Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age

1. Watersheds in Time and Place: Writing American History in Europe

3 Chapter 1 Watersheds in Time and Place Writing American History in Europe michael heale, sylvia hilton, halina parafianowicz, paul schor, and maurizio vaudagna Promoting American history in Europe has been a thankless and even dangerous business. Charles Kingsley as regius professor of modern history at Cambridge in 1866 endorsed a proposal that Harvard send someone to lecture on American history every other year, but was angrily rebuffed by dons who feared for the monarchy and the Church of England, one thundering that “we shall be favored with a biennial flash of Transatlantic darkness.” For somewhat similar reasons, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia prohibited the teaching of comparative constitutional law in universities. The king of Naples jailed a professor in 1858 for citing George Washington favorably, and even if that story is apocryphal , its circulation hardly encouraged the open study of American history.1 But, sometimes nourished, sometimes abused, American history did struggle to life in European universities. Its emergence and local trajectories were uneven, since Europe was far from a homogeneous entity. Today Europe comprises some fifty countries, and any attempt to map the course of academic interest in American history in them is necessarily tentative. This chapter offers a broad chronological analysis of European historiography of the United States. It locates major watersheds at the end of the nineteenth century, shortly after World War II, in the mid1970s , and following the fall of the Berlin Wall. While the Cold War significantly boosted the study of American history in Europe, its end ironically marked an even more rapid expansion of the field. This chap- 4 | Chapter 1 ter also charts regional and national variations, including the differing experiences of writing American history in western and eastern Europe and the distinctive case of the Iberian Peninsula. It matters where history is written. In recent years, global and other influences have promoted some convergence in the practices and perspectives of professional historians, but national cultures remain resilient enough to sustain the discrete characteristics of the European academies.2 The recurring preoccupations of European Americanists reflect the influence of place. It hardly needs to be said that the diverse connections between the American and European continents have long commanded attention, as scholars have examined the bilateral relationships between their home countries and the United States. Colonial expansion, migration , diplomatic relations, wars, trade, and transatlantic cultural interactions are all topics susceptible to scholarly research in European archives and have often been seen as extensions of European history. When the Polish scholar Michal Rozbicki first taught in a U.S. university , his students were bemused by his treatment of New England Puritanism as a continuation of the European Reformation rather than as a “new chapter,” with the focus on migrants who could not “escape” their culture.3 Once American history in this Atlantic perspective was well established in a particular country, though, its practitioners tended to diversify into other areas. The very distance of Europe from the American continent may also condition what scholars choose to see, as illustrated by a long-standing interest in the American experience with race. Well before the publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s The American Dilemma (1944), and especially since the 1960s, European scholars have written extensively on American slavery and race, intrigued by the looming presence in American history of a phenomenon so at odds with the values enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Lately European interest in racial and ethnic themes has sharpened as several European countries have themselves become immigrant destinations. Location has also played a role in the marked growth in recent decades of the U.S. cultural and social history fields, for while this is partly a reflection of modern historiographical trends, it is also a product of the academic structures in Continental Europe, where American history is often housed in English or American studies departments: a prerequisite of its study is the English language. The influence of location largely explains one of the most persisting European interests in American history—that is, political and constitutional history—which until recent decades have often seemed almost to Watersheds in Time and Place | 5 crowd out other kinds. The American Revolution early inspired some Europeans; wars and convulsions in Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that state building was constantly beginning anew; and the ingenuity of the American way of government invited study. American federalism was of some interest to the political...