American History in a Global AGE1

History and Theory 50 (February 2011), 1-70 © Wesleyan University 2011 ISSN: 0018-2656 amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age1 JoHaNN N. Neem Without common ideas, there is no common action, and without common action, men may still exist, but they will not constitute a social body.2 —alexis de tocqueville 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. Keywords: nations, nationalism, national history, globalization, world history, atlantic history, cosmopolitanism, pluralism We live in an age of globalization, or so we hear constantly. the formation of global economic and information networks, as well as the development of global political, economic, and civil society institutions, means that all of us are now shaped by and involved in communities that transcend our national borders. many historians have embraced the globalization paradigm and proclaimed that the era 1. an early draft of this paper was presented in 2007 to the centre for the Study of Historical consciousness at the University of british columbia. I thank Peter Seixas for his invitation, and michel ducharme for his comments on that occasion. gary gerstle and allan megill spurred me to think through some difficult questions. thomas bender graciously responded to an earlier version with constructive comments. conversations with Kate destler and a. ricardo lópez were essential to refining my argument. I also thank thomas Fallace, Patrice Higonnet, david Hollinger, aaron Sheehan-dean, rogers Smith, mart Stewart, John tambornino, and History and Theory’s editors. the views expressed are my own. 2. alexis de tocqueville, Democracy in America, transl. arthur goldhammer [1835, 180] (New york: library of america, 200), 89. 2 JoHaNN N. Neem of national history is over.3 ever since david m. Potter warned that nations can use historians as tools, american historians have been rightly wary of an uncritical alliance between historical writing and nationalism. globalization offers historians of the United States the opportunity to liberate themselves from the national box. essay after essay, book after book, criticizes the tradition of national history writing and celebrates the perspectives gained from a transnational vantage point. other works turn to regional or local studies that examine groups that have been below the national narrative’s radar screen. Few have stopped to mourn the passing of national history. even fewer have stepped up to defend it. given the deep tradition of national history within the american historical profession, however, historians must address its benefits as well as its flaws before deciding whether to continue it. by taking account of both the ethical implications and the methodological innovations that historians have brought to the study of national history, this essay makes a case for the continued importance of national history in a global age. It begins with an exploration of two of the most important ethical critiques of the american national history tradition: the cosmopolitan and the pluralist critiques. the issue for both is identity, namely which identity historians ought to support: a national identity; a universal, cosmopolitan human identity; or the multiple alternative identities people hold, including those concerned with race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and religion. critics of national history assume rightly that the writing, reading, and teaching of history play a fundamental role in shaping the identities—the self-conceptions—of history’s consumers. Here historians are concerned with what Kwame anthony appiah has called the “ethics of identity” and its relationship to the historical craft.5 3. akira Iriye, “the Internationalization of History,” American Historical Review 9, no. 1 (1989), 1-10; Ian tyrrell, “american exceptionalism in an age of International History,” American Historical Review 96, no.  (1991), 1031-55; Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800, ed. Stefan berger, mark donovan, and Kevin Passmore (london and New york: routledge, 1999); organization of american Historians, The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession, ed. thomas bender (http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/final.html [accessed September 27, 2010]); eric Foner, “american Freedom in a global age,” American Historical Review 106, no. 1 (2001), 1-16; Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. thomas bender (berkeley: University of california Press, 2002); dorothy ross, “liberalism and american exceptionalism,” Intellectual History Newsletter 2 (2002), 72-83; c. a. bayly et al., “aHr conversation: on transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006), 11-16; raymond grew, “expanding Worlds of World History,” Journal of Modern History 78 (2006), 878-898; carl J. guarneri, America in the World: United States History in Global Context (New york: mcgraw-Hill, 2007); Stefan berger, “towards a global History of National Historiographies,” in Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective, ed. Stefan berger (basingstoke, UK: Palgrave macmillan, 2007), 1-29; christopher grasso and Karin Wulf, “Nothing Says ‘democracy’ like a Visit from the Queen: reflections on empire and Nation in early american Histories,” Journal of American History 95, no. 3 (2008), 76781. See also the Journal of American History’s two special issues on transnational history edited by david thelen, JAH 86, no. 2 (September 1999) and 86, no. 3 (december 1999). . david m. Potter, “the Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” American Historical Review 67, no.  (1962), 92-950. See also arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Nationalism and History,” Journal of Negro History 5, no. 1 (1969), 19-31. 5. Kwame anthony appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). For a recent critical appraisal of the effort to connect historical scholarship with identity formation, see allan megill, “Historical representation, Identity, allegiance,” in Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts, ed. Stefen berger et al. (New york: berghahn books, 2008), 19-3. amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 3 this essay argues for the continued value of national history by invoking michael Walzer’s distinction between thin and thick languages. thin language, Walzer writes, is composed of liberalism’s abstract claims about human dignity and freedom. It reminds us of the rights belonging to all human beings and our obligation to care for all persons. Nonetheless, Walzer argues, our deepest commitments emerge in real communities through thick language, the specific and rich histories of the particular communities to which we belong.6 even as post-national historians seek to move us to thinner, less robust notions of national community, this essay concludes that americans and the world continue to need thick national histories that appeal to a particular political community’s shared past and symbols. calls to move beyond national history are as much methodological as ethical, however. critics argue that national narratives hide more than they reveal. the final sections of this paper respond that nations are as real (and are thus as legitimate objects of historical inquiry) as any other group. despite the hope of some scholars that studies of the historical processes of nation-making would weaken the nation’s hold over us, recent work has shown how the nation became a social fact. Unless historians are willing