| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The State of U.S. History. Ed. by Melvyn Stokes. (New York: Berg, 2002. xii, 448 pp. Cloth, $68.00, ISBN 1-85973-596-7. Paper, $24.00, ISBN 1-85973-502-9.)

Melvyn Stokes presents this volume as a service to teachers and students who cannot keep up with the burgeoning scholarship of a field that has moved away from its "traditional focus on the centers of political, economic, and social power and the doings of elite white men" and that has, in consequence, become "increasingly fragmented" (p. 1). Because thirteen of the authors teach at British universities and all nineteen chapters were initially presented at a conference in London, Stokes believes the volume will escape the "note of defensiveness" voiced by John Higham in The Reconstruction of American History (1962) and other American historians who have doubted the validity of scholarship focused narrowly on their nation's brief history (p. 1). Today, when some question the legitimacy of any national history, British Americanists testify that U.S. history remains "a vibrant and productive area for scholarly investigation" (p. 17). Only the American Patricia Nelson Limerick's essay on the American West describes a field in which "global levels of meaning" must be considered (p. 303).

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