- Putting the United States in Its Place
In 1894, at the end of his term as president of the American Historical Association, Henry Adams reflected on an explosion of efforts in his lifetime "to create a science of history." Despite a lack of discernible progress, "almost every successful historian has been busy with it, adding here a new analysis, a new generalization there; a clear and definite connection where before the rupture of idea was absolute; and, above all, extending the field of study until it shall include all races, all countries, and all times." Adams, while committed to the idea, was uncertain of its outcome and its implications. More than a century later, as we persist in our enlightened project of organizing human behavior in a variety of contexts into coherent overall narratives, I find myself sharing Adams's skepticism about our ability to do so with "a full understanding of its serious dangers and responsibilities."2
A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History is a milestone in Thomas Bender's campaign to get Americans to think about their history from a global perspective. For years, Bender has encouraged "a more cosmopolitan sense of being an American, to have us recognize the historical interconnections and interdependencies that have made America's history global even as it is national, provincial even as it shares in the general history of humans on this planet" (p. ix). The fact that Bender wrote his book for general readers means that much of its content will be familiar to academic historians. But its form should be of interest to anyone interested in seeing U.S. history "incorporated into [a] global context (p. 6)."3
Bender offers his book as a direct challenge to what he sees as a popular narrative of national history that emphasizes an exceptional expansion of freedom and material comfort in a land of opportunity. Originating in escapes from European tyranny, it moves through the achievement of independence in the American Revolution, the triumph of political democracy in the Age of Jackson, the abolition of slavery in the Civil War, the pragmatic adjustments to industrialization and urbanization in the Progressive Era, the travails of the [End Page 573] Great Depression, to the emergence from World War II as a global power in defense of liberty at home and abroad. In its more sophisticated incarnations, especially the eloquent speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., events that contradict this national story—the enslavement of Africans, for example—create tensions that ultimately underscore the hard-won triumph of freedom.
The extent to which Americans actually subscribe to this national narrative is debatable. Fifteen hundred U.S. citizens surveyed a decade ago "rarely mentioned the triumphal national narrative favored by those who write textbooks or advocate history as a means of teaching patriotism and civics."4 No doubt, the events of September 11, 2001, changed that attitude, at least temporarily. Still, one of Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen's most interesting conclusions in The Presence of the Past was that those Americans who felt excluded from the national narrative were the Americans most likely to appeal to it. It is no small irony that the popular story of the progress of democracy has empowered people to demand that the United States deliver on the promises of its history. Academic historians have tended to a similar position in recent decades. Like Bender, many of us regularly invoke it in order to advance alternative interpretations of American history.
Bender's considerable contribution to this literature is to link the history of the United States with events in the rest of the world. In A Nation Among Nations Bender takes "five major themes in American history and reinterprets them as parts of global history." Admirably, he did not want to "nibble at the edges of the default narrative." Instead, he has written a series of insightful extended essays on some of the most visible moments in that narrative—"the...