to abandon the study of groups, nations remain a legitimate lens through which to view the past. Nationalism may be distinct from liberalism, but liberal democracy, this essay argues, requires nationalism; the two are historically and theoretically intertwined. Historically, liberal democracy has presupposed bounded territorial communities. In liberal theory from John locke to John rawls, individuals in the state of nature did not create global communities but particular polities with territorial limits—hence the discussion of the status of foreigners in locke’s Second Treatise.7 theoretically, nationalism and liberalism were and remain premised on similar assumptions about the integrity of the interior moral life of the individual person or nation-state, and the need for rights—among individuals within a polity and among states in the international arena—to protect this integrity.8 the liberal model of the nation-state also exerts power in the modern world by determining the form groups must take if they wish to be recognized by the existing world order. aspiring to sovereignty, therefore, requires giving expression to the international community’s presuppositions about what makes a legitimate nation.9 although directed primarily to historians of the United States, many of whom also consider themselves american, this essay’s concerns are not limited to amer6. michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre dame, IN: University of Notre dame Press, 199). 7. craig calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (london: routledge, 2007), chap. 2. For a discussion of liberalism and community, see michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New york: cambridge University Press, 1982). 8. Jean bethke elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New york: basic books, 2008); Prasenjit duara, “Imperialism and Nationalism in the twentieth century,” in Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2003), 1-16; Nicholas onuf and Peter S. onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 200); charles taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (durham, Nc: duke University Press, 200), chap. 8. 9. calhoun, Nations Matter; duara, “Imperialism and Nationalism”; Peter S. onuf, “Nations, revolutions, and the end of History,” in Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World, ed. michael morrison (lanham, md: rowman and littlefeld, 200), 173-188, esp. 183-86. See also John rawls, The Law of Peoples (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999).  JoHaNN N. Neem ican historians. It addresses broader ethical and methodological questions that concern all practicing historians. It responds to a global examination of the relationship between national history and power and whether historians, by carving up the world into national units, have imposed and naturalized the nation in ways that limit the possibility for a better future and a more accurate understanding of the past. In the spirit of the essay’s central argument, I believe that by speaking as an american and as a historian of the United States, my argument will resonate more deeply among non-americans and non-americanists who struggle with similar issues in their own national and disciplinary communities. I Nations form the dominant paradigm by which we organize the past. History departments offer jobs and courses in the histories of specific nations; researchers are trained to write within specific national historical traditions. The problem with this structure, cosmopolitan critics of national history argue, is that american historians and, more important, the readers they reach and the students they teach, learn to think of the nation as a natural framework for dividing humanity. rather than consider humanity a single whole, historians are part of the process that divides the world into competing peoples. to such critics as akira Iriye, historians should instead start “thinking of american history not just as national history, or even as part of transatlantic history, but also as an aspect of human history.” In fact, to Iriye, any effort “to confirm local, national, or cultural distinctions is counter to the ideal of internationalization.”10 William mcNeill considers the ideal of “national ethnic unity” to be “barbarous.”11 In their recent collection about national historical writing in europe, Stefan berger and his co-authors agree, warning today’s historians about “the fallacies and dangers of any attempt to provide historical legitimacy to forms of national identity,” and concluding that “historians today would do well not to continue the unholy alliance with governments and states in constructing diverse forms of national identity.”12 10. Iriye, “Internationalization of History,” 3. See also thomas bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New york: Hill and Wang, 2006); guarneri, America in the World; William H. mcNeill, “mythistory, or truth, myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (1986), 1-10. For theoretical arguments in favor of abandoning national identity from a cosmopolitan perspective, see Jürgen Habermas, “citizenship and National Identity: Some reflections on the Future of europe,” Praxis International 12, no. 1 (1992), 1-19; Habermas, “the european Nation-State—Its achievements and Its limits. on the Past and Future of Sovereignty and citizenship,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. gopal balakrishnan (london and New york: Verso, 1996), 281-28; martha c. Nussbaum, For Love of Country?, ed. Joshua cohen (boston: beacon Press, 2002); Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, 2nd ed. (New Haven: yale University Press, 200); george Kateb, “Is Patriotism a mistake?,” in Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven: yale University Press, 2006), 3-20. recently, martha Nussbaum has modified her initial position rejecting nationalism and national history outright, arguing instead that a certain level of collective identity is permissible in liberal democracies. See Nussbaum, “toward a globally Sensitive Patriotism,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008), 78-93. 11. William H. mcNeill, Poly-Ethnicity and National Unity in World History (toronto: University of toronto Press, 1986), 59. 12. Stefan berger, mark donovan, and Kevin Passmore, “apologias for the Nation-state in Western europe since 1800,” in Writing National Histories, 13. amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 5 No historian of the United States has been more committed to moving american national history to a cosmopolitan framework than thomas bender. In his edited collection Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) and his recent book A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006), bender argues that by privileging one set of people (one’s co-nationals) over others we make unethical distinctions between ourselves and the rest of the world. at a time of “heightened awareness of both transnational connections and particularistic solidarities,” or globalism and pluralism, bender urges american historians to tell new stories that can make better sense of our place in the world.13 bender hopes that globalization will allow us to embrace the universal. americans, bender writes, should not be just “proud nationals” but also “humble citizens of the world.”1 Historians should write narratives that emphasize the interconnectedness of the human species instead of those that carve us up into distinct clans. He accuses national historians of “a narrow parochialism at a time when we need a wider cosmopolitanism.”15 bender worries that cosmopolitan history will not have a constituency in a world still defined by nation-states. Thus, pragmatically, he advocates not abandoning national history but making it a “history within a larger history, a history among histories.” By rendering American history a subfield in world history, bender hopes to appeal to existing readers’ nationalism while also transforming them into “rooted cosmopolitans, not nationalists.”16 In other words, bender recognizes a continued role for nation-states (and thus for national history) but hopes to reframe our national identities and national narratives so that our starting point is the globe rather than our own parochial community. If all human beings are equally worthy of our respect, bender argues, why should we reinforce particularism over human solidarity? 