Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age

12. Not Quite at Home: Writing American History in Denmark

198 Chapter 12 Not Quite at Home Writing American History in Denmark david e. nye Scandinavian historians were seldom much concerned with the United States before World War II, and in Denmark only a few scattered courses were first offered in the 1930s.1 The field developed slowly after 1945, stimulated by the Fulbright Program.2 No American historians lived permanently in Denmark before the 1980s, although several came temporarily on exchanges. For decades, these visiting Americans and a few Danes taught U.S. history primarily in departments of English and seldom in history or political science departments. A Danish Center for American Studies was almost established in 1970 at Århus University, but antipathy to the Vietnam War shaped a political climate that made it impossible, and the first such center emerged two decades later, at the University of Southern Denmark.3 Arriving in 1982, I began as a foreign lecturer with a two-year contract at Odense University. I was not expected to stay, and the position did not include a pension. Like Americans on previous exchanges, I thought of it as a European interlude. However, a new book that was to be my ticket back home instead led to a job at Copenhagen University in 1987. The longer I remained in Europe, the more it refocused my teaching and research. This chapter reflects on that process, from the late Cold War until 2012, keeping in mind three other American U.S. historians hired in the late 1990s: Eric Guthey (Copenhagen Business School), Russell Duncan (Copenhagen University), and Jody Pennington (Århus University). Writing American History in Denmark | 199 In the 1980s there were five U.S. historians dispersed among Denmark’s seven universities. The other four passed away or retired before the first American studies degree program opened, in 2003. Younger scholars not yet visible in 1982 replaced them. As the only U.S. historian at my university, I saw myself as a visitor. No Danish history department offered U.S. history courses, and the English faculty retained a strong British orientation. In all the Nordic countries, the shadow of Vietnam delayed the growth of the field. Indeed, in Norway the leading Americanists felt it necessary at the height of the anti– Vietnam War protests to write a letter that disavowed their support for U.S. foreign policy while asserting their continued interest in studying the United States. As late as 1991, Copenhagen University emphatically rejected a proposal to establish a center for American studies, even though external funding was available. In the 1980s, most Danish historians remained focused on political, military, and diplomatic history. Several of them considered Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis a viable argument and regarded Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform as a foundational text. In recent decades, the movement of scholars via the Fulbright Program and other exchanges has increased interest in social and cultural history. Yet even in 2012, Danish historians remained strongly Eurocentric, and Danish academic administrators still forced almost all U.S. historians to be part of English departments. Despite this unreceptive academic environment, Danish culture gradually provided me with a new framework of perception and comparison . The Nordic countries had sought a third way between American capitalism and Soviet communism. During the Cold War they were caught between the great powers, but they stubbornly resisted being subsumed into either the U.S. or the Soviet cultural orbit. They created capitalist welfare states with free university education, free medical care, and a wide range of social services. In Scandinavia, the monarch remained a powerful symbol and prime ministers performed little of the ceremonial work required of American presidents. And in contrast to religiously pluralistic America, the predominantly Lutheran population remained almost indifferent to abortion or sex education and found debates about creationism absurd. There were minorities of Fourth World peoples in Lapland and Greenland as well as new immigrants (many with Moslem backgrounds), but the Nordic countries were far more homogeneous than the United States, and the world’s highest taxes weakened class differences. In short, the politics and culture of 200 | Chapter 12 Scandinavia provided provocative contrasts to those of the United States. The Nordic countries did not feel that they were behind the United States but rather that they were on a different path. Nordic distinctiveness robustly persists despite full exposure to American popular culture. The average citizen has seen thousands of hours of American...