Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age

8. Positionality, Ambidexterity, and Global Frames

165 Chapter 8 Positionality, Ambidexterity, and Global Frames thomas bender Beyond reframing American history, the La Pietra project (1997– 2000) for internationalizing its practice included an aspiration to advance the role of scholars working outside the United States.1 Whether or not the La Pietra meetings had much to do with it, transnational and global framings of American history have flourished beyond anything the participants could have imagined. But the greater incorporation of foreign scholars and their scholarship, which the participants (one-third of whom were Americanists working outside the United States) strongly desired, has not been realized to the degree envisioned or hoped for. Of course, the number of books and articles by historians working abroad that one sees cited in notes in journals and books published in the United States has increased considerably in the dozen years since the “LaPietra Report” appeared, but that increase falls short of being commensurate with the quantity and quality of work that these chapters reveal. Let us hope that this book accelerates the engagement and incorporation. At the La Pietra meetings, we anticipated that a global framing of American history would make it more accessible and useful for scholars and the public abroad. Particularly important was opening to and connecting with the work of these scholars. There was an image of the Janus-faced European historian as a key figure, at once engaged with the disciplinary practice and findings of historical scholarship in the United States and aware of a very different audience, of European students and 166 | Chapter 8 public. Is the global framing (or other transnational or comparative framings) of use in this difficult role? The chapters here expose a certain naïveté at the Villa La Pietra. They point to important questions about both the raison d’être for historiographical cosmopolitanism and the theoretical and practical issues facing scholars of U.S. history who work outside the United States. There is also a looming question, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, about whether there is something in American history, historiography, and professional institutions that makes the incorporation of these scholars more difficult. To these large and consequential questions I cannot give answers, but I can share thoughts. The wide-ranging overview in the first chapter reveals that European engagement with American history and society from the beginning of the republic is greater and more diverse than I had realized. For Europeans well beyond Alexis de Tocqueville, America served as a reflecting pool for thinking about modernity and alternative political arrangements. Early in the nineteenth century it was useful for political reflections, but by the end of that century it represented something else: market capitalism and industrial productivity, with hints of opportunity. Later yet, it became an advertisement for the pleasures of consumerism and popular culture.2 In each of these phases, Amerique, as Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have phrased its worldly presence, was a prompt to imagining alternative futures.3 For western Europe, its usefulness has declined since 1989, particularly in the new millennium, while for those parts of Europe that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, American political, economic, and cultural practices have had at least a momentary appeal and usefulness .4 As the authors of these chapters indicate, American academic institutions and resources have set the standards for scholarship since World War II, despite recent self-criticism and some public loss of confidence within the United States. Yet equally striking is the extraordinary postwar European development of historical scholarship on the United States, particularly by the quite numerous current generation of historians , whom one author here has called the third generation. There has been a vast increase in the number of positions in American history in Europe, to more than six hundred, from near zero in 1945. The increase has been most dramatic in the former Soviet bloc nations, where research and instruction in U.S. history had been marginal at best in the Cold War, save in Moscow. Positionality, Ambidexterity, Global Frames | 167 Many of the positions for Americanists were established in American studies or English language and literature programs rather than in history departments. This was partly the result of the national focus of European history departments and a tradition of foreign study centers. But American foundations also encouraged it. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation turned to the area studies model of the United States in addressing the need for...