13. thomas bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Rethinking American History, 1-2. 1. bender, A Nation among Nations, 1. 15. Ibid., 3. bender did not initially urge historians to take the globe as context. In the mid-1980s, he was more concerned that post-1960s scholarship threatened to fragment the possibility for synthetic narrative, and thus for social unity. local studies and studies of various social groups abounded, bender then noted, but historians feared writing a new national narrative that, while inclusive of these various groups, also provided a shared story for all americans. In his 1986 “Wholes and Parts,” bender acknowledged that the nation-state remained the dominant paradigm for historical writing but hoped that historians would construct a more cohesive national narrative. He proposed then “a national synthesis, but with ‘the nation’ understood in a new way, as the ever changing, always contingent outcome of a continuing contest among social groups and ideas for the power to define public culture, thus the nation itself.” bender then suggested that competing synthetic national narratives are vital to democratic civic life because they offer “images of society” that allow self-reflection. In A Nation of Nations bender extends his concern for how to connect parts to wholes beyond the nation to how nation-states (parts) fit together in a global context (whole). thomas bender, “Wholes and Parts: the Need for Synthesis in american History,” Journal of American History 73, no. 1 (1986), 120-136, quoted at 122, 126. as editor of the Journal of American History, david thelen organized a roundtable in response to bender’s call for synthesis in which skeptical appraisals were offered by Nell Painter, richard Wrightman Fox, and roy rosenzweig, all of whom worried that a synthetic narrative would favor certain groups (those with power) over others. See Journal of American History 7, no. 1 (1987), 107-130. 16. thomas bender, “the boundaries and constituencies of History,” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006), 267-282; bender, A Nation among Nations. 6 JoHaNN N. Neem Pluralists approach the world from a different perspective than do cosmopolitan critics of national history. rather than assume a universal history, they worry that any master narrative, including those like bender’s that posit a universal humanity, will threaten people’s other identities. In Prasenjit duara’s words, “the process of remaking people according to alien (modern) values—often violently—is a form of cultural imperialism.”17 Inspired by michel Foucault’s theory of power, pluralists view national narratives as a way of disciplining a social body and of writing out the margins.18 david thelen, the former editor of the Journal of American History, argues that national histories arose alongside nation-states and serve to legitimize and reinforce nation-states’ authority: “History was invented and has largely served to provide stories that link individuals to the nation—to make the nation seem a logical or desirable or inevitable fulfillment of experiences for diverse individuals.” thelen is critical of a historical tradition whose primary function, as he sees it, is to reinforce the american nation-state’s political power. He condemns professional historians who, in the latter nineteenth century, sought to eradicate americans’ plural identities in order to forge national unity through a common national narrative. Instead, thelen hopes that globalization has taught us that our identities are shaped within multiple communities within and across national borders. He urges historians to focus on the experiences of individuals and groups that do not fit into national narratives. Historians should be pluralists, celebrating the diverse identities of peoples in the past. National histories, he argues, impose a common narrative over a given territory, silencing groups that do not fit in. In essence, Thelen concludes that national history is unethical because it delegitimizes the more authentic identities of ordinary people. Invoking mexican immigrants who live and have familial and economic ties on both sides of the U.S.–mexico border, thelen reminds us that such people’s histories cannot be told through the lens of either american or mexican history. by refusing to speak with, to, and for such populations, historians rob these groups of their past. National historiography simply cannot capture the complex identities of those living in the borderlands, in the spaces between nations, groups that are becoming increasingly common in a mobile global society.19 the debate over the ethics of national history (and thus national identity) is complex. Scholars continue to argue over whether nation-states and their corresponding national identities help humans flourish and whether they can be justified in liberal societies.20 Historians too must consider the ethical benefits of 17. duara, “Imperialism and Nationalism in the twentieth century,” 18-19. 18. duara, “Imperialism and Nationalism in the twentieth century”; duara, “transnationalism and the challenge to National Histories,” in Rethinking American History, 25-6; and duara, “Postcolonial History,” in A Companion to Western Historical Thought, ed. lloyd Kramer and Sarah maza (oxford: blackwell, 2002), 17-31. See also Stuart Hall, “Who Needs Identity?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Hall and Paul du gay (london and thousand oaks, ca: Sage Publications, 1996), 1-17. 19. david thelen, “making History and making the United States,” Journal of American Studies 32, no. 3 (1998), 373-397. on this point, see also carroll Smith-rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 2010).For a good example of such a borderlands history for an earlier period, see brian delay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War (New Haven: yale University Press, 2008). 