The Nation and Beyond:
Transnational Perspectives on United States History

David Thelen

When I was in graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1960s, nation-states were the self-evident focus for the discipline of history. Nations expressed people's identities, arbitrated their differences and solved their problems, focused their dreams, exercised their collective sovereignty, fought their wars. Modern professional historical scholarship grew up alongside the nation-state, its mission to document and explain the rise, reform, and fall of nation-states. And professional history developed a civic mission to teach citizens to contain their experience within nation-centered narratives.	1
Now, a mere third of a century later, familiar nation-states look fragile, constructed, imagined, even as they possess the very real capacities to collect taxes, recruit and deploy armed forces, manage legal systems, and allocate resources. Their capacity to govern was battered from the Left in the 1960s and the Right in the 1980s, in slogans like "self-determination" that evoke people on the march and those like "globalization" that seem beyond human reach. While some movements challenged the sovereignty of established nation-states from above in the name of the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement, others challenged the sovereignty of established states from below in the name of the potential nation-states of Kosovo, Serbia, Chiapas, Quebec, Palestine, Scotland, Lombardy, East Timor, and Catalonia. With nationalisms exploding not only in movements for new nations but also in such diverse directions as "Queer Nation," "black nationalism," and "Nation of Islam," the greatest threat to nation-states seemed often to come from nationalist movements.	2
The spread across national borders of institutions such as multinational corporations and CNN, of social movements such as feminism and environmentalism, and of unprecedented migrations of people have unleashed processes of hybridization and creolization as people shape new and multiple identities. Even the concept of citizenship, the unquestioned right of nation-states to bestow, has been shaken by movements that claim that people's rights should accompany them as human beings, not be bestowed on them as residents of a nation-state.1	3
As the challenges have multiplied, it has become possible, even necessary, to take a critical look at what had once seemed so inevitable as to be nearly invisible, to view from new angles key moments when nations were made, challenged, changed, and unmade, to explore how they confronted internal and external threats and opportunities, how they developed and may now be losing their privileged position as the focus for popular identity and sovereignty. With nation-states seeming fragile and contested in the present, scholars have reexamined assumptions about their stability and inevitability in the past. In generating a huge new literature to illuminate contemporary debates, scholars have traced a variety of paths to the present, finding the source of nations in shared sentiments and traditions, in manipulations by writers and elites, and in the scale and scope of economic activity. In the eight years between 1983, when Benedict Anderson blazed new trails for the study of nations and nationalism in Imagined Communities, and 1991, when he published a second edition, not only had nations developed in ways he had not anticipated, Anderson observed, but "the study of nationalism . . . ha[d] been startlingly transformed—in method, scale, sophistication, and sheer quantity."2	. . .