Authors: Thomas Bender
ISBN-13: 9780520230583, ISBN-10: 0520230582
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of California Press
Date Published: May 2002
Edition: 1st Edition
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).
"
In One eloquent essay after another, some of the wisest historians of our time write American history in a grand cosmopolitan context. From the era of discovery to the present, histories that we thought we knewof labor, of race relations, of politics, of gender relations, of diplomacy, of ethnicityare more richly understood when causes and consequences are traced throughout the globe. One emerges invigorated, ready to welcome a new American history for a new international century."Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship
"Rethinking American History in a Global Age is an extremely stimulating and thought-provoking collection of essays written by leading historians who offer wider contexts for illuminating the traditional themes and issues of American national history. Particularly impressive is the book's combination of caution and original, sometimes daring insights."David Brion Davis, author of
In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery
"For decades American historians have been urging one another to place our culture in comparative or transnational perspective. Thomas Bender's unique volume includes not only essays theorizing such efforts and essays exemplifying such work at its most successful and its most provocative, it also provides more skeptical assessments questioning whether American historians can meet the challenge of overcoming our longstanding national preoccupations. Rethinking American History in a Global Age is an indispensable book that will shape the work of a rising generation of historians whose horizons will extend beyond our own shores."James T. Kloppenberg, author of The Virtues of Liberalism
Preface | ||
Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives | 1 | |
Pt. I | Historicizing the Nation | 23 |
1 | Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories | 25 |
2 | Internationalizing International History | 47 |
3 | Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age | 63 |
Pt. II | New Historical Geographies and Temporalities | 101 |
4 | International at the Creation: Early Modern American History | 103 |
5 | How the West Was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-Mapping of U.S. History | 123 |
6 | Time and Revolution in African America: Temporality and the History of Atlantic Slavery | 148 |
7 | Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler Societies, and the Internationalization of American History | 168 |
Pt. III | Opening the Frame | 193 |
8 | From Euro- and Afro-Atlantic to Pacific Migration System: A Comparative Migration Approach to North American History | 195 |
9 | Framing U.S. History: Democracy, Nationalism, and Socialism | 236 |
10 | An Age of Social Politics | 250 |
11 | The Age of Global Power | 274 |
12 | American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving End | 295 |
Pt. IV | The Constraints of Practice | 315 |
13 | Do American Historical Narratives Travel? | 317 |
14 | The Modernity of America and the Practice of Scholarship | 343 |
15 | The Exhaustion of Enclosures: A Critique of Internationalization | 367 |
16 | The Historian's Use of the United States and Vice Versa | 381 |
App | Participants in the La Pietra Conferences, 1997-2000 | 397 |
Contributors | 401 | |
Index | 405 |