20. For important introductions to this debate, see Nussbaum, For Love of Country?; calhoun, amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 7 national history along with its costs. So far, historical journals have given more prominence to national history’s critics, perhaps because our profession favors the new over the old, or perhaps because we have accepted their critiques without fully recognizing what is lost when we abandon national history. as historians concerned about the ethical implications of our practice, however, we deserve to hear both sides of the debate. two questions emerge from american national history’s critics. First, are we justified in favoring certain groups over others if we believe that all human beings are created equal? Second, if we can favor certain groups over others, should nation-states be one of them? the place to begin answering these questions is with a recognition that communities are ethically important because they shape our identities and our conception(s) of the good. this is a sociological fact of human existence. Who we are is closely connected to the communities to which we belong.21 Nation-states, including the United States, are not just voluntary communities, of course. National identity is reinforced by law, in schools, through patronage of the arts, and by managing movement between borders. Nation-states seek to shape the identities of their citizens in order to forge and to sustain a territorial community over time. In reinhold Niebuhr’s characterization, “nations are territorial societies, the cohesive power of which is supplied by the sentiment of nationality and the authority of the state.”22 more recently, sociologist craig calhoun writes that nationalism “is the use of the category ‘nation’ to organize perceptions of basic human identities, grouping people together with fellow nationals and distinguishing Nations Matter; appiah, Ethics of Identity; The Morality of Nationalism, ed. robert mcKim and Jeff mcmahan (New york: oxford University Press, 1997). See also Seyla benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (the berkeley tanner lectures) (New york: oxford University Press, 2006). 21. this is the essential lesson learned from the communitarian critique of liberalism. See michael Walzer, “the communitarian critique of liberalism,” in New Communitarian Thinking: Persons, Virtues, Institutions, and Communities, ed. amitai etzioni (charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 52-70; Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice; robert N. bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (berkeley: University of california Press, 1985). See also duara, “transnationalism,” in Rethinking American History, 25-6; appiah, The Ethics of Identity; mcNeill, “mythistory.” For a critical assessment of the communitarian starting point, see Janna thompson, “community Identity and World citizenship,” in Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy, ed. daniele archibugi et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 179-197. 22. reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics [1932] (lousiville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 83. No recent critic of nationalism has achieved Niebuhr’s clarity or force. Niebuhr argues that even if individual people are capable of behaving morally, people in groups cannot. groups have “a collective egoism” that conflates group interest with ethical activity. Nationalism “transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism.” In other words, when we sacrifice our individual interests for those of the nation, we are in fact promoting our own egoistic interests without acknowledging them since we are in turn served by the nation; national interests are no less just and good in the international arena than individual interests within a society, yet we treat citizens who promote the national interest as heroes. Justice is universal, but nations ask a citizen to limit its application to particular groups within the world, to act as if our own “special and unique community” is one that “embodies universal values and ideals.” Niebhur extended his analysis to the relations between classes within a nation. Not only do nations serve their own collective interests against those of other nations, but often within nations the privileged classes serve themselves and use nationalism to secure the loyalty of the lower classes. Whether to nation or class, group loyalties interfere with the universal dictates of justice (Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, esp. 83-112, quotes at xxv, 91, 95). 8 JoHaNN N. Neem them from members of other nations.”23 americans have invested vast resources to ensure that the United States is not just a site of history but is also an imagined community. National history is one major prop in this enterprise. In any kind of community a shared history forges a shared identity by connecting our present lives to a collective story that constitutes who we are.2 by emphasizing the teaching of national history, americans hope to sustain, or, in the case of immigrants, create, a common identity that connects past events that took place in a particular geography with the present generation. the importance we assign to this project was demonstrated during the 1990s “History Wars.” although many americans agree that we need to know more about our national past, we disagree about the particular narrative. When a team of scholars led by gary Nash unveiled a proposed set of voluntary national history standards for america’s schools, many americans balked. to critics, Nash’s standards favored formerly marginalized peoples rather than traditional stories; it had a critical edge that some americans found unsuitable for fostering national identity and patriotism. National history is so important to americans that the U.S. Senate took time out of its busy schedule to condemn the proposed standards. the debate between the standards’ advocates and their critics did not concern the legitimacy of national history; instead, both sides’ commitment to particular national narratives demonstrates their awareness of a link between how we speak about the past and who we are in the present. the power of history, in essence, is its ability to tell collective narratives that shape present identity.25 even if collective stories about the past shape identity, there is no reason that the relevant communities need be territorial nation-states. Identities depend on networks, as bender argues in one of his earlier works: “territorially based interaction represents only one pattern of community, a pattern that becomes less and less evident over the course of american history. a preoccupation with territory thus ultimately confuses our understanding of community.” He urges us to think about community as an experience rather than a place. to understand the communities in which individuals place themselves we must be attentive to the “network of social relations in which the individual is embedded” even when these networks transcend assumed territorial limits.26 Similarly, thomas Haskell argues that markets can generate feelings of responsibility between strangers separated by vast distances. Wondering how abolitionists connected their actions 23. calhoun, Nations Matter, 39. For a critical perspective, see rogers brubaker, “migration, membership, and the modern Nation-State: Internal and external dimensions of the Politics of belonging,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1, no. 1 (2010), 61-78. 2. on the role of stories in forging collective identities, see rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (cambridge, UK: cambridge University Press, 2003). the phrase “imagined community” is from benedict anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (london: Verso, 1983). 25. gary Nash et al. History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New york: Knopf, 1997); diane ravitch and arthur Schlesinger, “the New Improved History Standards,” Wall Street Journal (april 3, 1996). See also david lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage, and History,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John r. gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 199), 1-57; mcNeill, “mythistory.” 