Continental-European Scholarship on Early Modern North American and North Atlantic World: A Report

When Wolfgang J. Helbich and other continental European scholars and specialists on North American history compiled their reports on European historiography relating to North America and the North Atlantic world, they and those American scholars involved in organizing the efforts enthusiastically assumed that this would heighten American historians' awareness about a historiography beyond the American and English-speaking world worthy their attention.¹ Alas, continental scholars who were silly enough to publish the results of their scholarship in a non-English language were soon to find that the reports had little impact. Their work was as swiftly neglected as that of their forefathers. In many cases, that neglect may have been justified, but not in all. Ignoring their scholarship does not only represent a loss; in most cases it will mean that their work will be done anew sooner or later by American scholars unaware of the French, Italian, Spanish, or German study that had discussed the same issue years earlier, probably even with the same advanced methodology and analytical tools employed by American scholars.

Let me cite one example that played some role in inducing me to embark on this article (and possibly future reports). In 1988 the late German historian Jürgen Heideking's massive study Die Verfassung vor dem Richterstuhl. Vorgeschichte und Ratifizierung der amerikanischen Verfassung, 1787–1791, was published. It is massive because it is 1,008 pages long.² But it is monumental, too, because it really is the most up-to-date overall analysis of the ratification process of the American constitution in all the aspects you can think of, and more. This massive study has had no impact on American scholarship—not because the subject is not considered of considerable importance but for mainly three reasons. First, the study is written in German and no, or to be cautious, almost no American scholar today with the exception of A. G. Roeber specializing in this field and employed by an American university is able to read German or is willing to read a book in German with 1,008 pages between its covers. Second, the book's price was prohibitively high—something like over two hundred U.S. dollars in 1988! And third, the book received, as far as I can see, only one scholarly review in the United States—A. G. Roeber's in the American Historical Review.³ The review was fair, critical, and scholarly—but it was the only one. And that again prompted leading American libraries—Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and the Library of Congress among them—not to buy the book. According to the OCLC only thirteen American libraries hold copies of this study. The database JSTOR suggests that none of the journals digitized in that database make any reference to this study. Consequently, studies that have been published in this country on the ratification process of the American Federal Constitution did and do not refer to it either.⁴

The example suggests a correlation between critical review of a book, its purchase by libraries, and thus its availability to American scholarship. Yet all these factors are somehow related to the single most important one—the knowledge of language. I admit that I do not use Russian scholarship because my knowledge of Russian is nonexistent. And my American friends have given me the same answer when I confronted them with German writings on American history. This conundrum can be solved only in two ways: Either historians reform the American high school system by having the teaching of foreign languages strengthened—a possibility as likely to succeed as producing a satisfactory apple pie with cranberries only—or of finding other means for acquainting American scholarship with continental European scholarship (but, of course, the same is true for many other cultures whose historians produce significant contributions to American scholarship and are for the same reasons equally ignored). Some governments provide a limited amount of funds for getting significant works translated into English.⁵ Occasionally fetching one of the very few prizes for non-English books in American history helps to...