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  • The Boundaries and Constituencies of History
  • Thomas Bender (bio)

"How Wide is the Circle of We?" historian David Hollinger asked a decade ago.1 He was pointing out the decline of confidence since 1940 in species-wide generalization in the human sciences. But his phrase seems to speak directly to the question of the humanities and citizenship today, when many, including me, think that the exclusiveness of national citizenship needs to give way to more cosmopolitan affiliations. The question is whether the humanities—with their reference to the human—have a role in such a development. Can we expect the humanities to help widen the circle of we?

Historically, the sponsor and constituency of the academic humanities has been the nation-state, not the whole of humanity. Though the humanities disciplines have spoken for the value of the human, they have never until our own time proposed to embrace all humans. The creation of the academic humanities as professional scholarly fields was intertwined with the making of the modern nation-state. Indeed, those peoples who were not organized into nation-states were beyond the ken for professional historians and were relegated to the discipline of anthropology. History as a discipline was in fact a key collaborator in the work of distinguishing those who considered themselves "civilized" from those they considered not so—for the reason of lacking a written literature and archives-based history. But this has changed in the past quarter century; moreover, the same move from parochialism to expansion and cosmopolitan inclusion is occurring in literary studies, art history, and musicology.

The world is now fully organized into nation-states, and humanities scholars are now more inclusive in their reach. Scholarship shuns the language of civilized and uncivilized, and all of humanity has been brought into the portfolio of history and literary studies. Parallel with this development there have been calls, as historian Prasenjit Duara titled his 1995 book Rescuing History from the Nation, to "rescue history from the nation." Similar calls have been made for literary studies, where border crossing has become a way [End Page 267] of life, with genres and themes providing paths beyond nations as containers of culture.

New notions of human solidarity are becoming commonplace in scholarship, and definitions rely more upon social imaginaries and identity than upon formal citizenship and political institutions: hence we have the Americas, the Black Atlantic, the Atlantic World, a variety of diasporas, routes and borderlands and middle grounds, and even global history. It thus seems to be a propitious moment for expanding the bounds of the humanities, and, indeed, the reframing of scholarship proceeds apace.

But less attention is being directed to the constituencies for history and the humanities. Changing the domain of inquiry undermines the nationalist foundations of the disciplines, including the national audiences or constituencies. This is especially true of history as a professional academic discipline, which has for more than a century assumed the role of making national subjects and citizens. As William H. McNeill has pointed out, "history got into the classroom ... to make nations out of peasants, out of localities, out of human raw material that existed in the countries of Europe and in the not so United States as well" (qtd in Appleby 10). The sciences and the other humanities disciplines also had their roles. The sciences were directly supportive of the developmental promise of the state, and we forget how important that role was in the land-grant colleges established after the Civil War. While these universities supported what we now call basic research, it was confidently assumed (correctly) that such research would be ultimately useful, becoming a technology of one sort or another. The connection was quite close in the case of the agricultural research stations established in every state. The humanities, especially literary studies, certified the quality of national high culture, which was central to the project of making nation-states.2

Without necessarily becoming apologists for any particular state or state policy, historians—by writing national histories as they did—endorsed the notion that the state was the designated carrier of history and the natural unit of human solidarity. Similarly, the humanities established literature and art as...

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