26. thomas bender, Community and Social Change in America (New brunswick, NJ: rutgers University Press, 1978), 6-7, 122. amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 9 to the sufferings of enslaved african americans, Haskell concludes that markets teach us “to attend to the remote consequences of one’s acts.” abolitionists argued that everyone involved in an economic system that sustains slavery is morally responsible for it, including Northern merchants, manufacturers, and consumers.27 today’s humanitarians who connect americans’ appetite for consumer goods with the exploitation of workers in distant countries are, by linking local activity to its distant consequences, also participating in a translocal community generated and connected by global markets. If identities can be forged in both territorial and non-territorial communities, why has nationalism emerged as the dominant form of historical identity? one reason is that the modern history discipline and modern nationalism arose together, and thus historical writing quickly oriented itself around nations.28 Since nation-states rely on their story being the dominant story within a territory, they have sought to ensure national history’s success. Simultaneously, the success of american nationalism infused historians with a desire to write the national story. yet human beings are members of multiple communities each of which may tell, and some of which do tell, their own stories. these stories can be sub-national, as in the case of some minority communities in the United States, or they can be transnational, as in the case of thelen’s mexican immigrants, some religious communities, such multinational corporations as general electric, or such international groups as greenpeace, amnesty International, and al-Qaeda. even if we are sociologically communal beings, then, there are many communities to which we may belong.29 the nation-state is just one of these actual and potential communities, and national history is just one of the actual and potential collective stories we can tell about the past. the question remains whether nations deserve our loyalty, and therefore whether it is legitimate for historians to continue to narrate national stories. 27. thomas l. Haskell, “capitalism and the origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985), 57-566, quoted at 560. 28. For a discussion of the relationship between the rise of nation-states and history, see allan Smith, “Seven Narratives in North american History: thinking the Nation in canada, Quebec and the United States,” in berger, ed., Writing the Nation, 63-83; duara, “transnationalism”; Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. anthony molho and gordon S. Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Joyce appleby, lynn Hunt, and margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New york: Norton, 199), 91-125. See also marcus gräser, “World History in a Nation-State: the transnational disposition in Historical Writing in the United States,” Journal of American History 95, no.  (2009), 1038-1052. 29. For a discussion concerning the tension between territorial national civic loyalty and that owed to transnational religious or other kinds of groups, see yael tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). tamir argues that nations are any communities with a shared past that can make legitimate claims on their members. Nations include, for example, the Irish or Jewish diaspora, even if their populations are scattered across the globe. Shared identities need not be limited to geographical spaces with political boundaries. In fact, tamir argues that nations and states must be separated from each other since, in tamir’s opinion, “most contemporary states are multinational and under these circumstances, the demand that a state should reflect one national culture entails harsh implications for members of minority groups” (10). In other words, individuals can choose their national identities independent of their state-based citizenship and civic obligations. tamir’s prescription favors what we would call transnational communities—which tamir labels “nations”—over territorial ones and would disconnect national identity from citizenship and the political rights and obligations that citizenship in a polity brings. 50 JoHaNN N. Neem americans need national history because liberal democratic politics depends on fostering territorial communities.30 National history’s critics assume that liberal democratic politics can survive even if our identities are turned toward the particular or the universal. yet, as charles taylor argues, democracies require “a strong form of cohesion” to be successful. liberal democracies depend on the willingness of citizens to play by the rules—for minorities to accept their losses, for majorities to respect the rights of minorities. In a democracy, persuasion must be used instead of force or violence to achieve one’s political goals. For a citizen to be willing to sacrifice his or her immediate goals she must consider herself part of an “ongoing collective agency,” taylor writes.31 In fact, taylor argues, without some emotional or affectionate bond—without nationalism—citizens will have little reason to put aside their immediate interests and desires for the good of the whole, including the rule of law: “only those with a supermuscular Kantian conscience would be willing to knuckle under to a majority with which they felt no links.”32 because democracies rely on voluntary consent they actually require from us “much more solidarity and much more commitment to one another in our joint political project than was demanded by the hierarchical and authoritarian societies of yesteryear.”33 like taylor, calhoun argues that democratic politics “requires thinking of ‘the people’ as active and coherent and oneself as both a member and an agent” and that liberal theory has always assumed, by necessity, the existence of a bounded people. even if liberalism’s values are universal, their implementation within a democratic framework, calhoun concludes, requires social solidarity: “democracy depends on social solidarity and social institutions. Neither is given to human beings as a matter of nature; they must be achieved through human imagination and action—in short, through history.” Nationalism provides the “cultural supports for social integration” without which democratic politics would be impossible.3 even if liberal democracies need cohesion between citizens—the kind provided by nationalism, and thus by national histories—this need cannot warrant the unjustifiable exclusion of minorities from the process of shaping what constitutes a democratic society’s national identity. taylor acknowledges that nation-states historically have committed violence against domestic minorities in order to forge national homogeneity. although nation-states always exclude those outside their borders from participating in their political processes, it is unjustifiable for liberal democratic societies to exclude domestic minorities simply to protect an existing national identity. Instead, national identities in a liberal democracy, including those depicted in the historical narratives we tell about ourselves, are constantly 30. although national identity may be a good in all kinds of societies, my discussion here is limited to the relationship between nationalism and liberal democracy. For the central importance of liberalism as a precondition for an ethically justifiable nationalism, see Nussbaum, “toward a globally Sensitive Patriotism.” 