Synopses & Reviews
"In One eloquent essay after another, some of the wisest historians of our time write American history in a grand cosmopolitan context. From the era of discovery to the present, histories that we thought we knewof labor, of race relations, of politics, of gender relations, of diplomacy, of ethnicityare more richly understood when causes and consequences are traced throughout the globe. One emerges invigorated, ready to welcome a new American history for a new international century."Linda K. Kerber, author of
No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship"Rethinking American History in a Global Age is an extremely stimulating and thought-provoking collection of essays written by leading historians who offer wider contexts for illuminating the traditional themes and issues of American national history. Particularly impressive is the book's combination of caution and original, sometimes daring insights."David Brion Davis, author of In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery
"For decades American historians have been urging one another to place our culture in comparative or transnational perspective. Thomas Bender's unique volume includes not only essays theorizing such efforts and essays exemplifying such work at its most successful and its most provocative, it also provides more skeptical assessments questioning whether American historians can meet the challenge of overcoming our longstanding national preoccupations. Rethinking American History in a Global Age is an indispensable book that will shape the work of a rising generation of historians whose horizons will extend beyond our own shores."James T. Kloppenberg, author of The Virtues of Liberalism
Synopsis
In rethinking and reframing the American national narrative in a wider context, the contributors to this volume ask questions about both nationalism and the discipline of history itself. The essays offer fresh ways of thinking about the traditional themes and periods of American history. By locating the study of American history in a transnational context, they examine the history of nation-making and the relation of the United States to other nations and to transnational developments. What is now called
globalization is here placed in a historical context.
A cast of distinguished historians from the United States and abroad examines the historiographical implications of such a reframing and offers alternative interpretations of large questions of American history ranging from the era of European contact to democracy and reform, from environmental and economic development and migration experiences to issues of nationalism and identity. But the largest issue explored is basic to all histories: How does one understand, teach, and write a national history even as one recognizes that the territorial boundaries do not fully contain that history and that within that bounded territory the society is highly differentiated, marked by multiple solidarities and identities?
Rethinking American History in a Global Age advances an emerging but important conversation marked by divergent voices, many of which are represented here. The various essays explore big concepts and offer historical narratives that enrich the content and context of American history. The aim is to provide a history that more accurately reflects the dimensions of American experience and better connects the past with contemporary concerns for American identity, structures of power, and world presence.
About the Author
Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (1993), New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (1988), and Community and Social Change in America (1978) and the editor of The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (California, 1992).
Table of Contents
Part I. Historicizing the nation -- Transnationalism and the challenge to national histories / Prasenjit Duara -- Internationalizing international history / Akira Iriye -- Where in the world is America? The history of the United States in a global age / Charles Bright and Michael Geyer -- Part II. New historical geographies and temporalities -- International at the creation: early modern American history / Karen Ordahl Kupperman -- How the West was one: the African diaspora and the re-mapping of U.S. history / Robin D. Kelley -- Time and revolution in African America: temporality and the history of Atlantic slavery / Walter Johnson -- Beyond the view from Euro-America: environment, settler societies, and internationalization of American history / Ian Tyrrell -- Part III. Opening the frame -- From Euro- and Afro-Atlantic to Pacific migration system: a comparative migration approach to North American history / Dirk Hoerder -- Framing United States history: democracy, nationalism, and socialism / Robert Wiebe -- An age of social politics / Daniel T. Rodgers -- The age of global power / Marilyn B. Young -- American empire and cultural imperialism: a view from the receiving end / Rob Kroes -- Part IV. The constraints of practice -- Do American historical narratives travel? / Franðcois Weil -- The modernity of America and the practice of scholarship / Winfried Fluck -- The exhaustion of enclosures: a critique of internationalization / Ron Robin -- The historian's use of the United States and vice versa / David A. Hollinger.