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 Chronicle of Higher Education
>From the issue dated July 5, 2002
 

  Portraying an 'Unexceptional' American History
By LINDA K. KERBER

The practical technicalities of bookmaking being what they are, Rethinking
American History in a Global Age went to press before September 11, but we
read it necessarily in a post-September 11 perspective. Readers may no
longer need persuading that the United States cannot be well understood
unless it is placed in an international context, but there is still a
pressing need for this book. Like The Social Sciences in Historical Study,
the Social Science Research Council's 1954 publication that signaled new
claims for history as a social science, this dense, intensely serious
volume, edited by New York University's Thomas Bender and published by the
University of California Press, is likely to serve another generation of
scholars as an agenda for American-history writing.

The "rethinking" of U.S. history has been going on for more than a decade,
as increasing numbers of academic historians have been bemused by the
provincialism of their field. It is the obvious result of daily experience
with the Internet, the popularity of multicultural themes and sensibilities,
the affordability of international travel, and similar trends. What unites
the authors of the essays here is the belief that American history may be
idiosyncratic but it is not exceptional; when Americans claim to have been
unique -- a "city upon a hill" or the "greatest generation" -- they are
actually making excuses. Renaming the conquest of aboriginal peoples as
Manifest Destiny no longer postpones comparison with South Africa and
Australia.

Rethinking American History was jointly sponsored by New York University and
the Organization of American Historians and grew out of a series of
conferences that brought scholars who study American history, and some who
study other regions, together from around the world. As president of the OAH
at the time of the project's inception five years ago, I enthusiastically
supported it.

Internationalizing American history can be as straightforward as
strengthening language training so that more historians in the United States
can read the books of their non-English-speaking colleagues or sources like
immigrant newspapers. But it may also -- and this is the fear that haunts
many of the authors in this volume -- produce its own distortions.

Over and over, the historians writing here ask if the effort to understand
globalization is just another way of justifying it; if situating American
history in the process becomes another way of turning even the skeptical
historian into an instrument of American cultural and economic power. Will
American history be just another product to be exported? The concluding
essay, by David A. Hollinger, a historian at the University of California at
Berkeley, is called "The Historian's Use of the United States and Vice
Versa"; the title makes the reader shiver.

Rethinking American History, therefore, attempts to set a wider cosmopolitan
challenge. "Internationalizing," these essays show us, can mean
reinvigorating historical approaches through nuanced transregional
examination (comparing -- as Ian Tyrrell, of the University of New South
Wales, does -- environmental history from Australia not to the United States
as a whole, but specifically to California). It can mean a search for
transnational themes and issues: citizenship, migration, slavery, social
politics.

The result is to call into question some longstanding scholarly
interpretations that, for many Americans, still have the ring of "truth."

American slavery, for example, is no longer the South's "peculiar
institution," but, as Robin D.G. Kelley, of NYU, shows, part of a broader
dispossession of working people around the Atlantic region. Slave unrest in
the United States, according to Walter Johnson, also of NYU, should be
understood not merely as the series of "revolts" that Southern masters --
and many subsequent historians -- claimed them to be, but rather as "battle
plans in a war for control of the New World." Using comparisons from which
most American historians shrink, Dirk Hoerder, of the University of Bremen,
likens control of black people in the United States, even after the Civil
War, to the torture we associate with the Spanish Inquisition and repressive
societies.

Another key theme -- that the United States has generally been hospitable to
immigration -- is also upended here. For most historians, "immigrant" has
meant European immigrant. We have used, Hoerder points out, other terms to
describe the immigration history of black people (subsumed under the heading
of slavery) and of Asians ("sojourners" ineligible for citizenship), the
refugee migrations of American Indians over the continent, and the seasonal
migrations of workers from northern Mexico; and to describe the emigration
of people from the United States to other countries: blacks to Liberia,
Italian-Americans to Sicily, draft resisters to Canada and Sweden. The
semantics obscure a lot more tension over global flows of migration than
many Americans admit.

