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May, 2004
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"And, We Burned Down the White House, Too": American History, Canadian Undergraduates, and Nationalism*

James Tagg
The University of Lethbridge

IT OFTEN HAPPENS THIS WAY. I am having coffee with a colleague when a couple of his or her students come over to say hello. During introductions, it comes out that I teach history. This receives a good enough response until I am compelled, or my colleague goes on to declare that I am an American historian. Embarrassed silence often follows, at least until one of us manages to change the subject. Although I sometimes perversely imagine that such telling silence is more mis en scène than honest reaction, real emotions are at work here. Good manners and false protests of ignorance about American history cloak underlying anti-American sentiments among our students. Behind the façade a jumbled set of emotions inform their discomforted imaginations. They are offended by the patronizing and condescending attitudes of Americans when the latter comment on, or intrude into, the outer world. They dislike the vulgar materialism of American society; scorn dumbed-down American culture; and are uncomfortable with the too familiar, too up-beat, too in-your-face candor of many Americans. A plethora of negatively perceived elements of the American past always linger on their historical horizons, especially modern and contemporary matters like Vietnam, the recurring ironies of so-called "free trade," and the two wars on Iraq. American arrogance and self-righteousness; American ignorance of, and uninterest in, Canada; and American political, economic, and cultural "imperialism" frame these sometimes guarded feelings. But in public conversation around an American (as anyone who teaches American history is assumed to be), words are measured, opinions are guarded, sentiments are sometimes suppressed.1 1
      Complicating these "anti" emotions is a still more profound yet not always well articulated fear that Canadian culture, and likely Canadian sovereignty, will be overwhelmed by a United States too ignorant and too uninterested to even notice the consequences of their actions. Some Canadians combine this with a guilt-ridden corollary and irony—that Canadians individually and collectively are the too-willing or at least too passive accomplices in this process. This not so subtle "American take-over" irony is therefore as important in defining Canadian attitudes about Canada as it is in defining Canadian attitudes about the United States. 2
      It is for these reasons that many students approach my classes and my subject with an apprehension not found in British, Russian and French history courses. No reflective Canadian comes to American history either unengaged or tabula rasa; American history is not "just academic." Students carry the heavy baggage of Canadian nationalist emotions and assumed knowledge of the United States, and a powerful interplay between these emotions and this knowledge in their approach to American history is inevitable. 3
      Those unfamiliar with issues of Canadian identity and nationalism might be discomforted about the tone and thrust of what they have read thus far. That discomfort can be mitigated in part by understanding that Canadians accept and sometimes even celebrate many of the imperatives derived by living next to the United States. Canadians enthusiastically embrace good trade relations with the United States, and they have a seemingly endless appetite for American popular culture. They admire American energy and most of the principles of civic governance and civil rights promoted in American nationalism. In addition, the near hegemonic victory of social history—with its focus on the lived experiences of ordinary people as well as elites, its emphasis on group interaction, and its inclusion of minorities and formerly marginalized groups in the shared cultural experience of society at large—ameliorates somewhat the troubled vision students and others hold of a dangerous and rapacious American nation-state.2 4
      None of these "positive" attitudes and directions, however, can override the necessity most Canadians feel for upholding their own cultural American History, Canadian Undergraduates, and Nationalism and national identity. Critics of nationalism in general often offer up what might be termed a "strong" definition of nationalism that emphasizes the ideological, patriotic, chauvinistic and culturally homogeneous character of most nationalisms.3 To some extent my Canadian students seem to identify American nationalism with these "strong" terms even though they intellectually know some of the social, racial and cultural facts that place limitations on that definition for the United States, and even though the United States has been and remains racially and ethnically diverse, often experiencing a Canadian-like confusion among its own regional and national identities.4 5
      If Canadian students are apt to envision in the United States a powerful Euro-American style of nationalism and the centralized nation-state solidarity that appears to go with it, they and Canadians at large are less certain about Canadian nationalism. Some, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, accepted as normative and desirable this "strong" definition of nationalism; others opposed it, favoring a "weak," benign nationalism in which diversity, pluralism, and internationalism were encouraged under the transparent umbrellas of good provincial and federal governments, individual equality, and a loose sense of being Canadian. 6
      This latter "weak" nationalism has predominated in Canada. While many Canadians would agree with writer Mavis Gallant that their "national sense of self is quite separate from nationalism,"5 the fact is that modern theorists of nationalism themselves offer broadly inclusive definitions of nationalism that make Gallant's careful distinction moot. Karl W. Deutsch, for example, suggests that nationalism and a sense of national integration requires only that a people think of themselves as a country in which "their fates are tied together," and in which certain "national messages, memories, and images" are given privilege in social intercourse.6 While Ernest Gellner insists that nationalism is the consequence of a shared culture, one that is indeed powerful enough to alter even the local cultures it absorbs, he accepts a good deal of latitude in the generality of that culture.7 He even admits that a "universalist" view of nationalism (the "weak" nationalism I suggest above) is possible and even desirable.8 It is, of course, Benedict Anderson's theory of nationalism and nationhood built upon "an imagined political community" that most perfectly fits the Canadian "imagination." Born from the creolization of populations in the Americas from the 17thcentury onwards and the rise of the symbolic power of print culture, Anderson's nationalisms seem always in flux yet equally anchored in a "civic" core that simply absorbs and co-opts racial, ethnic and cultural distinctions and details.9 7
      Anderson's "imagined communities" allow Canadians a claim to nationalist pride, no matter how muted. Despite Québecois "strong" regional-ethnic nationalism, both they and other Canadians hold a special relationship to nature, to history, and to nation building, that has allowed most of Canada to stitch together a truly modern, or even "post-modern" nationalism.10 As Canadian journalist Richard Gwyn observes, Canadian nationalism has emerged from the "state-nation," and it is the Canadian state that "has formed up and has shaped our character in a way that is true for no other people in the world."11 At the same time Gwyn observes a light quality to this nationalism. "We are strongly attached to our weak attachments to each other," Gwyn quotes one observer.12 A bemused sense of fragility and necessity for accommodation generally dominate the Canadian nationalist imagination. Combined with the always looming threat of "continentalism,"13 a quiet appreciation of Canada's vulnerability and a low level anxiety for the nation's future mark Canadian nationalism, not jingoism and chauvinism. It is therefore this "weak" yet real and complex nationalism that collides in American history classrooms in Canada with the imagined clarity of "strong" American nationalism and with the threat of American absorption or "continentalism." This essay is largely about the interplay of these nationalisms in the context of the shifting fortunes and opportunities for American history in Canada as I have experienced them locally over the past thirty-odd years. 8
   

