's reader features secondary accounts written by current scholars, while Greenfield and Buenker's reader is comprised of primary documents. Brief and incisive essays written by the editors introduce the chapters in both of these works. |
9
|
| | |
The American Revolution | |
|
This is the first example I offer showing how to implement the recommendations of the La Pietra Report in a college-level survey course in United States history. Because the global and national chronologies noted as my first step seem self-explanatory, I will not discuss them further, and will instead devote the remainder of this article to the other steps already mentioned. I turn to the second step, the International Framework. After first covering the background causes of the American Revolution, I mention the "shot heard round the world" in mid-April, 1775 near the Concord Bridge, noting the tactics and heroism of the Minutemen. This event, I add, is seen by many as the defining one during the opening stages of the American Revolution. But a more determinative event, I assure classes, took place a year later in Paris, where a fictitious trading firm—Roderigue Hortalez and Company—began the illegal funneling of arms to the American rebels. In fact, without French arms (France supplied ninety percent of the gunpowder used by Continental troops in the first two years of the war), money, and troops and Dutch loans along with Spanish military aid, the Revolution most likely would not have begun successfully.9 The French weapons and munitions were shipped across the Atlantic to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from where they were transported inland to the forces of American General Horatio Gates. This foreign aid was far more critical, I tell students, than the heroics portrayed in the recent movie "The Patriot," starring Mel Gibson, who plays a Rambo-like one-man-army guerrilla commando. In fact, that movie simply perpetuates the self-aggrandizing and provincial view that the Revolution was won primarily, if not solely, by the courageous exploits of highly individualistic American militia leaders. So following the flow of armaments and money from Europe to the American colonies in an opening vignette easily situates the American Revolution in an international framework. |
10
|
|
For the next step, Connections to Developments Beyond America's Borders, I can point to numerous links between the American Revolution and the wider world. Besides the indispensable foreign aid that has just been noted, I can show how the Declaration of Independence was translated and viewed in Europe, and/or treat 1776 as the harbinger of "the age of democratic revolution" that extended from the last quarter of the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century. |
11
|
|
Students in my classes have been interested in how the various European countries translated and responded to the Declaration of Independence. Borrowing heavily from the March, 1999 issue of the JAH (particularly articles by Willi Paul Adams and other foreign scholars), I prepared a handout on this matter for students. For example, I note that French translations of Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" stressed a more precise social right to a life of modest comfort and health. French translations replaced "happiness" (bonheur) with "well-being" (bienêtre).10 This rendering of the Declaration de-emphasizes the role of individual effort in the expectation of enjoying a materially based contentment. (Having conducted a comparative study of several modern European social welfare systems in 1996 under a travel grant from the State Chancellor's Office, I tell my students that this French interpretation of "pursuit of happiness" accords with the premises on which France's current social welfare system is based.) This use of translated documents illustrates how, in accordance with the La Pietra Report's recommendations, we can internationalize our courses by following the flow of ideas across national borders. |
12
|
|
Additionally, students in my survey courses consider 1776 as a harbinger of "the age of democratic revolution," comparing and contrasting the American Revolution with other upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In doing so students trace the diffusion of revolutionary ideas throughout the Western World. While intellectuals in France saw in the American Revolution the embodiment of their own radical creed, they often failed to see major differences between the cataclysms of 1776 and 1789. For example, the French sought a total break with their past and opted to experiment in a wholesale fashion with republican governance. The Americans, on the other hand, I tell students, remained intent on preserving many aspects of their English heritage and pursued republicanism with greater caution and moderation than did the French. Also, while the French attached great value to public order and cohesion, Americans stressed individual freedom.11 This difference in values goes far, I explain to classes, toward helping us understand why even today the French champion social solidarity (as evidenced in the nationwide strike of 1996), while Americans are much less apt to think and act collectively (a partial explanation for the defeat of former President Bill Clinton's health care plan). |
13
|
|
The revolution in Saint Domingue (today's Haiti) in 1791 affords another connective link between 1776 and the wider world. Like Britain's Thirteen Colonies, Saint Domingue waged a war for independence against a European imperial power (in this case France), espousing ideals of freedom and equality that were prominent in both the American and French Revolutions. Yet only the Haitians were successful in ending slavery in their revolution.12 One of the many ironies regarding Thomas Jefferson that I share with students is embedded in a letter that he wrote to his friend James Madison in 1799, expressing alarm that the freeing of blacks in Saint Domingue could ignite an international slave rebellion. "If this combustion can be introduced among us [Southern slave owners] under any veil whatever, we have to fear it."13 That the author of the Declaration of Independence should have penned those words invariably leads to a lively discussion in my classes about how revolutionary Jefferson was, and how America's planter aristocracy interpreted the Declaration's claim that "all men are created equal." In this case the Haitian revolutionaries provide my students with an international standard for gauging the disparities between the Declaration's revolutionary credo and the reality of human bondage throughout the American South in the late eighteenth century. To present a balanced view, I also tell students that though the revolution in Saint Domingue abolished slavery, it brought to power the dictator Toussaint L'Ouverture. |