31. charles taylor, “No community, No democracy, Part 1,” The Responsive Community 13, no.  (2003), 17-27. 32. charles taylor, “liberal Politics and the Public Sphere,” in New Communitarian Thinking, 20. See also charles taylor, “Why democracy Needs Patriotism,” in For Love of Country, 119-21. 33. taylor, “No community, No democracy, Part 1.” 3. calhoun, Nations Matter, 17, 152. amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 51 made and remade by citizens engaged in deliberation: “Political identities have to be worked out, negotiated, creatively compromised between peoples who have to or want to live together under the same political roof.”35 taylor’s recognition that minorities have often been silenced in the process of nation-making is an important one that echoes pluralist critics of the american national history tradition. many critics of national history agree with thelen that the american liberal tradition has from its beginning been premised on erasing the presence of others—or, worse, as edmund morgan argued in his classic American Slavery, American Freedom, on defining itself against the other.36 rogers Smith’s study of american citizenship laws between the revolution and 1900, for example, concludes that since independence, americans have combined liberal universalism with such ascriptive identities as race, ethnicity, class, and gender. the american liberal tradition, from this perspective, has always been corrupted by illiberal assumptions.37 gary gerstle has found a similar tension between the universal aspects of liberal “civic nationalism” in the United States and the ethno-racial particularism of its application during the twentieth century.38 In his 2001 aHa presidential address, eric Foner suggested that the tension between american freedom’s universal promise to the world and its parochial application at home has been a constant in american history.39 one need not challenge these conclusions; they are unfortunately all too true. despite american liberalism’s claims to universal equality, it is undeniable that the history of american democracy has more than its share of illiberal assumptions about the economic, racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual bases for membership in the polity, and that these assumptions have spawned violence against targeted groups. the importance of the pluralist critique lies not in its rejection of national history, however, but in its effort to transform the american narrative.0 the story americans tell themselves about themselves is always changing. thanks in part to critical analyses of american history, many of which emerged as new people and ideas entered the profession in the 1960s and 1970s, today’s national narrative is much more aware of past abuses and wrongs, and much more inclusive. take, for example, gary Nash’s recent synthetic account of the american revolution, The Unknown American Revolution. Pulling together scholarship from the past thirty years, Nash examines how the revolution affected and was affected by the actions of Native americans, african americans, women, and laborers. 35. charles taylor, “No community, No democracy, Part 2,” The Responsive Community 1, no. 1 (2003–200), 15-25. See also calhoun, Nations Matter, 17-168. 36. edmund S. morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New york: Norton, 1975). See also ronald takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New york: oxford University Press, 1990) and, more recently, Smith-rosenberg, This Violent Empire. 37. rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: yale University Press, 1997). See also barbara young Welke, “law, Personhood, and citizenship in the long Nineteenth century: the borders of belonging,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America. Volume 2: The Long Nineteenth Century (1789–1920), ed. michael grossberg and christopher tomlins (New york: cambridge University Press, 2008), 35-386. 38. gary gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 39. Foner, “american Freedom in a global age.” 0. See, for example, gary gerstle, “liberty, coercion, and the making of americans,” Journal of American History 8, no. 2 (1997), 52-558. 52 JoHaNN N. Neem Nash’s story is critical of the ways in which americans have treated marginalized groups, but it is also an effort to reframe the revolution within national history. Its moral strength comes from its self-conscious effort to teach americans about themselves. In doing so it undermines older narratives about the revolution while reinforcing the strength of the national community. the past limits of american liberalism, then, are not a sufficient reason to reject writing national history but, if Nash is an example, a reason to write more of it.1 National history is a civic enterprise, and at least one of its goals is to bring americans together around shared stories, whether critical or celebratory. Nash’s book, as well as his own work in crafting national history standards, demonstrates that this effort need not lead to unthinking jingoism. there is, however, a danger to carrying the pluralist critique too far—as far as thelen and duara do, for example—because it could undermine the possibility of shared civic stories, and thus the possibility of national community. Nash instead asks us to rewrite national history, not to abandon it. He hopes we will embrace a more inclusive, and more democratic, national story. In Nash’s example, multiculturalism is not against nationalism, it is part of it.2 a truly democratic narrative would, as Nash argues, include many groups, but it would also seek to teach americans about themselves, reinforcing americans’ commitment to their nation. II National identity is not just a prerequisite for liberal democracy; it furthers the goals of social and economic justice within democratic societies by using national sentiment to urge citizens to sacrifice for a common good. Calhoun concludes that nationalism “helps mobilize collective commitment to public institutions, projects, and debates” and “encourages mutual responsibility across divisions of class and region.”3 Similarly, daniel bell argues that nations are “communities of memory” which “carry a moral tradition . . . which entails an obligation to sustain and promote the ideals and aspirations embedded in their history through memory and hope.” by binding individuals together via a common past and present, nations help individuals work collectively toward a common, better future. Unlike non-national group identities, american nationalism connects a territorial com- 1. gary b. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New york: Viking, 2005). See also Nash, “History for a democratic Society: the Work of all the People,” in Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education, ed. Paul gagnon and the bradley commission on History in Schools (New york: macmillan, 1989), 23-28. See Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, 15-16, on the ways in which competing particularistic (national) accounts of peoplehood can support and promote universal liberal ideals. 2. compare duara, “transnationalism,” and duara, “Postcolonial History” to Nash, “History for a democratic Society.” See also arthur m. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New york: Norton, 1992). 