American History in Canada

 
      The popularity of American history in Canada has remained fundamentally strong over the years I have taught in Alberta. Cursory examination shows that Canadian universities proportionately hire more American historians than are hired in any other country except the United States, and any slog through Canadian calendars and other non-American university course listings would similarly show that Canadian students encounter more opportunities to take American history than do Asian, Latin American, or even European students.14 No other English-speaking country compares with Canada when it comes to the number of undergraduate students who encounter American history.15 The burgeoning of Canadian universities in the 1960s and the availability of American history courses in those universities were obviously fundamental contributors to its popularity. Concomitantly, Canadian history and Canadian studies, and American history and American studies were being promoted as subjects necessary and worthy of encouragement.16 9
      Within this educational-expansionist context, however, international affairs, high politics, cultural drift, and local events shaped the uneven fortunes of American history at my university from the beginning of my teaching career onward. The 1960s set the tone with buoyant optimism in both the United States and Canada as high politics began to shed its dowdy image, as "Ike" gave way to JFK, and "Dief" gave way to Trudeau; as the "Quiet Revolution" promised a latter-day liberation in Quebec, and the Civil Rights movement promised a new participatory democracy in the United States; and, as Canadian universities prospered, and their students faced the happy prospect of securing employment in the career of their choosing. 10
      The whiggish promise of progress was everywhere, at least on the surface of things, and this bubble of anticipation brought students to American history classes in the hope of tracing the trajectory of inevitable improvement. The spirit of the times was satisfied by major topics in United States history: the American Revolution, with its then still Lockean vision of liberal individualism and democratic promise; the antislavery movement and Civil War witnessed from a long distance through the lens of Civil Rights reform and "progress"; and the New Deal, a somewhat tarnished but still living emblem of social justice. On the other hand, the quest for a social calculus of progress just as frequently drew our students closer to subjects like sociology and psychology as it did to history. 11
      Then came the political fallout from the 1960s that, even in our remote corner of the continent, had profound and immediate effects. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and Richard Nixon's election to the presidency in 1968 slowly came to be perceived here as the end of liberalism, the end of civil rights, and the end of the liberal ethic for the United States. Watergate added the exclamation mark. Meanwhile, students at my university encountered two reality shocks from which they took a long time to recover. One involved our Student Council's invitation to the Black Panthers to speak on campus. It could not be accepted because the Royal Canadian Mounted Police stopped the Panthers at the border. The other occurred when the student newspaper was shut down and its editors threatened with prosecution for publishing the manifesto of the FLQ in October, 1970. However innocent, it was treated as a serious contravention of the Trudeau government's War Measures Act. Civil Rights, free speech, and a free press, all hallmarks of the American heritage, appeared in disarray beginning in the early 1970s. Across the border, Vietnam increasingly loomed as the ugly antithesis of social progress. 12
      As contemporary events soured the youthful passions of my students and me, old style "strong" nationalism asserted itself in Canada. The "Committee for an Independent Canada," including a local chapter, promoted the nationalist cause with passion, castigating American interlopers (presumably including me) who came north and took Canadian jobs, and who presumably instilled American values and threatened Canadian autonomy. Behind the dramatic rhetoric, they naively proposed a vigorous Canadian nationalism and patriotism that they claimed would inevitably be kinder and gentler than the jingoism of the United States.17 Nationally, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau shed his boyish light-heartedness. The new Trudeau was tough and anti-American, disdainful of the vulgarities of American culture while exploiting the lessons it taught in image politics. Trudeau and Nixon mixed like oil and water.18 13
      American history enrollments dipped at my university, partly as a consequence of these factors, partly from the growth of new subject fields in our department of history, and perhaps partly (as the astute reader will be thinking by now) from ineffective teaching on my part. National and local trends alike, laced with ideological frustration and anti-American rhetoric, boded poorly for the teaching of American history. Some teachers simply accommodated themselves to the temper of those times by incorporating anti-American styles in their pedagogies.19 14
      The political and public blandness of the 1980s and 1990s—decades devoid of reform but not of rhetoric, decades of war as television programming, and of radical capitalist rhetoric that stirred few souls—permitted students a kind of non-engaged opportunity to poke at the American giant from the safe haven of our larger and increasingly democratized university classrooms. Only a few hard-boiled conservatives took American history as a consequence of the American turn to the right, and even they refused to embrace the deception that it was "morning in America again." Anti-American hostility toward what the young identified as American rapacity and endlessly worsening corrupt American public morality continued to be the primary chorus of vocal students. 15
      Students born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s were, however, more besotted with American cultural representations, events, and icons than those who had come before. On the one hand, they embraced American "fashions," thought in Americanized images, and had been at least partly schooled by American television. On the other hand, and not insignificantly, from the 1970s on, they had been lectured in their classrooms and through the media on their need to find and promote Canadian identity and to preserve Canadian culture. In an interesting blend, cultural familiarity with the United States coupled with curiosity born from a homegrown Canadian identity crisis conspired by the 1980s to fashion more student interest in American history. 16
      Local factors also increased student interest in American history in the 1980s and 1990s. Several of us in our then small undergraduate Faculty of Arts and Science took up our school's purported devotion to "liberal education," and promoted new breadth requirements, core and interdisciplinary courses, and newly designed courses to enhance integration of knowledge. Despite the fact that I thought our efforts in the hallways and councils of the University were primarily directed at curricular legislation, it was the secondary and tertiary effects of our campaigns that had the greatest effect on me personally. I acquired more of a "jack-of-all-trades" level of knowledge in some areas. When subjects like democratic theory, social Darwinism, or jazz arose in my American history courses, I could at least integrate some of the ideas and influences of Benjamin Barber and John Putnam, Daniel Dennett and Stephen Jay Gould, and Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane. 17
      Coincident to our liberal education quests, the department of history re-organized its survey level courses. Re-organization resulted in a one-semester-only survey course for each of our Ancient, British, modern European, modern Asian, Latin American, and American history fields. The plan was audacious, and it has largely worked. One does not teach a narrative history of the ancient world or even of the United States from colonial beginnings to the present in one thirteen week semester. Much significant narrative detail gets excluded, whole historical eras become more segregated, and too many major and minor historical figures remain ignored. Over time, however, the effects were like those of a good editor or publisher demanding a short manuscript. Focus was tightened, ideas and analysis necessarily superseded details, large interpretive and historiographic issues moved to the front of the class, and even the syntax and diction of lectures and discussions was improved. 18
      The maturation of social history from the 1980s on also made American history more a subject of Canadian empathy than of nationalist anger. It made all history more diverse and more interesting, and enrollments in all of our history courses improved substantially. By happy coincidence, then, our survey courses encouraged perspective and synthesis at a time when historical writing was losing much of that advantage. Our advanced courses gave us room to incorporate the brighter and more varied palette of modern social and popular culture history. 19
      What has been the relative weight of these factors in shaping the fortunes of American history over my thirty-odd years of teaching? What factors counted most in how American history was received through those years? Hot topic public affairs—the FLQ crisis, expressive Canadian nationalism, Vietnam, and Watergate—had a powerful and immediate impact on American history during the 1970s. A kind of fundamental anti-Americanism was established. Absorbed by an increasingly large and democratic student body from the 1980s onward, this anti-Americanism matured into a more sophisticated contest of competing nationalisms as public affairs issues from the 1980s onward generally failed to produce spikes of hot nationalist resentment. On the other hand, the improved contextualization of American history resulting from our department's curricular changes, and more emphasis on ideas and analysis within American history courses, were the most significant factors in furthering American history at our university. Only the demise of "master narrative" history compromised apparent gains.20 But despite all of the things that enhanced the popularity of American history after the early 1980s, a perceivable undertow of student hostility and frustration toward the United States remained the most constant and unique element in teaching American history. 20
   

