American history in a global age1
TL;DR: The authors argues that new methodological and historical work on the history of nations and nationalism has proven that nations are as real as any other historical group and that rejecting national history on critics' terms would require rejecting the history for all groups.
Abstract: Historians around the world have sought to move beyond national history. In doing so, they often conflate ethical and methodological arguments against national history. This essay, first, draws a clear line between the ethical and the methodological arguments concerning national history. It then offers a rationale for the continued writing of national history in general, and American history in particular, in today's global age.
The essay makes two main points. First, it argues that nationalism, and thus the national histories that sustain national identities, are vital to liberal democratic societies because they ensure the social bonds necessary to enable democratic citizens to sacrifice their immediate interests for the common good. The essay then argues that new methodological and historical work on the history of nations and nationalism has proven that nations are as real as any other historical group. Rejecting national history on critics' terms would require rejecting the history of all groups. Instead, new methods of studying nations and nationalism have reinforced rather than undermined the legitimacy of national history within the discipline.
Citations
More filters
Posted Content•
TL;DR: The history of American exceptionalist discourse, however, illuminates an ongoing process of identity-formation as Americans have sought to determine the place of their nation in the larger world as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Historians are generally hostile to the idea of “American exceptionalism.” The history of American exceptionalist discourse, however, illuminates an ongoing process of identity-formation as Americans have sought to determine the place of their nation in the larger world. This paper focuses on the provincial Anglo-American sources of exceptionalist discourse and emphasizes Britain’s continuing centrality to national identity through the nineteenth century. Though the debate over who “we” are will never be definitively resolved, the debate itself is vitally important in sustaining the legitimacy and capacity of the regime.
50 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In the early 19th century, most Americans were said to live in places dominated by face-to-face interactions and personal relationships as mentioned in this paper, and most residents seldom traveled more than a few miles from the place where they were born, had little contact with people from distant regions, and received little information about elite ideas or far-off events.
Abstract: Many of us who have studied early American history for some time are acutely aware that we have witnessed a 180-degree turn in the field. During the late 1970s and 1980s, when some of us were coming of age as historians, social history was in its heyday. The town or community study was regarded as the ideal form of analysis. Book after book and article after article stressed the relative isolation of early Americans. If "persistent localism" characterized Massachusetts towns in the seventeenth century, communal stability and local autonomy still remained the norm throughout the eighteenth century. In colonial Virginia, most residents, it was said, seldom journeyed more than a few miles from the place where they were born, had little contact with people from distant regions, and received little information about elite ideas or far-off events. Even into the first decades of the nineteenth century, as geographic mobility increased and urban areas grew in size, most Americans were said to live in places dominated by face-to-face interactions and personal relationships.1What a difference a couple of decades makes. By the 1980s and 1990s, historians had begun to look well beyond local communities as the basic unit of study. When they examined early America, what caught their attention was not the inhabitants' remoteness and isolation but their extensive connections and contacts with the larger world. Using this lens, historians who study the early American republic began to emphasize the importance of "imagined communities" and "public spheres" that linked people who were geographically distant from one another. Print culture circulated ideas, technology diminished isolation, the market economy created trading relationships, and shared rituals forged an expanded sense of community. These connections meant that even across vast expanses individuals could share a common political ideology, support the same movements for social change, or express a shared sense of American identity and nationalism.2At the same time, historians Jack P. Greene and Bernard Bailyn, among others, were promoting an even more capacious sense of the field. Taking their cue from Fernand Braudel's magisterial study of the Mediterranean and R. R. Palmer's brilliant Age of Democratic Revolution, they urged early American historians to broaden their research to include all the countries, regions, and areas that border the Atlantic Ocean. For historians of the early American republic, this approach produced a significant broadening of their geographic scope of inquiry. Instead of focusing solely on events within the borders of United States, or what became the United States in 1776, research in the field now encompasses everything from the African slave trade and the growth of trans-Atlantic abolitionism; to the many-faceted connections between the French, Haitian, and American Revolutions; to the role of European powers and indigeneous peoples in the borderlands of North America. "Hemispheric history," which examines connections and comparisons between events in Latin America and the early United States, has also received greater attention.3Now the "global turn" has arrived. At least since the 1990s, the growth of transnational corporations, the emergence of the Internet, the increasing importance of global exchanges of capital, and the expansion in international terrorism have made globalization a ubiquitous concept in both the popular and scholarly literature. Hoping to bring the past into conversation with the present, historians have sought to address the historical origins, antecedents, and development of this phenomenon. Long before the twentieth century, it is clear, ideas were in circulation; goods and capital flowed around the world; animals, plants, and germs constantly moved between and among societies. National boundaries were not fixed, but were fluid and permeable. Individuals living in the past were not parochial residents of a face-to-face society but cosmopolitan adventurers or citizens of the world. …
31 citations
TL;DR: The history of American exceptionalist discourse, however, illuminates an ongoing process of identity formation as Americans have sought to determine the place of their nation in the larger world as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Historians are generally hostile to the idea of “American exceptionalism.” The history of American exceptionalist discourse, however, illuminates an ongoing process of identity formation as Americans have sought to determine the place of their nation in the larger world. This article focuses on the provincial Anglo-American sources of exceptionalist discourse and emphasizes Britain’s continuing centrality to national identity through the nineteenth century. Although the debate over who “we” are will never be definitively resolved, the debate itself is vitally important in sustaining the legitimacy and capacity of the regime.