14
|
|
Next I consider American Exceptionalism. After noting similarities between the American Revolution and other "democratic" revolutions of the time, I discuss with students the exceptionalistic view of Seymour Martin Lipset that 1776 marked the first major successful anti-colonial war in modern world history.14 The resulting ascendancy of the civilian over the military branch of government in the aftermath, I note, was a distinctive and perhaps exceptional feature of the American Revolution. Moreover, our Revolution was distinctive, I point out, in that proportionately it led to the highest level of emigration following it among all of the upheavals of the period. For example, the American Revolution produced over six times as many émigrés per 1000 of population as in France after the Revolution of 1789.15 The migration of 80,000 or more Loyalists to Canada, the West Indies, and Europe points students to an important international consequence of the American Revolution. So here is another instance of where simply following the flow of people, as the La Pietra Report urged, facilitates the internationalization of the subject matter. |
15
|
| | |
Romanticism and Reform in Antebellum America | |
|
In introducing the International Framework in my second example, I do not begin with the standard textbook account of how New England Transcendentalists, influenced by European "Romantics," undertook the establishment of an American literary tradition. Rather, I start with a vignette about Margaret Fuller's extensive travels in Europe between 1846 and 1850. I note how, serving as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, she went down into a coalmine in Newcastle, England to observe the dismal working conditions of laborers. She was further appalled by the abject poverty she encountered in Glasgow, Liverpool, London, and Paris. The plight of poor women disturbed her most. In one of numerous letters she wrote to the New York Tribune, Fuller said: "I saw here in Glasgow persons, especially women, dressed in dirty, wretched tatters, worse than none, and with an expression of listless, unexpecting woe upon their faces."16 As a result of this and other similar experiences abroad, Fuller, a feminist before departing for Europe, moved more and more toward being an outspoken paladin for women. I relate her meetings with Quakers and socialists, as well as her sexual awakening and political radicalization—in short, how her life was changed and her writing empowered by gritty and poignant experiences in a wider world. Fuller's odyssey, in effect, becomes my class's window into the Euro-American social ferment that infused reform movements in the United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. |
16
|
|
In exploring Connections to Developments Beyond America's Borders regarding American Transcendentalism, I show how Ralp Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and others were influenced by Plato's idealism as well as by ideas found in Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad-Gita, Immanuel Kant's stress on intuition and universal ethics (Categorical Imperative), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's distinction between "reason" and "understanding," and Emanuel Swedenborg's mysticism.17 Similarly, a handout I share with students notes how New Englander Albert Brisbane studied in Paris under utopian socialist Charles Fourier and afterward persuaded George Ripley to adopt the new form of political economy at Brook Farm, which, in turn, was visited by a number of European reformers, including Scottish manufacturer Robert Owen.18 Also, I mention Frances Wright's utopian socialist venture in Nashoba, Tennessee, where the fiery Scotswoman also embarked on efforts to end slavery and advance the causes of interracial marriage and women's liberation. |
17
|
|
In addition to Fuller and Brisbane, a number of other American writers also traveled to Europe for artistic inspiration and insight. Emerson, an oracle of Transcendentalism, traveled to Europe in 1832–33, meeting and befriending writers Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, all three of whom dazzled Emerson with their discourses on German idealism.19 Similarly, I tell students, Nathaniel Hawthorne spent several years in the early 1850s in Liverpool, England serving as American consul, after which he lived in Italy for two more years gathering experiences that would become grist for his Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks (1871) and other writings. In Florence he was an occasional guest at the palazzo of English poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning.20 These transatlantic interactions in which American intellectuals were influenced by the ideas of leading thinkers in Europe help students see United States history in a broader spatial and thematic context. Again, following the flow of people and ideas enables us as instructors to more easily internationalize course content. |
18
|
|