3. calhoun, Nations Matter, 17-19. . daniel bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics (New york: oxford University Press, 1993), 126. See also todd S. gitlin, “the Intellectuals and the Flag,” in The Intellectuals and the Flag (New york: columbia University Press, 2006), 125-156. amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 53 munity to the democratic state that governs it, allowing citizens to become participants in both a shared past and future. Nationalism can serve this important civic purpose because it is not just a coat one wears but is ideally constitutive of one’s identity. as calhoun notes, “tradition is not a kind of possession, a good to which people have a right so long as it doesn’t conflict with other more basic goods.” Instead, “culture is constitutive” of who we are, and this is no less true of nationalism than of any other cultural formation.5 bell argues that if individuals fail to live up to the moral ideals they inherit from their national tradition, “they lose a source of meaning and hope in their lives.” Nationalism, then, is not simply a source of social cohesion but, like all cultural forms, cohesion premised on deeply held identities. to bell, in fact, national identity can “provide the narrative unity of our lives.”6 Sheldon Wolin carries this point further, arguing that democratic politics requires us to accept our “birthright,” the ambiguous history of our own political community. collective political identities make possible “a citizen who can become an interpreting being, one who can interpret the past experience of the collectivity, reconnect it to past symbols, and carry it forward.”7 We are not born abstracted from community, but are inheritors of a communal tradition that, rightly understood, obliges us to our fellow citizens and enables us to imagine a shared, better future for which it is worth striving. essential to nationalism’s power is its ability to inspire shame. If we see ourselves as constituted by historical communities, and thus responsible to and for upholding the ideals espoused by our community’s moral traditions, we in turn feel ourselves responsible for its failures in the past and present and work to make good on our tradition’s promise in the future. this has spurred at least some american public intellectuals to re-engage with the american nation-state. richard rorty, for example, criticized the academic left for being “unpatriotic” by refusing “to rejoice in the country it inhabits.” contrasting early twentiethcentury pluralism with certain strains of contemporary multiculturalism, rorty argued that american intellectuals should not seek a nation divided into groups “at odds with one another.” Instead we must recognize that “a sense of shared identity is not an evil. It is an absolutely essential component of citizenship.” liberal politics relies on a national community that “has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it.” Progressive politics are especially reliant on nationalism. to feel shame at one’s nation’s failures requires one to identify with the nation-state, to see its failings as one’s own failings: “there is no contradiction between such identification and shame at the greed, the intolerance and the indifference to suffering that is widespread in the United States. on the contrary, you can feel shame over your country’s behavior only to the extent to which you feel it is your country.”8 5. calhoun, Nations Matter, 23. See also Samuel H. beer, “liberalism and the National Idea,” in Left, Right and Center: Essays on Liberalism and Conservatism in the United States, ed. robert a. goldwin (chicago: rand mcNally, 1967), 13-169, esp. 16-169. 6. bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, 126. See also Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, chap. 2. 7. Sheldon Wolin, “contract and birthright,” in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 11. 8. richard rorty, “the Unpatriotic academy,” New York Times (February 13, 199), 15. See 5 JoHaNN N. Neem one of the primary arguments against nation-states, and thus against national history, is that they exacerbate global poverty. but if we accept that human beings are always born into communities that shape their identities, nationalism has been and can be one of the strongest forces to counter economic and racial inequality. laborers have long relied on appeals to the nation to demand better working conditions and wealth distribution.9 the rev. martin luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists linked their calls for ending racial discrimination to the highest ideals of american democracy, helping their cause resonate with other americans. according to benjamin barber, “the american trick was to use the fierce attachments of patriotic sentiment to bond a people to high ideals.” It is love of country—and love of our fellow citizens—that makes us want to make the world a better place. Invoking Woody guthrie’s songs, barber asks, “is guthrie’s rooted love of america incompatible with justice? Hardly. In nearly every song he transmutes that love into a demand for justice.” the issue is not whether to be patriotic; it is whether we use nationalism to help the poor and needy within our midst.50 The economic benefits of nationalism are even more important in a globalizing era. as the world’s corporations increasingly carry out their production using global supply chains, there are few countervailing powers left on which workers can rely to challenge the power of large, rootless, cosmopolitan corporations. the one lever that still might work, however, is nationalism. to calhoun, nationalism offers “among the few viable forms of resistance to capitalist globalization.”51 Unless we wish to live in a world dominated by global corporations and their cosmopolitan managers, perhaps we should recognize, even celebrate, the important political work that nations and nationalism continue to do. one might counter that nation-states are not the ideal means to secure redistributive justice and to challenge exploitation precisely because corporations are no longer bound by national boundaries. the problem, however, is that “any effective scheme of distributive justice . . . presupposes a bounded world of people deeply committed to each other’s fate,” or a nation, if individuals are going to be willing to support also rorty, Achieving Our Country (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1998); rorty, “Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (cambridge, UK, and New york: cambridge University Press, 1991), 197-202; Stanley Fish, “but I didn’t do It!” New York Times (march 21, 2007); bruce ackerman, “rooted cosmopolitanism,” Ethics 10, no. 3 (199), 516-535. on the relationship between the left and nationalism, see mitchell cohen, “rooted cosmopolitanism: thoughts on the left, Nationalism, and multiculturalism,” Dissent (1992), 7883; Wolin, “contract and birthright”; Walzer, Thick and Thin, chap. ; bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, 12-155. 9. For the nineteenth century, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New york: oxford University Press, 198). For the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see gerstle, American Crucible, 139-155; gerstle, WorkingClass Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (cambridge, UK, and New york: cambridge University Press, 1989). See also michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New york: basic books, 1995); elisabeth clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (chicago: University of chicago Press, 1997), 100-1. 