27 citations
01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: In this article, el primer ensayo de esta serie analiza aquella protesta provincial against los impuestos de la metropoli, que se convirtio en guerra civil and, mas tarde, en la primera Guerra de independencia, registrando not only a las 13 colonias que se independizaron, sino tambien a los territorios y pobladores que permanecieron leales a la Corona.
Abstract: El primer ensayo de esta serie analiza aquella protesta provincial —tan frecuente— contra los impuestos de la metropoli, que se convirtio en guerra civil y, mas tarde, en la primera guerra de independencia. David Armitage situa este conflicto dentro del Imperio britanico atlantico, registrando no solo a las 13 colonias que se independizaron, sino tambien a los territorios y pobladores que permanecieron leales a la Corona. Desde esta perspectiva, la experiencia se vuelve comparable con los procesos del Atlantico hispanico, dejando de ser un evento aislado. De esta manera, es posible discutir sobre la influencia global de la gran innovacion que fue crear Estados a partir de un Imperio.
19 citations
TL;DR: The expansion of slavery on the North American continent under the newly independent United States was both remarkable and unprecedented as mentioned in this paper. But in doing so, historians tend to neglect the presence, persistence, and significance of the slavery and empires that predated the expansion of the United States into the continental interior.
Abstract: The expansion of slavery on the North American continent under the newly independent United States was both remarkable and unprecedented. In 1770, European settlers, European empires, and African American slaves had only the barest presence west of the Appalachians. While scattered settlements of European Americans held slaves in places such as the British Illinois country, British West Florida, and Spanish Louisiana, African American slavery on the North American continent was largely confined to the strip of British colonies that hugged the Atlantic Coast. Outside of the Chesapeake and Low Country plantation cores, there were seven times as many slaves in the northern colonies (47,000) than there were in the entire Ohio and Mississippi Valleys and along the Gulf Coast (7,000). Finally, while European empires staked claims to the trans-Appalachian West, Native Americans continued to control the vast interior of the North American continent. Over the next half century, the expansion of European American sovereignty and African American slavery would produce dramatic changes in the continental interior. By 1820, the United States exercised sovereignty over the long contested Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri Valleys. It also oversaw an enormous empire for slavery that stretched from the Chesapeake to Florida, from the Atlantic to the Missouri, and from the Gulf of Mexico to St. Louis and the Illinois country.1Historians typically attribute the growth of slavery in the continental interior to the emergence of an independent United States and the dominance of the federal government by southern planters and their partisan allies. As slaveholders from the Atlantic states sought to exploit the advantages offered by growing demand for cotton and sugar, they used the powers of the federal government to create a western empire for slavery that provided new lands for plantations and new markets for slaves. In many ways, the literature on slavery and expansion in the early republic remains exceptionalist and nationalist in that it analyzes the growth of slavery in the interior of the North American continent as a uniquely American phenomenon, occurring in distinctively American places and historical periods, and involving the westward expansion of American institutions and peoples. Over the past decade, historians have moved beyond the confines of the United States as both nation and nation-state by situating the growth of slavery in broader Atlantic and imperial worlds, and by highlighting the resistance of Native Americans and African Americans to slavery's expansion. But despite these additions the expansion and growth of slavery in an ill-defined trans-Appalachian West remains a phenomenon linked closely with the westward expansion of the United States.2 Treating the expansion of slavery as a phenomenon that was concomitant with the emergence of an independent United States and assuming that the United States was exceptional in its commitment to encouraging slavery's growth and expansion create numerous interpretive problems. Historians typically begin their analyses of expansion with the flurry of ordinances passed and rejected by the United States in the 1780s. But in doing so, historians tend to neglect the presence, persistence, and significance of the slavery and empires that predated the expansion of the United States into the continental interior. At the same time, by focusing on the changes wrought by the expansion of the United States, historians have minimized the significant continuities that characterized slavery's growth and expansion from the 1760s through the 1810s under French, Spanish, British, and American regimes. Other problems abound. Even as historians have emphasized the significance of growing Atlantic world demand for cotton and sugar in driving slavery's expansion into the southern interior, they have isolated the growth of slavery from other factors that shaped the history of the interior of the North American continent. …
11 citations