A Survey of Student Attitudes

 
      Over the years, term papers, examinations and personal discussions with students have given me more than a few ideas about Canadian undergraduate attitudes toward the United States and American history. To further test my understanding of those opinions, an anonymous opinion survey was administered in the 2002 spring semester to my senior level early American history course and to my survey level "Main Themes" course. 21
      I was not really surprised either by the personal backgrounds of those who returned my long survey,21 or by their answers to a broad range of opinion questions about the United States. Every one of them listed "patriotism" and "nationalism" (or terms that equaled the same thing) as the American quality most worthy of admiration and praise. The image of national solidarity, "love of country," "pride," and "togetherness" constituted the patriotism they admired. No particular trait or characteristic of being American—not, for example, constitutional freedoms (except for one respondent), civil rights, generosity, the ideal of equality—was suggested as the central prop beneath "patriotism" and "nationalism." It was just the sheer sense of emotional bondedness of Americans that they admired. As one student mentioned, the 4th of July "supersedes our weak little July 1st celebrations."22 Canadian students deeply feel the fragmentation of a Canada born with geographic, historic, and linguistic separation. Because of this, and perhaps because many of them understand that the United States is a country of deep regional divisions as well, they are in genuine awe of American patriotism and nationalism.23 In teaching American history, the "patriotism" lessons remain clear: first, the ideological foundations of different societies in history, no matter how seemingly familiar, require persistent definition and re-definition; and secondly, although twenty-first-century disgust with "nationalism" and the nation-state may express fashionable and current utopian hopes for the future, the differing nation-states and nationalisms are elements fundamental to understanding American history in Canada.24 22
      Of course, the paradoxes of patriotism were not lost on these students when they answered my question on the most objectionable national quality of Americans. Indeed, a couple of them simply used their response on the first question as their response to this one. Here the ramifications of patriotism and nationalism—"ignorance" of other countries and societies, and "arrogance" built of self-satisfaction and self-congratulation—were mentioned by almost all of the respondents. Slavery, racism, segregation, economic inequality, materialism and gun culture made brief secondary appearances on their lists. Arrogance, the product of "unchecked patriotism" constructed on the premise that "anything that is American is better," was easily twinned by these students (and most students I have taught over the years) with American ignorance of other cultures and countries (especially Canada). This was further joined with American's assuming that they were "guardians of the Free World" or taking "on a role of referee even if they do not understand the subject matter."25 American unilateralism and uncooperativeness with other countries—undoubtedly exacerbated by the recent so-called "war on terrorism" and the then impending war on Iraq—made stronger appearances in this survey than I have sensed in previous years. The existence of these sentiments all indicate an urgent need for us to teach more American foreign affairs and foreign policy history. But there is more to it. Many undergraduates read American diplomatic history textbooks as if they were courtroom testimony in the prosecution of the United States. To some extent, American diplomatic and foreign affairs history has come to define its boundaries broadly in recent decades, incorporating the complexities and contexts of world affairs, of republican ideology, of democratic pluralism, and of a variety of ethnic, religious and regional conditions. However, diplomatic history must continue to widen its contexts if Americans hope to avoid stoking the sentiment of anti-Americanism.26 23
      Subsequent opinion questions on the best and worst characteristics of "American government and constitutionalism" produced more mixed results. While some students noted the capacity of the American government to "rally" the public and to "act" when called upon, more of them saluted the checks and balances of the American system, including federalism, division of powers in general, restriction of terms for presidents and other officeholders, frequent elections, and an "effective Senate." On the negative side, a majority mentioned corruption and immorality in American politics, while others raised "horse trading," the ideological limits of the two-party system, too little care for the poor and the oppressed, and, again, the uninformed involvement of the United States in other countries' affairs. Several sentiments drive these Alberta undergraduate views: their desire, as Canadians, to have governments responsive to the variety of Canadian interests; their wish, as western Canadians, for a federal government that can be checked by an elected and effective Senate; and their desire to keep the advantages of parliamentary initiative and the integrity of "responsible government" in Canada while gaining frequent elections, rotation in office, and the more frequent accountability of the American system. But in my experience, the virtues and failures of both the Canadian and American political systems are frequently lost on all but the most sophisticated political science or history students. Students confuse the two systems in gross ways, and fail to understand their ideological underpinnings, to say nothing of their functions. Sorting out these matters in teaching American history in Canada is essential, and when any of my courses hit the snag of the United States Constitution, we have to stop and review the fundamental structure and function of that constitutional system before we can move on. 24
      The positive and negative aspects of "American culture" are far less difficult for them to sort out, or so they assume. Almost all cite one or another aspect of popular culture as the great American contribution to the world, although scattering acknowledgments were given to the Bill of Rights, the invention and furtherance of modern capitalism, "devotion to education," and even American humanitarian aid. The negatives followed the same channels, with the excesses of individualism, consumerism, and materialism held up for condemnation, along with passing critical references to the right to bear arms, the American "melting pot" myth, and the falsity of the "American Dream." One wag offered the old quip: "what culture?" 25
      Popular culture, employed frequently by non-Americans as an accessible mode of interpreting the United States, presents special challenges for teaching undergraduates. Canadian youth come to the university unschooled in American history, including fundamental understanding about American ethnic and racial history, American social discourses and religious typologies, class systems and class relations, and "master narrative" mythologies. To be sure, as conspicuous and conscious consumers of American popular culture even young Canadians understand much about modern American capitalism and marketing, and movies inform them about some values (and fears) of Americans over time. Most also share with their American contemporaries the language and culture of popular music. But students often apply the apparent universalist significances of current popular culture backward in time, creating a fictional American past filled with easy homilies about American individualism and hedonism. At the same time, it is difficult for them to understand the roots and meaning of music like blues and jazz because they have not yet learned enough about slave cultures, African-American and other ethnic cultures and religions, regional societies, and various dynamic influences specific to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In short, it is often ironic that while we expect popular culture and its metaphors to explain fundamental things about the American past to a general population, popular culture as an analytical subject may be better suited to advanced students and scholars already familiar with some of the elusive social underpinnings of American culture. 26