Instead of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier, we have contested
"borderlands." That term has achieved wide currency in scholarship, and I
thought I had given up Turner long ago. Yet I found myself startled by
Charles Bright, of the University of Michigan, and Michael Geyer, of the
University of Chicago, when they propose that "the Germans and the Japanese
imagined themselves doing in the 20th century what they thought the
Americans had done in the 19th: conquering a territorial hinterland that
would serve as a source of food and resources, a controllable inland market,
and a homeland for a growing population organized for maximum production."
Perhaps I hadn't quite given up a belief in exceptionalism.

The traditional categories of history writing for which a global perspective
would seem most appropriate -- public policy, war, diplomacy -- are not
excused from prescriptions for rethinking. Daniel Rodgers, of Princeton
University, emphasizes how much American solutions to social ills, often
credited to New Deal originality -- wages and hours standards, workplace
safety, social security -- were actually "scavenged" from the "transnational
social politics" of industrializing Europe. Historians as well as diplomats,
Marilyn B. Young, of NYU, argues, have failed to distinguish the world from
the United States's own ambitions -- a failure that has too often led the
country to misunderstand its enemy. Young's devastating account could, alas,
easily be extended to September 11 and its aftermath.

But if it is to be worthy of its name, an internationalized American history
must do more than enrich themes that are already part of a historian's
arsenal. A more disruptive premise is that we must distrust the writing of
national history itself. Why should it be the nation, wisely asks Chicago's
Prasenjit Duara, that "defines history and political identity"? Shouldn't
we, asks Akira Iriye, of Harvard University, look at the role played by
other groups like nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty
International or the World Jewish Congress? Is "citizenship" necessarily a
word with uplifting overtones? Or, the late Robert H. Wiebe asks, was the
drive behind its invention the need to create "a single pool of male
citizens" for state purposes like military service and taxation?

Similarly, national histories can obscure larger patterns. The traditional
story of the origins of the United States has started with English settlers
seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity. In that narrative, the
peaceable settlers are surprised by American Indian hostility and angered
when they are colonized by the British crown. But if the settlers are
simultaneously seen as both the colonized and the colonizing agents of their
state, then the power relations among them, the crown, and aboriginal
peoples are recast. And, Tyrrell explains, American history begins to look
like other "settler societies," such as those in Australia, New Zealand, and
South Africa.

Only occasionally, however, do the authors here glimpse what a rethought
history might be like if women were included in the new global perspective.
When they do, it is instructive, as when Iriye emphasizes sexual assault on
women as central to the way conquering armies have established control.

Understanding a "global age" requires -- as other recent work by feminist
historians is showing -- that we deal with phenomena like the asymmetrical
education of men and illiteracy of women, the ways in which understandings
of male honor and respectability are shaped by placing boundaries on women's
choices, how the globalization of sweatshops rests on the employment of
women in harsh industrial conditions, and the vast transnational flow of
traffic in women.

Read along with two special issues of The Journal of American History that
were initiated by the then-editor David Thelen -- "Interpreting the
Declaration of Independence by Translation" (March 1999), and "The Nation
and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History" (December
1999) -- these essays are likely to serve as an agenda for academic
historians of the United States, wherever they live, as they contemplate
their next projects.

Those projects will be ones of deep seriousness. They will not be fun.
Historians who inquire into the consequences of power rarely come up
cheerful.

David Hollinger's concluding essay warns that historians who accept the
challenge to internationalize U.S. history are likely to find themselves in
direct conflict with demands to reach a wider public. The experience of
academic historians in recent years has shown the public to hunger for a
history that is not only well written but that does not demand a long
attention span or disrupt traditional lore. But, if we heed the questions
that September 11 raises, we may well be writing about complicated topics
like refugees and statelessness; about issues we haven't wanted to face,
like the hesitant role that the United States has played in developing
international institutions that defend human rights, or the
commercialization and export of American popular culture.

It is our challenge, Hollinger says eloquently, to find the words to provide
a history that is not consoling yet still compelling; that will not be
avoided but will be read.

Linda K. Kerber is a professor of history at the University of Iowa. Her
most recent book is No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the
Obligations of Citizenship (Hill and Wang, 1998).