Why France?: American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. See Edward Berenson and Nancy L. Green, “Quand l’Oncle Sam ausculte l’Hexagone: Les historiens américains et l’histoire de la France,” Vingtième siècle 88 (October–December 2005): 121–31. 2. Jan Goldstein, “The Future of French History in the United States: Unapocalyptic Thoughts for the New Millennium,” French Historical Studies 24, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 3–4. On the statistics above, see François Lagarde, “La France et les Français aux Etats-Unis,” FranceAm érique, April 30–May 6, 2005; on French immigration to America, see Ronald Creagh, Nos cousins d’Amérique: Histoire des Français aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Payot, 1988); on this “anomalous” American interest in French history, see Jeremy D. Popkin, “The American Historian of France and the ‘Other,’” in Objectivity and its Other, ed. Wolfgang Natter, Theodore R. Schatzki, and John Paul Jones (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 96. 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Conduct of Life” (1860), in his Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 1023. 4. For this argument, see Frank Costigliola, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance since World War II (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992). See also André Siegfried, Les EtatsUnis d’aujourd’hui (Paris: A. Colin, 1927), 313, cited in Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, France and the United States: From the Beginnings to the Present Day, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 245–46. 5. Harvey Levenstein, We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France Since 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 280. See, for instance, Thomas Friedman, “Our War With France,” New York Times, September 18, 2003; John J. Miller and Mark Molesky, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France (New York: Doubleday, 2004); Kenneth Timmerman, The French Betrayal of America (New York: Crown, 2004); and Harlow Giles Unger, The French War against America: How a Trusted Ally Betrayed Washington and the Founding Fathers (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005). 6. Duroselle, France and the United States, 25. 7. On gender history, for instance, see Rebecca Rogers, “Rencontres, appropriations et zones d’ombre: les étapes d’un dialogue franco-américain sur l’histoire des femmes et du genre,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 11 (December 2004): 101–26. See also Libération, July 6, 2005. 8. One could make an argument for the inclusion of other American scholars in this collection —literary critics, for instance. We decided to focus on one discipline (our own) in order to preserve the book’s coherence and delineate a particular kind of relationship with France. 9. Richard Kuisel, “American Historians in Search of France: Perceptions and Misperceptions ,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 307–19; R. R. Palmer, “A Century of French History in America,” French Historical Studies 14, no. 2 (Autumn 1985): 160–75; Popkin, “The American Historian of France,” cited above, and “Made in USA,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 40, no. 2 (April–June 1993): 303–20. 10. See, for instance, Steven Englund, “Note critique: Lieux de mémoire en débat,” Politix 26 (June 1994): 168; and Natalie Zemon Davis, L’histoire tout feu tout flamme: Entretiens avec Denis Crouzet (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004). 11. All contributors are accomplished scholars and many teach in elite universities, but this book is not designed to be a pantheon. Likewise, a majority are Caucasian, of middle-class origin , and politically liberal—which is true of the profession as a whole. We did not, of course, inquire about class or politics prior to inviting contributors. We define American historians as citizens or long-term residents of the United States or Canada who obtained their doctorate from a North American university. See David H. Pinkney, “American Historians on the European Past,” American Historical Review 86, no. 1 (February 1981): 1. 12. See Susan A. Crane’s rich “Historical Subjectivity: A Review Essay,” Journal of Modern History 78, no. 3 (June 2006): 434–56. 13. J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History: New Views on History and Society in Early Modern Europe (London: Longmans, 1961), 13, cited in John Higham, History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 136; and Lewis P. Curtis Jr., The Historian’s Workshop: Original Essays by Sixteen Historians (New York: Knopf, 1970), xiv–xv. On the autobiographical tradition among historians, see Luisa Passerini and Alexander C. T. Geppert, “European Ego-Histoires: Historiography and the Self, 1970–2000,” introduction to Historein 3 (2001), 8–13. On historians...