      Opinions about the greatest "American contribution to world civilization" produced reluctant and diffuse answers, including American initiatives in World War I, Edisonian-type inventions, human and civil rights. On the other hand, several respondents predictably identified American deployment (not necessarily development) of the atomic bomb in World War II as the greatest "assault on world civilization." Despite my attempts to encourage debate on the necessity and/or justice of the A-bomb's use in August, 1945, it is usually only young men with militarily-inclined interests who defend Truman's decision.27 Others persist in condemning the United States, however, at least in part in order to allow themselves to judge negatively American policies and practices during and after the Cold War. Unfortunately, a non-complex view of the A-bomb decision also suppresses their capacity to accept the role of contingency in American history after 1945. 27
      Finally, among the broad opinion questions, students were asked to rank the "five greatest and five worst Americans" over time. Most of the replies were predictable; they lacked range in a way that demonstrates the drubbing good biography has received over the past twenty years. Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, FDR, JFK, and George Washington—in that order—make up their "greats." Only two women—Susan B. Anthony and Marilyn Monroe—made the list, along with a few modern and popular figures like Walt Disney, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Jordan. Only one student mentioned any literary figure, while the worlds of cultural reform, business and commerce, and science received little acknowledgement. "Great" Americans, as defined here, are national icons, monuments rather than persons, emblems of some more generalized condition such as forthrightness, steadfastness, virtue, or reform. 28
      The "worst" Americans list was filled by persons all too grotesque in their memorability, including badly damaged individuals like Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, David Koresh, Jeffrey Dalmer, and O. J. Simpson. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan appeared on behalf of the politicos, along with a few Confederate Civil War officers. Oprah Winfrey and a small group of what they defined as "irritating" popular icons also appear. Aside from the Confederate officers, the villains' list is all from the late twentieth century. History softens or ameliorates the memory of a Jeffrey Amherst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, George Armstrong Custer, cruel nineteenth-century industrialists, and even 1920s and 1990s Wall Street swindlers. Richard Nixon, now a distant figure to most students, got only one vote. The relationship between the narratives of individual human lives and the nature of an historic era is weakly comprehended here. Without a better understanding of real people—not just the icons, celebrities and infamous—American history elides from human history to a general set of ideologies, faceless postures, and flawed typologies, thus encouraging the pre-existing tendency of Canadian students to pillory the character of Americans and confuse American history with a static set of essences. 29
      More specific questions about events and eras in American history yielded some modestly interesting results. Opinions on the writing and history of the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights—"civil religion" for many Americans—received a ho-hum response; many acknowledged its political significance in the eighteenth century but most found it just another frame of government today. As one said, it was now no better and perhaps not as good as the republican constitutions of France and Germany or even the constitutional monarchies of Great Britain and Canada. Teaching American constitutional history in Canada, even to advanced students, is problematic, with the origins, impact, scope and complexities of the "supremacy clause" (Article VI), and the rise of "judicial review" the hardest aspects of American constitutionalism to explain. English and Canadian common law traditions are well planted, even in the minds of twenty-year-olds born near or after adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 30
      Unlike their American counterparts, Canadian undergraduates celebrate the War of 1812 as an important and pivotal event. For them, it was a war won by Canada and, as they gratuitously gloat, their side burned down the White House as well.28 They realize, of course, that the Treaty of Ghent gave them no territory and no dominion over the United States but the fact that they avoided absorption by the United States provides their main source of interest in that war. The United States Civil War, by contrast, is not always felt in its full dimension of ferocity and tragedy. They admit it was a just and noble cause to end slavery but also note that Americans were latecomers in ending slavery. The era of industrial development that followed the Civil War is passively approved by most students (in examinations they often applaud Andrew Carnegie for his views on welfare capitalism). They too seamlessly identify this "root, hog, or die" era with that of the late-twentieth-century American thrust for dynamic capitalist expansion. As Albertans generally unfamiliar with labor unions, they are puzzled by the emerging labor movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s. And, when I use Robert Wiebe's now old but still brilliant Search for Order to discuss the profound social transformation of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America, they seem bewildered by the massive ideational and material forces at work in the period.29 The late nineteenth century increasingly emerges as a "world we have lost," especially with the collapse of working-class consciousness in the academy and culture at large. 31
      In the twentieth century, almost all salute the American effort in World War II as among the high points of American altruism (despite the "bomb"). But this only makes their caustic criticism of American involvement in the Cold War that followed more severe. In straw polls over the years, and in my recent survey, students by large majorities blame the beginnings of the Cold War primarily on the United States, and by even larger majorities blame the deepening of the Cold War on the United States. With the exception of a few tough minded, anti-communist "Cold Warriors," most students take a leftist line that is not dissimilar from that of Joyce and Gabriel Kolko in the 1960s and 1970s. The more middle-ground judgments of John Lewis Gaddis and others do not seem to move them.30 The reasons for this are both simple and subtle. If pushed, students will admit they expect better out of a democratic United States than the McCarthy era and the assemblage of ill-advised policies and hysterical reactions that have marked American foreign affairs for a half century. They also know, but are loath to admit, that while United States policies and actions have largely become known, the severest policies and actions of Stalin and his successors, even with the recent release of historical documents, have been under-publicized and too lightly considered.31 While they embrace the self-criticisms many Americans have made of Cold War policies and actions, most Canadian undergraduates also dismiss the 1950s and 1960s as a time of fraudulent banality. They choose to ignore the good news aspects and domestic buoyancy in that period in favor of identifying only its vacuity and materialism. 32
      The Civil Rights movement, long a popular and positive topic among students, has lost its urgency and luster; many now shrug and say it was long overdue by the 1960s; others question its durability and long term consequences in a culture that they often claim is still racist. Some of this is avoidance, of course, as Canadian "separate worlds" relations with their Native populations strongly suggests. A feel-good Canadian multi-culturalism, heavily sponsored by the federal government but with real roots in popular sentiment as well, often salves the consciences of Canadians, even those of us who live near insular Indian reservations. Furthermore, twenty years ago, Canadian students clamored to get presentation and term paper assignments on civil rights and the women's movement; now both are a hard sell. Radicalism in the 1960s continues to be popular, primarily because of student familiarity with the music and the celebrities of the era. But from the 1990s on, intense interest in the reform eras and hot-topic controversies of the twentieth-century, such as the abortion debate, has either declined or become more diffuse. 33
      As for economic affairs, globalism-on-American-terms-only is the theme as they read history backwards, identifying everything from the nineteenth century onward with American capitalist rapacity. Yet, most see Americans in general as simple victims of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and about half of them salute American leadership in global economic matters, while the other half condemn things like the IMF and World Bank as tools of American imperialism. 34
   

