The Signifigance of the Wider World in American History

Thomas Bender, ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ix + 427 pp. Appendix and index. $55.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

"Why do they hate us?" Since September 11, 2001, countless undergraduates have posed this question to me. There are no easy answers. Most of our scholarship in American history is so inwardly focused that we are ill prepared to address crucial issues of power and perception on an international scale. In the last three decades a phalanx of talented historians has broadened our vision of history "from below," but few have connected their social and cultural work at the local level with the more global sources of political authority, economic influence, and military force. Scholars have written insightful and provocative books on the lives of people long neglected by American historians—women, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and many others. Most of this writing has, however, confined itself to events and personalities on American territory. The foreign "others" who have long contributed and reacted to America are silent in our narratives. We are, in this sense, as guilty as the media at large for provincial self-centeredness. "They" do not really exist in "our" history.

On September 11, "they" made themselves heard. The terrorists and their supporters deserve strong condemnation for their premeditated violence against innocent lives. That said, their acts also expressed a social-cultural condemnation of "Americanization," rooted in local resentments and shared by thousands of non-terrorists. The terrorists showed how these deep and broad resentments could be mobilized to attack the political, economic, and military symbols of America's international power. We clearly need a more globalized vision of American history in order to grapple with the issues—and undergraduate questions—surrounding the sources of anti-American sentiment, its various expressions, and its consequences for our own identity as Americans.

We are, then, at an intellectual crossroad that both resembles and differs from that of Frederick Jackson Turner more than a century ago. With the accumulating evidence that America's expansion into the "open lands" of the "Great West" had reached a terminus, Turner called on historians to study the neglected processes of frontier settlement for insight into what he called the "American character." Historians had focused too much attention, Turner argued, on the Germanic origins of American life, too little on the role of the expanding Western frontier. Post-Civil War developments—rapidly increasing population in the western settlements, industrialization, imperialism—motivated a reconceptualization of our nation's history. ¹ In the twenty-first century, recent events have similarly highlighted the need to rethink our scholarship. The investigation of "American factors" that Turner championed now isolates U.S. history too rigidly from the rest of the world. If academics "discovered" the frontier in the late nineteenth century, it is now time for them to recognize that "they" matter for how we write "our" history. Paraphrasing Turner, we must give more attention to "the significance of the wider world in American history."

How shall we connect our writing and teaching of American history with the wider world? More than anyone else, Thomas Bender has confronted this issue head-on. With the assistance of the Organization of American Historians, New York University's International Center for Advanced Studies, and a variety of foundations, Bender organized a remarkable "Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History." Between 1997 and 2000 more than seventy-five historians from five continents participated in four conferences on the subject. In 2000 they produced the "La Pietra Report" that urged scholars to "contextualize the United States on a global scale:" "Connections and comparisons in our thinking about nations and cultures beyond the borders of the United States are essential. American history, so often sharply distinguished from the histories of the wider world, must be connected to that world, as the experiences of Americans have been for centuries." Along these...