Rethinking American History in a Global Age

Published by University of California Press 2002

Rethinking American History in a Global Age

Edited by: Thomas Bender

https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520936034

Overview
Contents

About this book

In rethinking and reframing the American national narrative in a wider context, the contributors to this volume ask questions about both nationalism and the discipline of history itself. The essays offer fresh ways of thinking about the traditional themes and periods of American history. By locating the study of American history in a transnational context, they examine the history of nation-making and the relation of the United States to other nations and to transnational developments. What is now called globalization is here placed in a historical context.

A cast of distinguished historians from the United States and abroad examines the historiographical implications of such a reframing and offers alternative interpretations of large questions of American history ranging from the era of European contact to democracy and reform, from environmental and economic development and migration experiences to issues of nationalism and identity. But the largest issue explored is basic to all histories: How does one understand, teach, and write a national history even as one recognizes that the territorial boundaries do not fully contain that history and that within that bounded territory the society is highly differentiated, marked by multiple solidarities and identities?

Rethinking American History in a Global Age advances an emerging but important conversation marked by divergent voices, many of which are represented here. The various essays explore big concepts and offer historical narratives that enrich the content and context of American history. The aim is to provide a history that more accurately reflects the dimensions of American experience and better connects the past with contemporary concerns for American identity, structures of power, and world presence.

Author information

BenderThomas:

Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (1993), New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (1988), and Community and Social Change in America (1978) and the editor of The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (California, 1992).

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
PREFACE Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction. Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives Thomas Bender Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. HISTORICIZING THE NATION
1. Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories Prasenjit Duara Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2. Internationalizing International History Akira Iriye Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
3. Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age Charles Bright and Michael Geyer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
PART II. New Historical Geographies and Temporalities
4. International at the Creation: Early Modern American History Karen Ordahl Kupperman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
5. How the West Was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-Mapping of U.S. History Robin D. G. Kelley Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
6. Time and Revolution in African America: Temporality and the History of Atlantic Slavery Walter Johnson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	148
7. Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler Societies, and the Internationalization of American History Ian Tyrrell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	168
PART III. Opening the Frame
8. From Euro- and Afro-Atlantic to Pacific Migration System: A Comparative Migration Approach to North American History Dirk Hoerder Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
9. Framing U.S. History: Democracy, Nationalism, and Socialism Robert Wiebe Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	236
10. An Age of Social Politics Daniel T. Rodgers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	250
11. The Age of Global Power Marilyn B. Young Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	274
12. American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving End Rob Kroes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295
PART IV. The Constraints of Practice
13. Do American Historical Narratives Travel? François Weil Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	317
14. The Modernity of America and the Practice of Scholarship Winfried Fluck Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	343
15. The Exhaustion of Enclosures: A Critique of Internationalization Ron Robin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	367
16. The Historian’s Use of the United States and Vice Versa David A. Hollinger Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	381
APPENDIX. Participants in the La Pietra Conferences, 1997–2000 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	397
CONTRIBUTORS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	401
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	405