Problems Teaching the American Revolution

 
      Some of the Canadian undergraduate student opinions cited above will be familiar to American historians who have heard the same views or variants thereof in the United States. In order to suggest subtle nuances that are less often encountered by United States-based American historians, it may be instructive to look at one specific example—the American Revolution—to illustrate how problematic and different teaching in Canada can be. 35
      My Canadian undergraduate students do not find the American Revolution a dull subject. They enjoy reading older works, especially those with some narrative structure, like Benjamin Labaree's The Boston Tea Party, Hiller Zobel's The Boston Massacre; Robert Gross's Minute Men, Alfred Young's George Twelves Hewes, and David Hackett Fischer's Paul Revere's Ride. They determinedly work through Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins and Gary Nash's Urban Crucible; and, they give favorable reviews to Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which I use as a comprehensive text in my advanced early American course.32 36
      They do not necessarily believe or accept what these works have to say, however, nor do most of them find the American Revolution revolutionary. It is not just a matter of the old line that the American Revolution does not meet the standards of violence and destruction apparent in the French and Russian Revolutions. In opposing the idea that the American Revolution was revolutionary, they are in the company of many Americanists, of course, from old imperial school scholars like Charles M. Andrews and Lawrence Henry Gipson to neoimperialists like T. H. Breen and the Seven Year's War expert, Fred Anderson. All of these historians see the Revolution set in a longer time frame than the 1760s and 1770s and against a much broader landscape of place than the Atlantic seaboard.33 In fact, the first challenge many of my undergraduates meet when taking up the Revolution is to insist that we adopt an interpretive playing field both wider (geographically) and longer (chronologically). Comprehending the American Revolution as "merely" another of Robert R. Palmer's Atlantic revolutions used to be a interpretive tack taken by some.34 Insisting on an exclusively imperialist view is still another approach. 37
      My Canadian students also seem unable, in many instances, to overcome a kind of inborn Burkean conservatism, a social prejudice in favor of gradualist history carried forward glacially by habit, history, and ancient institutions. After the Annales school re-emerged in classrooms in the 1970s, new force and language was appropriated to this prejudice. Either the Revolution was the mere flotsam and jetsam of superficial events, or it was just part of the larger, more profound, deep currents of European history. Given the English origins of the American colonies, the backing of imperial school ideas, and what they selectively choose to accept from the neo-conservative, opposition Whig school, shorn of its most dynamic ideological and emotional elements, "no real revolution" must be the right answer to my examination questions on the subject. History is a slow, meandering stream when it runs its truest course, they imply, and the American Revolution is not seen to deviate much from that course. For a few, the chance to squelch the exceptionalist view of American history is redolent throughout their essays on the American Revolution. 38
      For many students also, human nature, especially that of Americans, is ipso facto self-interest at a petty level. American self-interest in the 1760s, therefore, just got mixed up with a few irritating taxes. Reading modern American avarice and love of low taxes back to the eighteenth century, some students are content to believe that a pure-and-simple desire to avoid taxes was at the heart of the Revolution. Others understand the tax crisis as just a symbol of larger issues of representation but then get confused when the proposals of Governor Bernard and Joseph Galloway and others for representation fell on deaf ears. They are not much better off with issues of class or interest conflict as elucidated best by Gary Nash and Woody Holton.35 In the end, they believe that the Americans perceived an economic advantage for themselves in independence. Many agree with one of my survey respondents who argued that with a slight change in policies, the British could have held onto their troublesome colonies. 39
      Coming from a non-revolutionary history of their own, one that made only slow, evolutionary gains in acquiring ultimate national autonomy, Canadian students are skeptical about any other historical model of national development.36 They are dubious about the explosive emotional potential contained in the ideological arguments of Bailyn and Wood, and they latch on to any slight criticism I might offer of those arguments in order to dismiss ideology as a motive factor in revolutionary America. Although they accept the autonomous qualities of New England Puritan culture and Virginia planter culture that preceded the Revolution, they do not easily absorb or acknowledge Opposition Whig or Country vs. Court tendencies or classical republican antecedents to the American Revolution.37 Virtue over corruption and liberty over power are seen as slogans, not deeply ingrained elements of ideology. Gordon Wood's article on conspiracy and the paranoid style is frequently distorted into a psycho-historical interpretation whereby paranoid Americans revolted merely as a consequence of foolish fears, or collective mental illness.38 40
      Students often suggest that ideas were employed mendaciously as excuses for some underlying, selfish motive of the colonists, and the most frequent rationale offered for the Revolution is that Americans felt they could succeed better commercially without the mother country. Even when we turn to Joyce Appleby's work, students embrace her ideas on material self-interest but do not readily comprehend her larger arguments on affective liberty.39 Much the same fate befalls Wood's Radicalism which many, if not most, students—confronting history backward from the comfort of well-established modern ideas about liberty, democracy and equality—claim contains few truly radical consequences of the Revolution. They do not recognize such things as the end of deference and elite control as the powerful transformation it really was. 41
      The American Revolution suggests how difficult it can be for students to accept ideological and nationalist differences. Some students, as mentioned earlier, still see "nationalism" as coterminous with the nationalism of language, blood, or ethnicity, and are even loathe to accept what Michael Ignatieff describes as a "civic nationalism" based on ideology not birth, a nationalism that was first introduced by the American experience.40 Their opinions show the difficulty of teaching a subject in which a priori assumptions about American national character (e.g., modern materialism) are read back into the past. The failure of the ideological argument to find acceptance by my students in this course demonstrates the profound need for more courses in European, British, and American intellectual history. Altogether, teaching the American Revolution is an interesting challenge in getting students to abandon large mindsets and to think in terms of different cultures, times and contingent possibilities. 42
   

