Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age

13. American History in the Shadow of Empire: A Plea for Marginality

206 Chapter 13 American History in the Shadow of Empire A Plea for Marginality françois furstenberg The international expansion of U.S. history in the past two decades presents both opportunities and risks to American historians outside the United States. Enormous credit goes to those who have led the charge, including Thomas Bender, David Thelen, Ian Tyrrell, and Bernard Bailyn . All have worked to broaden not just the intellectual but also the institutional range of American history. All have also thought about vexing issues such as translation, curricula, conferences, and journal publishing. Their impact has been tremendous and salutary. If exceptionalist approaches long positioned the United States as not just unique but also outside history—a nation exempt from the historical forces that have shaped the rest of the world—it follows that historians of the United States practicing outside that country would have little to offer Americans.1 But now American historians are urged to reach out, to connect their past with those of other nations and other peoples—to think of themselves as members of “a global community of historians of America.”2 And who better to help them do so than historians of the United States in Europe: they who have long spent their careers at the interstices of national history, between the histories of their own nations and the history of the United States. The turn away from exceptionalism offers European historians of the United States new and exciting opportunities, the chance “to extricate American history in Europe,” as chapter 1 puts it, “from the marginality that it had long suffered.” American History in the Shadow of Empire | 207 As U.S. history has internationalized, its scholarship has grown. European historians now regularly publish their work with American university presses and in U.S.-based journals. Americans benefit from expanded intellectual and professional connections with historians in Europe, which help them break free from the provinciality they seek to overcome. U.S. academic life is enriched, both for faculty and for students , and U.S. history as a whole is improved by its engagement with broader trends in Atlantic history, global history, international history, borderlands history, and more. Meanwhile, historians of the United States in other countries have gained a new authority. Moving from the margins to the center garners bigger audiences, more prominent publishing platforms, and a greater voice in intellectual exchanges. All of this can lead to a somewhat triumphalist view of current historiography : intrepid historians overcoming retrograde intellectual impulses to create something new and better. But although that account has a great deal of truth, it is not the whole story. It may exaggerate the intellectual context that predated the recent wave of internationalization and occlude some of the drawbacks to the internationalization of U.S. history, both of which are worth pondering as we continue to expand our intellectual and institutional horizons. I have often wondered at historians’ tendency to denigrate past scholarship . We who study the past are quick to dismiss the scholarship that came before us. Books not even a decade old are often considered out of date. In such an intellectual context—always looking for the next turn— it is easy to overstate the alleged provinciality of U.S. history. Certainly there is much to criticize. American historians of the United States are far more monolingual than their colleagues in their own departments, not to speak of their counterparts in European departments of history. In general, they read less than historians of—for instance—Canada of the history of other nations. And it is true that many are mostly unfamiliar with the scholarship on American history produced in other countries. Nevertheless, one should be wary of generalizations. The United States is a big and diverse place, with a variety of regional and institutional cultures. The production of history happens very differently from one part of the country to another. The U.S. South has its own historical culture, as does New England, not to speak of the Southwest “borderlands” or the well-developed field of California history.3 But the United States is not just geographically diverse; it also contains a 208 | Chapter 13 vast range of institutions of higher education, and one of the great strengths of the chapters in this collection is showing that institutions matter. The production of historical knowledge faces very different barriers when located at the underfunded branch campus of a...