In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

37 Chapter 2 Using the American Past for the Present European Historians and the Relevance of Writing American History tibor frank, martin klimke, and stephen tuck That writing about the past is interwoven with the demands of the present is something of a truism. But how each historian seeks to make, or not make, the connection, and how, in turn, this affects her or his research interests and writing style clearly varies—and seemingly marks one of the more significant differences between U.S. historians from the United States and their counterparts in Europe. To the eyes of many European scholars (of the United States), the American style is the openness and frequency with which historians make explicit links between past and present. By contrast, European writing on the United States might seem, at first glance, more detached. There is not, and never has been, a simple contrast between politicized historians based in the United States and dispassionate historians in Europe.1 The heat in controversies over identity-related pasts in some of the so-called tragic countries of twentieth-century Europe, such as Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Hungary, has more than matched that in controversies in the United States over topics such as the Founding Fathers, slavery, and Western settlement. Moreover, leading historians in Italy, for example, are recognized as public intellectuals entitled to comment on contemporary issues in ways that their U.S. counterparts can only dream of and, for that matter, many U.K. historians cannot relate to. Indeed, the difference in approaches to making use of the past may be greater between historians in European nations than between those in Europe and in the United States. For example, 38 | Chapter 2 when Joyce Appleby, a past president of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, presented a historians’ petition to members of Congress in 2002 urging them to “assume their constitutional responsibility” to vote on the issue of war against Iraq, she was doing something that, to British or Dutch historians , might seem alien—and yet was familiar to French historians.2 Where the difference in historical studies on the two continents is pronounced, though, is between U.S. and European historians of the United States. Obviously for the latter, the past is literally a foreign country (to adapt the British novelist L.P. Hartley’s famous opening line), whereas in the United States, the historian’s personal investment in the story he or she is telling today often reinforces the tradition of using the history of “our country” to help make the case for future action.3 But again, it is not simply a contrast between engaged, U.S.-based historians and detached, outside observers of U.S. history from Europe. Indeed, studying the history of a different nation can be a political statement in itself and, at times, quite a bold one, especially when the nation in question is a Cold War superpower and then the preeminent global power. Rather, it is the nature of the engagement that differs. The implicit comparison with one’s own country and continent and their sociopolitical constellations at a given historical point has made any European reflections on America, whether driven by criticism or praise, “self-perception from a distance.”4 There has not been a single European approach to using the American past—motivations for and methods of choosing American history have varied across time and place, reflecting the connections, and relative standing, of the United States and Europe.5 In the generation following World War II, some European intellectuals attempted to educate European audiences about U.S. history while trying to import a model of U.S. history (in the case of western Europeans) or criticizing it (in the case of Eastern Europe). From the late 1960s, European historians sought to share in American dissent too—in both history and historiography. More recently, with the rise of transnational approaches and because of America ’s perceived role as a trendsetter, European historians have also turned to U.S. history to help make sense of contemporary domestic European concerns and to reassert Europe’s place in post–World War II global history . In other words, in recent years, many European historians too have found a personal stake in the stories they are telling. This chapter explores various uses of American history: as selfperception , as a model to embrace or reject, for educating Europe about [18.191.195.110] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

Share