Closing Observations

 
      American readers may find that this essay gratuitously exaggerates stubborn anti-Americanism among Canadian undergraduates. It does not. On the other hand, it should be acknowledged that most of these students share with American students presentist deceptions and generalized clichés about American history. Canadians are also deeply curious about American history, and many recognize that they occupy a unique perch above the 49th parallel to view and interpret the American past. Most intelligent students assume (probably erroneously) that they know as much or more about the American past as do their American counterparts. But for all Canadian students, knowledge and perception are double-sided. They must penetrate the veneer of their Canadian prejudices about American character and must understand American-held prejudices as well. They must juggle two mythologies, ignoring neither but understanding how each mythology interplays with historical realities. 43
      While success in teaching American history in Canada depends on student understanding of two persistent nationalisms, it has depended, and will increasingly on other historical approaches as well. American foreign affairs historians will undoubtedly abandon the limited approach of projecting American interests outward onto a world canvas in favor of addressing a wider array of reference points. Modern biographies will increasingly restore a narrative sense to American history, in some cases subduing the iconic and the heroic, and in others elevating voices not privileged by power or wealth. Micro-histories will likely awaken Canadian undergraduates to American realities. And intellectual history, deftly integrated with social history, will allow students to periodize and better contextualize the historical landscape of the American past.41 44
      Above all, the adaptation of social history forms and approaches has made the American past more readily accessible and comprehensible to Americans and Canadians alike. A brief glimpse at two areas in particular—Puritan New England and American slavery—illustrate clearly the transformative advances of social history. Fifty years ago, the debate over seventeenth-century New England Puritanism largely dealt with whether Puritanism and the towns that supported it retarded or fostered the growth of American individualism and democracy in later centuries. If this was a debate of limited value to Americans, it was even less so for Canadians. When I began teaching in 1969, Perry Miller's old but definitive work on the New England mind and Puritan theology was still of interest to students, largely because all were somewhat familiar with Christian doctrine and some were familiar with Calvinism specifically. But in large measure, Perry Miller merely satisfied intellectual and philosophical curiosities out of place and time. Fortunately, from the beginning of my teaching career, it was the classical work of Edmund Morgan's, The Puritan Family, and the then new work of historians like Sumner Powell, Kenneth Lockridge, and Philip Greven that drew student interest. Alberta undergraduates could comprehend the village structures Powell detailed, the community interactions Lockridge uncovered, and the issues of Puritan family inheritance which Greven was better able to understand simply by growing up in the farm country of southern Alberta, where significant vestiges of these social phenomena still existed. Richard Godbeer's recent work on sex in Puritan New England further allows students to use their modern understanding of sex and sexuality to identify with the evolution of New England sensibilities.42 45
      About a half century ago, the history of American slavery also addressed questions more interior to the American polity than relevant to undergraduates in another country. While Kenneth Stampp's Peculiar Institution excited humanist revulsion to slavery, neither it nor other works that tried to explain slavery's existence or persistence—like Stanley Elkins's Slavery—informed Canadian undergraduates broadly about how slavery, slave culture, the African-American experience and white responses and interactions with all of these elements shaped society. But Winthrop Jordan's landmark work on the origins of American slavery broke down non-complex interpretations, as did Eugene Genovese's social history of slavery in Roll, Jordan, Roll. Herbert Gutman pushed forward our intimate view of the African-American family while historians like John Blassingame began to provide us with the African-American perspective on American slavery. Now, historians like Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan have moved on to a further stage of social history, emphasizing how interactions among whites and blacks created a hybrid American society.43 Slavery and African-American historiography have moved our understanding of the American past beyond the social utility vs. the social evil of slavery. Issues now include blame for oppression, how slavery evolved economically and structurally, how slaves lived and coped, and how slaves and African-Americans and whites intertwined to create a unique American culture. Advances both in the social history of New England Puritanism and of slavery and the African-American experience give non-Americans the capacity to experience empathy (not necessarily sympathy) in relationship to the American past. 44 46
      Yet the benefits of American social history will never fully mitigate the contest of nationalisms for Canadian students. Inevitable comparison lies at the heart of learning American history in Canada. Even implicit rather than explicit comparisons of the evolution of British North American colony into the country of Canada set against the American revolutionary experience and the subsequent nation-founding of the United States allow students to ask important questions about material and ideological elements too easily assumed as natural givens by more insular American students and their professors. 47
      The virtues of comparative history have long been touted and do not need repeating. It is worth noting, however, that Canadian undergraduates, however much they study the subject, are not likely to lose the advantage—an advantage more culturally than geographically derived—that they hold over American undergraduates in the sphere of comparison. One would like to think that American colleges and universities, by increasing Canadian and Mexican studies in the United States, would improve their capacity to understand Canada and Mexico as well as themselves in the process. There is no evidence, however, that these national comparisons will be made by Americans. Although no American would like to say it, the populations are either too small (Canada) or the economic and cultural impacts perceived to be too weak (both Canada and Mexico) or the social origins too "foreign" (Mexico) for Americans to perceive either country or culture as anything but marginal and peripheral. Furthermore, the "new Rome," as a consequence of its singular military power and economic dominance in the world, magnanimously imagines it can bring other cultures and societies into its tent. It is a tent where the terms of reference and the diction of values are pre-determined in an American way and, consequently, those who choose, or must remain, outside the tent are automatically and tautologically marginalized.45 48
      Most of the literature written over the past thirty years on the teaching of American history has suggested that American history can best be taught by including formerly disadvantaged groups—African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, for example—in the historical landscape.46 But while no one would dispute this as a necessary and desirable goal, inclusion of them under the American axiom of "strong" nationalism leads to a history of diversity within America alone, a history whose progress winds inevitably toward further inwardness, to an ever more generalized yet exceptionalist definition of what it is to be American and to "share" American values. The comparative impulse for Americans is thereby satisfied by keeping it geographically "in-house," a circumstance which shelters comparative elements under the pantheon of American values and identity markers. Ideas like "freedom," "democracy," and "equality" not only become co-opted and forced into the service of one nationalism but it is also more difficult to compare the American past with others because of their self-referential and singular American definitions. 49
      This American variant to inclusion, which compromises comparative history built on using concepts that, if not familiar and shared, are at least reasonable starting points for understanding, also makes problematic the other major recommendation found in teaching-of-history literature—the need for world history. If world history is simply a collage of national and regional events—"this" happened here while "that" happened there, and "meanwhile" "this" was happening somewhere else—it is obviously meaningless, with every national and regional history sharing nothing more than temporality. If world history is to be built around large ideas—democracy, modernization, the rule of law, even self-actualization—centripetal forces of American nationalism will narrow the definition of these terms and the focus of such world history, largely rendering it useless. If world history is truly comparative and blended national or regional history, Canadians and many others may be keen but the attraction will be lost on most Americans (if not American historians).47 50
      For now, we are left with national history as the unfashionably still dominant unit of historical understanding. Outside of Europe—where national, comparative, and pan-European history might have better potential to co-exist—Canadian undergraduate students at least have a greater opportunity than those from most other nations to interpret the past of their most powerful neighbor. Proximity and dependence are part of this equation; experience, and the history of historical study in Canada is another part. But being different from Americans, and comprehending the utility and human need to understand that difference better, is the best part. 51
      When I became a Canadian citizen in the mid-1980s, I had to be examined by a citizenship judge. When she asked what I did for an occupation, I told her I taught history at the University of Lethbridge. Pressed for my field, I had to reply, "American history." Without losing a beat, she said, "That's too bad. What we need is more Canadian History." It was not the warmest of welcomes to Canada. She was also ill informed if she thought American history was taking time and energy that should have gone into Canadian history. Canadian history and Canadian studies have grown enormously in Canadian universities during the past half century. American history has also grown. The growth may have been coincidental in part, but these subjects also need each other. American history will thrive if Canadian history is healthy and prospering; Canadian history will prosper if American history maintains a healthy presence. Perspective, knowledge and identity—even of the workings of history in general—will improve as a result. Knowing ourselves in a nationalist sense and knowing our neighbors need not remain mutually exclusive endeavors. 52


* The author wishes to thank June Tagg, Maren Wood, and the journal's reviewers for their especially helpful criticisms.


