Wayne E. Lee

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Wayne E. Lee | A Final Word | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

A Final Word

Identity, as many historians have discovered, is a funny thing. It is simultaneously defined by the self and by the observer—usually not in the same way. I have been given the marvelous opportunity to consider my own professional identity through the eyes of an extraordinarily capable and generous group of international scholars. I have never considered myself to be primarily an Americanist. My training in military history and colonial North American history had always emphasized the Atlantic Ocean as at most a filter for cultures and ideas, if not an open highway. My original draft of "Mind and Matter" began each subsection with a discussion of how that general subject had been treated in scholarship on European history or world history (I have much more to learn about Latin American, Asian, and African history). The draft quickly grew to unimaginable lengths. I first removed whole sections, and shortly thereafter I jettisoned virtually all the non-American comparative material. One unfortunate result was that as I discussed the remaining material it inevitably began to appear relatively parochial and exclusively American because much of the literature has developed that way—if not "exceptionalist," then somewhat isolated. So to Brian Holden Reid's, Marc Milner's, and Brian P. Farrell's calls for more comparative work and more international perspectives, I can only sing out "amen."¹ But let me emphasize once more that military history, even American military history, has always been open to comparative approaches, if only because one must consider both sides of a war. I might even suggest, in line with the proposal by Dirk Bönker, my colleague in the Duke–University of North Carolina joint program in military history, that we move beyond the merely comparative and consider more carefully the transnational movement of military ideas and even "cultures."²

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