In looking for American Exceptionalism with respect to this topic, I point out that throughout the Antebellum period a number of American characteristics stand out and in a few instances could be considered exceptional, as some European visitors and commentators testified. First, individualism was far more pervasive in the United States than anywhere else in the world and for that reason could be considered exceptional. The writings of Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman along with the opinions of numerous Europeans attested to the power of the solitary American directing his own fate. Second, religiosity seemed much stronger in the United States than elsewhere, noted Alexis de Tocqueville. Third, and related to the religiosity, Americans moralized in public discourse—often invoking Biblical language—to a far greater extent than people in other countries. Fourth, Americans were unusual and possibly singular in their propensity for "voluntary association," as is seen in the abolitionist, peace, temperance, and other movements for societal reform in the Antebellum period. Fifth, Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws and governments constituted a highly original and arguably exceptional contribution to global politics. |
19
|
| | |
American Imperialism in the 1890s | |
|
For the International Framework for this topic, the World's Fair held in Omaha in the summer of 1898 has served as a broad backdrop.21 Among the numerous international exhibits at this fair was a Chinese Village, organized by a Chicago merchant and an agent of the Union Pacific Railroad. The aim of that exhibit was to excite the public's imagination about the fabled markets of China and entice prospective investors into the trade with Asia and the Pacific. The Chinese market seemed critical in 1898, I explain to students, as government and business leaders feared a relapse into economic depression if America's surplus manufactures were not marketed in Asia. Coaling stations and naval bases in the Pacific and Caribbean, along with a canal across the isthmus of Central America, were thought necessary to tap that trade.22 While America's Pacific commerce was promoted at the exposition, crowds were also drawn to the usual complement of exotic displays. For example, at the Philippine Village fairgoers were treated to the spectacle of Filipino warriors, some of whom reportedly had "cannibalistic proclivities."23 In this case instead of taking my students to some foreign locale to stage the opening scenes of American imperialism, the World's Fair brought foreign locales to the United States, providing a useful international venue for introducing the subject of overseas empire. |
20
|
|
In accordance with the La Pietra Report, I show my students Connections to Developments Beyond America's Borders in the case of American imperialism in the 1890s by tracing the flow of people and ideas back and forth between the United States and nations in the Pacific and Asia. For example, I treat the New England Congregational missionaries who began arriving in Hawai'i in 1820 and their more business-minded descendants as agents of American empire because most of them strongly supported annexation to the United States. In fact, these transplanted Americans in Hawai'i overthrew the monarchy in 1893 with help from United States Marines for the purpose, in part, of handing over the archipelago to Uncle Sam.24 Similarly, American ties to China were strengthened by missionaries and particularly by Department of State Sinologist W.W. Rockhill. Fluent in Mandarin and Tibetan (and French as well), Rockhill traveled extensively throughout China and other parts of Asia with guides in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Later he was instrumental in the drafting of the Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900.25 So America's global reach at the turn-of-the-century is explained, in part, by its people's connections or ties to distant lands. Following those connections during the decades leading up to the 1890s, as has been shown, helps internationalize the imperial episode. |
21
|
|
Did American imperialism show American Exceptionalism? The United States was unusual, I emphasize in class, in the sense that it was the most reluctant of the Great Powers to acquire an overseas empire. This reluctance was due in part to the anti-imperialist ideology on which the country was founded. Significantly, no other imperial nation in the late nineteenth century had to confront an anti-imperialist movement as determined as the one launched in the United States, which was comprised of former presidents, heads of universities, labor leaders, and eminent intellectuals and publicists.26 (Interestingly, a transnational, comparative study of late nineteenth century anti-imperialism has yet to be written.) In the years since the turn-of-the-century, the American public has remained ambivalent at best about our nation's global sway and involvements, and before the mid-twentieth century, historians often shied away from even using the terms "empire" and "imperialism" in reference to United States foreign policy. Instead, the term "expansion" seemed preferable. America's style of reluctant imperialism, then, was distinctive among the Great Powers. |
22
|
| | |
Conclusion | |
|
In this age of globalization, the La Pietra Report should command the attention of all scholars and teachers of United States history. While challenging the history profession to widen the lens through which our nation's past is studied, the report does not go beyond limning a few trajectories to help educators reframe their courses. This is as it should be. When we educators begin following the people, the money, the ideas, and the things, we will discover all sorts of creative ways to internationalize our courses. This article is offered in that spirit, that is, in the hope that it may trigger some ideas about additional ways to explore and teach the transnational and related spatial and temporal contexts of American history. Students are looking for a history that speaks to the globalized present; thanks to the ground breaking internationalized studies of the past forty years or so, we are in a good position to offer our classes a rescaled and more inclusive narrative that is bound to stimulate thinking and learning about our nation's journey through time. |
23
|
Notes
1. An earlier version of this article, under a slightly different title, was presented at the Organization of American Historians Annual Conference in 2002 in Washington, D.C.