Notes

1. Dale Carter, an Englishman teaching in Denmark notes that Danish students assume that "any American professor teaching them (usually a visitor) has as part of their agenda a defence of the United States. They are perceived as part teacher, part advocate." See John Ingham et al., "Teaching American Studies Abroad: A Symposium at the University of Toronto, 23 April 1999," Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1999), 97.

2. Two social history examples of these ameliorating effects will be examined later in this essay. The limits of group identity and group interaction as curatives to nationalist conceptions will also be addressed.

3. An example of this definition may be found in Anthony H. Birch, Nationalism and National Integration (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 4.

4. Recognition of this shared confusion over identities is made in Ramsay Cook, Canada, Québec and the Uses of Nationalism. 2nded. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 222–23.

5. Mavis Gallant, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1981). Gallant, one of Canada's most brilliant short-story writers, grew up in both the anglophone and francophone worlds of Québec but has lived most of her life in Paris. She expresses no doubt about her belief that she is Canadian and nothing but Canadian, yet she clearly admits her disgust with "nationalism" and "patriotism."

6. Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Its Alternatives (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 6; and, Deutsch quoted in Peter Alter, Nationalism (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), 7.

7. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983).

8.Ibid., 1–2.

9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. rev. ed. (London: Verson, 1991).

10. For a brief description of some elements of Canadian distinct identity see Cook, Canada, Québec and the Uses of Nationalism, 196–209; On "post-modern" nationalism see Richard Gwyn, Nationalism with Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 243–54.

11.Ibid., 17–18.

12.Ibid., 182.

13. Denis Stairs, "North American Continentalism: Perspectives and Policies in Canada," in David Cameron, ed., Regionalism and Supranationalism: Challenges and Alternatives to the Nation-State in Canada and Europe (Montreal: The Institute for Research on Public Policy and Policy Studies Institute, 1981), 83–109, identifies five areas in which "American penetration of Canadian society" perceivably exists—diplomatic, economic, cultural, informational, and philosophical intrusion. In short, almost all meaningful areas of national existence are effected by "continentalism," and Stairs demonstrates some of the peculiar ways in which Canada as a nation has reacted to those penetrations or threats of penetration.

14. The meager presence of American history in some foreign universities is surprising. Linda K. Salvucci, "Did NAFTA Rewrite History? Recent Mexican Views of the United States Past," Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 2 (September, 1995): 646–47, notes that only fifty of the 50,000 students at the National University in Mexico City enrolled in the year-long American history survey.

15. In an older article, David H. Burton, "Teaching American History at British Universities: The Continuing Challenge," History Teacher, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1973), 267–280, lists 38 universities and 108 faculty teaching some aspect of American history in the United Kingdom, numbers that are surely larger now. Burton lists a number of things that retard American history in universities, however: early specialization by students matriculating into university, the limited availability of U. S. History in optional subject matter for A-level exams, a tendency to blend American history into a broader western or world history, and a lack of proximity to and interest in the United States. See also Marcus Cunliffe, "Teaching United States History Abroad: Great Britain,"The History Teacher, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Nov., 1984), 69–74; and, Marcus Cunliffe, "American Studies in Europe," American Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1971), 22. Others testify that American history is often taught extensively in survey mode but less so in advanced courses or that American history is taught topically at best to serve the limited purpose of comparing and contrasting cultures. See, for example, Leopold S. Launtiz-Schürer and Joseph M. Siracusa, "Some Recent Trends in the Study of United States History in Australia: A Bicentennial Note," American Studies International, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1977): 22–33; and, Basil A. Le Cordeur, "American History for South Africa: Perceptions and Objectives," American Studies International, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1994): 96–102.
      By contrast, Canadians seem to enroll broadly in American history survey courses, and many students go on to take further American history courses, some even pursuing it as a major subject in graduate school. Stephen J. Randall and Albert Desbiens, "A Guide to the Study of United States History in Canada, 1945–1980," American Studies International, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1985), 67–68, claims that in 1958, only 10 or 20 Canadian universities offered more than one specific course in U.S. history, and the largest offered anywhere was four. By 1980–81, however, a survey of English Canadian universities revealed "some 331 courses devoted exclusively to United States history were offered, plus 78 others which dealt at least in part with an aspect of American history, such as slavery, women's studies, business history, and diplomatic history." Of 38 universities surveyed, 25 had master's level work and 17 doctoral level work in American history. Even in Québec, seven of nine departments of history in 1980 taught American history. By 1985, over a twenty year period, there had been approximately 140 master's theses and doctoral dissertations written on American history in Canada. Limited library resources and press outlets for scholarship in U. S. History alone restrained growth in the field, Randall and Desbiens noted.

16. An early appeal by a prominent Canadian university figure for more American studies in Canada can be found in Claude Bissell, "American Studies in Canadian Universities," Queen's Quarterly 66 No. 3 (Autumn, 1959), 384–87. Peter Buitenhuis, "American Studies in Canada," American Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1971, 19–24, lamented how Canadian nationalism had frustrated the rise of American studies in the 1960s but American History, Canadian Undergraduates, and offers evidence as well that Canadian studies and American studies were in fact growing apace.

17. On the "nationalism" challenge see, for example, Peter Buitenhuis, "American Studies in Canada," American Studies, 10:1, 1971, 19–24.

18. Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad. 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994), 662, claims that New American taxes on imports from Canada (1971), extreme differences over Vietnam, and a weakening Canadian military involvement with the U. S., meant that Canadian-American "relations approached a twentieth-century low" by 1976.

19. The "flag-waving patriotism and self-congratulation" of Americans has pushed some Canadian teachers of American history to adopt anti-American extremes in response. See Paul W. Bennett, "'Beneath the Gloss and Floss'": Teaching American History in 'The Great White North,'"The History Teacher, 23:4 (August, 1990), 449–453.

20. Interesting observations on the now abandoned place of narrative in history can be found in Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture (Toronto: Anansi, 1999), 29–61. More will be said of this later.

