Rethinking Rethinking American History in a Global Age

Historically Speaking · June 2003 President's Corner Rethinking Rethinking American History in a Global Age Peter A. Coclanis One of the most interesting developments inAmerican historyoverthe past decade or so has been the attemptbyvarious scholars to embed or at least to situate our past in broader narrative frames. Ifthe particularconcerns and methodologies ofsuch scholars have differed, their findings, byand large, have provided support, whether explicit or implicit, for two related scholarly initiatives as well: one to relax the association between American history and the American nation-state, and the other to challenge notions ofAmerican exceptionalism. The most celebrated, important—and, certainly, self-conscious—example of the "broadening" phenomenon in recentyears is the 2002 collection entitled Rethinking American History in a GlobalAge, edited by Thomas Bender.' This collection at once reprises and encapsulates the principal interpretive themes that resulted from a multiyear collaborative project entitled "The Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History," sponsored byNewYork University and the Organization ofAmerican Historians, and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies among others. This project involved seventy -eight scholars (thirteen from NYU) who convened four times between 1997 and 2000 in Florence, Italy at NYU's "extraordinarily beautiful and peaceful Villa La Pietra." According to Bender, the project's organizers believed that holding the conferences outside the United States "seemed symbolically to make an important point about the value of stepping outside of the nation, ifonlytemporarily, to write a fresher account of it." Bender also notes that the "consistently good spirits ofthe conference . . . owed something to the Tuscan sun, the delightfulgardens ofthevilla, and the formal but comfortable meeting rooms" at La Pietra. (I'll bet. Can anyone spell boondoggle ?) In addition to the volume edited by Bender, the La Pietra projectproduced four reports, the last of which "The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession," also written byBender, summarizes the project's main conclusions and recommendations. All four reports are available at the OAH website and the website ofNYU's International Center for Advanced Studies.2 RethinkingAmerican History in a Global Age and "The La Pietra Report" can legitimately be viewed as scholarly companions. Almost all ofthe essays included byBender in RethinkingAmerican History and, obviously , Bender's "Report" itselfarepredicated on a set ofinterrelated assumptions—"priors ," as economists say—that at a minimum includes the following: (a) American historians over time have been limited, ifnot hamstrung by their narrative fixation on the nation-state; (b) one such limitation resulting from this fixation has been the beliefin American exceptionalism; (c) more complex and varied solidarities, processes, and identities , which have perforce been neglected because ofthe aforementioned fixation,jieed greater attention; (d) such solidarities, processes, and identities may best be observed at levels of historical analysis greater or smaller than the nation-state; (e) transnational or supranational levels ofhistorical analysis seem particularlyinviting to American historians in the increasingly global age in which we live today; and (f) connections to and with histories, historiographies , scholars, and institutions hitherto viewed as exogenous to the American experience are notmerely desirable, butwell nigh imperative. Letme saystraightawaythatmanyofthe essays included in RethinkingAmerican History are quite stimulating, and that some of the points made in the companion report are atonce reasonable and unobjectionable. A number of the finest historians working todaywere involved in the project, so itis in June 2003 · Historically Speaking no way surprising that RethinkingAmerican History includes a number ofexcellentpieces. Indeed, but for one or two essays, it is a fine collection. Moreover, just as Bender et al. claim, some subjects ofhistorical inquiryare notparticularlywell suited for national treatment , much less for organization around the nation-state, and inmanycasesAmericanhistorians probablyshoulddesign theirresearch projects in trans-, supra-, and infra-national ways. If many scholars—economic historians , forexample—have longknown this, and have long been working in ways concordant with such knowledge, itnever hurts to reinforce a sound point. Similarly, I'm all forconnectivityand amsold on the idea thatwehave much to learn from histories, historiographies , scholars, and institutions "a little beyond," as the Transcendentalists (who, followingthelogicofourguides , should be read alongwiththe GermanRomanticists!) might put it. Myproblemswith bothRethinkingAmericanHistory and the report, itis fair to say, do not rest so much with the...