Transatlantic Revolution, National Identity, and American Exceptionalism in the Early Republic

Since the history of the early American republic revitalized as a field some thirty-odd years ago, its students have devoted a great part of their energies to researching the emergence of national identity, politics, and culture in the wake of the Revolution. This steady attention to the development of nationhood has been neither unintentional nor unconsidered. The period once had a reputation as “the most boring part of American history to research or teach,” and attention to topics such as nationalism and national identity seemed a likely route out of that debased position.¹ Those subjects gained increasing traction during the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to a host of nationalist struggles. Today, historians of the early American republic continue to emphasize the nation’s creation as the primary significance of the field. The present mission statement of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) highlights the “special public significance” of the “founding of the United States” and the creation of “the American nation-state.”² Even the very name attached to the field, which lays stress on the adjective “American,” clearly conveys its national orientation. Many of the most-cited histories of the era published in the last four decades, including books by Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, David Waldstreicher, and Joanne Freeman, incorporate the words “American” or “nationalism” into their titles (both words, in the case of Waldstreicher).³

But if the theme of nation once promised to elevate the early American republic on history’s popularity charts, more recent world events now threaten to condemn the field for its nationalist preoccupations. As the issue of globalization takes center stage in contemporary consciousness, inquiries into the emergence of American national identity have seemingly become narcissistic. Joyce Chaplin took historians of the early American republic to task in 2003 for their relentless focus on national concerns, which she argued had made them unresponsive to the new Atlantic methodology that was transforming colonial historiography.⁴ A landmark essay collection published the following year, Beyond the Founders, seemed to support Chaplin’s critique by including only one essay in fourteen that could be labeled “Atlantic.”⁵ Academic trends may move slowly, but historians of the early American republic were bound to respond. Now the last two years have produced a bumper crop of first books by new historians attempting to drag the history of the early American republic into the “Atlantic World.” In particular, these historians have taken up the question of how the revolutions that shook the Atlantic world in the wake of American independence affected politics, society, and culture in the United States.⁶

Each of the three books under review here began as a dissertation, suggesting that research for each started before Chaplin’s public critique of the field. (White alone cites Chaplin, who is an editor of Johns Hopkins’ “Early America” series in which the book is included.) The authors’ prescient timing, combined with the fact that each trained at a different graduate institution (Ziesche at Yale, White at Columbia, and Roberts at Oxford), indicate that the books reflect a zeitgeist sweeping the field, not merely the authors’ particularistic interests or the vision of a single charismatic advisor. The authors’ choice of subjects seems to have originated in a shared belief about the necessity and utility of studying the early United States not for its bounded national dynamics, but through its connections to other places. Ziesche describes his book as an “histoire croisée...