21. Twenty-three students (only four from my senior class) responded to this survey out of a possible fifty-seven. They were evenly divided by gender, all but two were in their twenties or younger. They were also evenly divided between those in their first two years of university and those in the last two years. Half had already taken at least six courses in history. All claimed Canadian citizenship; two claimed dual Canadian/Ameri-can citizenship. Almost all were from Alberta and all were from the West. Most had traveled fairly widely and often to the American West and Midwest. Most claimed to have read at least one article or book on American history. Even with already clearly developed views about the United States, most were surprisingly reluctant to claim that they had more than modest knowledge about the U. S. history. Newspapers and television, they claimed, were the most important sources of their knowledge.

22. A poll reported in Toronto's The Globe and Mail, June 29, 2002, A9, summarizes Canadian ambivalence. Some 74% claimed Americans did "a better job of celebrating their accomplishments than Canadians"; on the other hand, 71% disagreed with the proposition that "Americans have more important people and accomplishments to celebrate than Canadians."

23. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada's long serving prime minister of the depression and World War II eras, was at least partly right when, while lamenting Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, he famously declared that "...if some countries have too much history, we [Canada] have too much geography." See Dominion of Canada, Official Report of Debates, House of Commons, First Session; Eighteenth Parliament. Vol. IV, (June 18, 1936), 3868. King acknowledged in this speech the advantages Canada shared with its good neighbor, the U. S., in not suffering all of the historical baggage of Europe. At the same time he noted the problem of establishing and retaining Canadian sovereignty over Canada's vast and thinly populated territory.

24. For example, Birch, Nationalism and National Integration, 223–24, notes that "there is no evidence at all of public loyalties being transferred from national governments to supranational organizations.... Possessive nationalism is very much stronger than incipient internationalism."

25. Marcus Cunliffe, the friend, promoter and teacher of American studies in Great Britain, rightly answered Americans who found foreign students too anti-American: "The history of nation states is per se in large part a record of jingoism, aggression and prevarication—and this is true of new nations no less than old ones. Americans have often adopted a tone of moral superiority in analyzing other national societies. Why be surprised that the tone is resented, or its justice challenged?" See Cunliffe, "Teaching United States History Abroad," 71. Le Cordeur further notes that, "What is especially fascinating for South Africans about American history is the irony of that peculiar mixture of extreme idealism and its all-too-frequent violation or non-realization which has been a hallmark of 'the American experiment.'" See "American History for South Africa," 97.

26. Paul Gagnon has observed that, "To study foreign affairs without putting ourselves [meaning Americans] into others' shoes is to deal in illusion and to prepare students for a lifelong misunderstanding of our place in the world," The Atlantic Monthly, 262 (November, 1988), 63.

27. The critical arguments usually offered can be found in Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Penguin, 1985) and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995). For a middle ground see Barton J. Bernstein, "Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb, 1941–1945," Political Science Quarterly 90 (Spring, 1975), 23–24, 30–32, 34–43, 44–54, 57–69. Plausible defenders of the bomb's use are Herbert Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1966) and, Robert James Maddox, "Why We Had to Drop the Atomic Bomb," American Heritage 46 (May/June, 1995).

28. This popular observation is frequently made by students. Listen to "The White House Burned (The War of 1812)," by "Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie" from their album "Steaming Pile of Skit."

29. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).

30. See Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). More conservative arguments are offered in John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), and The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995); and, Walter La Feber, America, Russia, and the Cold War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993).

31. See John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

32. See respectively Benjamin Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Hiller Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1970); Robert Gross, The Minute Men and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999); David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere's Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967); Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); and, Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1991).

33. Although their arguments vary widely see, for example, Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Background to the American Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1931); Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Coming of the American Revolution (New York: Harper, 1964); T. H. Breen, "'Baubles of Britain': The American Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present 119 (May 1988): 73–104; and, Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Vintage Books, 2000)

34. Robert R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions. 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959).

35. Nash, Urban Crucible. Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

36. On the other hand, Seymour Martin Lipset is too strong in proclaiming that the "basic organizing principles" of Canada differ from the United States in that Canada represented and continues to represent "counterrevolution" and thus "is a more class-aware, elitist, law-abiding, statist, collectivity-oriented, and particularistic (group-oriented) society than the United States." See Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1990), 8 and passim.

37. At least until recently, some American teachers and scholars had also apparently found it difficult to promote the ideological origins of the American Revolution instead of the older theory of Lockean liberalism. See, for example, Earl Sheridan, "The 'Republican Revision' and the Teaching of American Government," PS: Political Science and Politics, 20:3 (1987): 689–91.

38. Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," William & Mary Quarterly, 39:3 (July, 1982): 401–441. Students are amused to find themselves on the opposite side from Dr. Benjamin Rush who believed that adherents to Great Britain and Americans who did not support the revolution suffered a derangement he called "Revolutiana." See Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, N. C.: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 286–88.

39. See especially Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York and London: New York University Press, 1984), 15–23.

40. For a brief discussion of this definition of nationalism see Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London and Toronto: Penguin Books, 1994), 5–9.

41. A good example of this combination can be found in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001).

42. For the early themes of individualism and democracy see Vernon L. Parrington, Main Themes in American Thought (N. Y.: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1927); Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy: The Founding of American Civilization (N. Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947 and, Edmund S. Morgan, "The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution," The William & Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser., XXIV (January 1967), 3–43.. Social history works mentioned above are Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (N. Y. Harper & Row, 1966; orig. pub. 1944); Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1965); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town The First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (N. Y.: W. W. Norton & Co., 1970); and Philip J. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1970. On Puritans and sex see Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2002).

43. See respectively, Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (N. Y.: Knopf, 1956); Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life 2d ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (N. Y.: Vintage Books, 1974); Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (N. Y.: Pantheon Books, 1976); John W.. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-bellum South (N. Y.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1998); and, Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N. C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

44. The great difficulty in establishing ways to teach American history to non-Americans is represented in Frank Fitz-Gibbon, "Teaching About the United States in England," The Social Studies, 77:1 (Jan./Feb., 1986), 29–30. Fitz-Gibbon argues rightly for emphasizing "the complexity and diversity of the American experience in order to challenge oversimplified images and also to serve as a platform from which to combat prejudice," insisting that this go so far as to create "empathy with Americans."

45. R. G. Collingwood puts it bluntly. Identifying the rise of national history with the rise of Rome, he states, that a new idea of history arose, "a history in which the hero of the story is the continuing and corporate spirit of a people and in which the plot of the story is the unification of the world under that people's leadership." See The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 34.

46. This is based on a review of the bibliographic guide, America: History & Life, from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present.

47. George M. Frederickson protests that attempts to compare whole nations will, in the case of the United States, lead to the trumpeting of American "exceptionalism" in an "oversimplified" and "idealized" way. He warns that such whole comparisons will result in placing the "nation as the foreground" while "creating a generalized image of others as background." See "From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History," Journal of American History, 82:2 (September, 1995): 587–604. Foreground and background are much closer for Canadians, and comparative nationalisms more able to share the foreground.

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