One of the first major steps in the direction of internationalizing America's past was taken by C. Vann Woodward, who edited a seminal work in the late 1960s, The Comparative Approach to American History (New York: Basic Books, 1968). At that time and in that work historians teaching at institutions in the United States focused on comparing such international phenomena as frontier advances, revolutions, institutions of government, experiences with slavery and its abolition, reform movements, imperialisms, and economic development. Scholars took the next major step toward internationalization in the 1990s by ushering in what they called "transnational" history. Generally, this term referred to phenomena—such as popular culture, politics, and migrations—that passed through a nation, both transforming it and being transformed by the process itself. Since the 1990s, if not before, the number of historians in foreign countries studying America's past has increased dramatically and throughout the world there has developed a fresh appreciation for the importance of geographic and cultural perspectives on the study of United States history. See, especially, David Thelan, "The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History," The Journal of American History, 86 (December, 1999), 965–975. While the conceptual work of internationalizing the study of American history continues, a third step toward extending the spatial boundaries of United States history has been the more recent focus on the classroom applications of the newly globalized historical thinking. The most authoritative and suggestive work on this matter is Carl J. Guarneri's, "Out of Its Shell: Internationalizing the Teaching of United States History," AHA Perspectives, 35 (February, 1997), 1, 5–8.
2. La Pietra Report: Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History (New York: The Organization of American Historians and New York University, 2000), p. 21.
3. La Pietra Report, pp. 21–22.
4. For a selection of some of these papers, see Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
5. Some of these papers are included in Bender, Rethinking American History in a Global Age.
6. La Pietra Report, pp. 14–17.
7. La Pietra Report, p. 12.
8. I wish to acknowledge my debt to Professor Carl J. Guarneri of St. Mary's College in California, who read a preliminary draft of this paper and encouraged me to infuse more conceptual rigor into my use of the term "American exceptionalism." We met as participants in the La Pietra Project.
9. Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), p. 34. Figures for the extent of economic aid provided the American revolutionaries by France, Spain, and the Netherlands can be found in Curtis P. Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), pp. 20–21.
10. Elise Marienstras and Naomi Wulf, "French Translations and Reception of the Declaration of Independence," Journal of American History, 85 (March, 1999), 1314–1315.
11. Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 1999), pp. 152–53.
12. Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 102.
13. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, p. 129.
14. Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1963), p. 17; and more recently by the same author, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), p. 18. In the latter work Lipset acknowledges that Iceland was technically the first colony of a European power to gain its independence.
15. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 176.
16. Quoted in Eve Kornfeld, Margaret Fuller: A Brief Biography with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), p. 57. For a critical analysis of Fuller's letters from Europe to the New York Tribune and her other writings while overseas, see William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth Century American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 102–124.
17. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), pp. 121–226; Paul F. Boller, American Transcendentalism, 1830–1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1974), pp. 34–98.
18. Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 2. Interestingly, Brisbane was dismissive of G.W.F. Hegel, whom he had also studied under in Berlin, because the latter's vision of a better society did not extend beyond European civilization. Fourier, by contrast, envisioned a better future for human beings around the world through the adoption of utopian socialism. See Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 365.
19. Richardson, Emerson, pp. 127–152.
20. Shortly after attending the La Pietra Conference in 2000, I visited the Browning Institute at Casa Guidi, the mid-nineteenth century Florence residence of English poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Their palazzo served as a gathering place for writers and artists, particularly but not exclusively from the British Isles and the United States. The décor of the library remains faithful to that of a mid-nineteenth century Florentine palace. Stepping across the threshold into that room, with its richly upholstered chairs and well-stocked bookcases, immediately transported me back in time. Like Hawthorne, Fuller was also a guest of the Brownings, who were emotionally devastated when they learned of Fuller's death by drowning, along with the loss of her Italian husband and son, in a shipwreck on her return voyage to the United States in the summer of 1850. Afterward, Mrs. Browning wrote that Margaret Fuller's "death shook me to the very roots of my heart." Kornfeld, Margaret Fuller, pp. 236–237.
21. Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 105–125.
22. Thomas J. Osborne, "Trade or War? America's Annexation of Hawaii Reconsidered, Pacific Historical Review, 50 (August, 1981), 298–302.
23. Rydell, All the World's a Fair, p. 120.
24. Thomas J. Osborne, "Empire Can Wait:" American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation, 1893–1898 (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1981), p. xii.
25. American National Biography, s.v. "Rockhill, William Woodville," by Noel Pugach.
26. Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968), pp. xi–xii.
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|