50. benjamin r. barber, “constitutional Faith,” in For Love of Country, 30-37. For a response that moves beyond the binary between nationalism and globalism, see ayelet Shachar, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009). 51. calhoun, Nations Matter, 11. amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 55 the taxes and regulatory schemes that help redistribute wealth and health between richer and poorer.52 although the majority of american historians, relying on professional inertia, continue to practice national history without defending it, gertrude Himmelfarb and david Hollinger have stepped up to support the relationship between national history and democratic politics. In a response to the cosmopolitan critique of nationalism offered by philosopher martha Nussbaum, Himmelfarb argues that democratic citizenship has no meaning outside the context of states. “this is not a quibble,” she writes. Nussbaum hopes “to ground a universal morality in a universal—and stateless—community. If nationality, as she says, is ‘morally irrelevant’ to the cosmopolitan ideal, so is the polity that defines the nation, and so is the idea of citizenship. and so too is all of history.”53 Historically, citizenship has always been premised in membership in a polity. absent a polity, Himmelfarb asks, what possibilities are left for citizenship? Hollinger agrees with Himmelfarb that national identity is a prerequisite of democratic citizenship because it fosters the emotional bonds that “appeal to a common destiny—to a sense that we, as americans, are all in it together,” continuing that nationalism “has been a vital element in the mobilization of state power on behalf of a number of worthy causes.” Solidarity enhances the possibility of social and economic justice within the United States because it appeals to a shared identity. Nationalism generates affections that inspire americans to care about the poor and the discriminated-against in their midst, and gives them a political context to address these problems. Nationalism, defined by citizenship rather than blood, “mediates between the species and those ethno-racial varieties of humankind represented within its borders,” Hollinger concludes.5 the nationstate’s boundaries create the commons in which we promote the common good. there remains a tension, however, between the universal values of liberalism and the parochial communities generated by territorial nation-states and sustained by national history.55 many of our most deeply held liberal commitments are universal in application: all people are created equal and are thus equally endowed with rights, dignity, and respect. can we reconcile liberal universalism with the sociological reality that communal identities are both a fact of human existence and necessary for democratic politics, connecting, to use bender’s framework, the parts (nations) to the whole (humanity)? this is an especially pertinent question 52. bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, 137. 53. gertude Himmelfarb, “the Illusions of cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country?, 7; Himmelfarb, “Is National History obsolete?,” in The New History and the Old (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1987), 121-12; see also Senya benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New york: routledge, 1992). 5. david a. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New york: basic books, 1995), 18 and 138; Hollinger, “the Historian’s Use of the United States and Vice Versa,” in Rethinking American History, 381-395. 55. on the tension between liberalism and national history, and a critique of using national history to foster patriotism, see, among others, Harry brighouse, “Should We teach Patriotic History?,” in Education and Citizenship in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, ed. Kevin mcdonough and Walter Feinberg (New york: oxford University Press, 2003), 157-175; Patrice Higonnet, Attendant Cruelties: Nation and Nationalism in American History (New york: other Press, 2007). 56 JoHaNN N. Neem given that nationalism does not inherently promote liberalism nor democracy but has, in such cases as Nazi germany and imperial Japan, as well as in the historical illiberal assumptions that shaped american democracy’s history, worked against it. Walzer offers us a path through this thicket by distinguishing between thin and thick languages.56 Walzer recognizes the moral priority of liberalism’s universal values but argues that our deepest commitments emerge in real communities. those who assume morality can best be understood by starting with abstract universal premises overlook the role of community in shaping and enabling our moral commitments. to Walzer, “morality is thick from the beginning, culturally integrated, fully resonant, and it reveals itself thinly only on special occasions, when moral language is turned to specific purposes.”57 the issue is not whether one can distinguish between thin and thick language—in theory, one can—but whether that distinction matters in people’s daily lives. Walzer suggests that those of us committed to liberalism’s universal values rely on thick culture to ensure that thin values resonate among the democratic citizens of particular nation-states. the key to Walzer’s discussion is the idea of resonance. “there are the makings of a thin and universalist morality inside every thick and particular morality,” Walzer argues. It is through the particular that the universal is made possible.58 National history is the source of americans’ thick language. It provides us a shared identity. Humanity as a whole is an abstraction to which we are weakly connected and to whom our bonds are mediated by the commitments we have to our own communities. “Societies are necessarily particular because they have members and memories, members with memories not only of their own but also of their common life,” Walzer argues, continuing, “humanity, by contrast, has members but no memories, and so it has no history and no culture, no customary practices, no familiar life-ways, no festivals, no shared understandings of social goods.”59 by appealing to a shared past, to common symbols, national history enables individuals to do the right thing by their fellow citizens, to contribute to justice, to fight poverty, and to provide aid to those in need. Without a shared culture our thin obligations—our universal values—would never gain our deep commitment. National identity and liberal universalism need not always be in conflict. It may be possible to be both “proud nationals” and “humble citizens of the world,” as bender proposes. the Founding Fathers thought that the nation must embody universal values, and thus that the american experiment was relevant for humanity, not just for themselves. they assumed that the particular and the universal would reinforce each other.60 Walzer too argues that thick narratives reinforce thin ob56. Walzer, Thick and Thin. See also Walzer, “What does It mean to be an ‘american’?,” Social Research 57, no. 3 (1990), 591-61; appiah, Ethics of Identity, 213-272. 57. Walzer, Thick and Thin, . 58. Ibid., xi. 59. Ibid., 8. 60. Seth cotlar, “reading the Foreign News, Imagining an american Public Sphere: radical and conservative Visions of ‘the Public’ in mid-1790s Newspapers,” in Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America, ed. mark l. Kamrath and Sharon m. Harris (Knoxville: University of tennessee Press, 2005), 307-338; cotlar, “the Federalists’ cultural offensive of 1798 and the moderation of american democratic discourse,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey l. Pasley, andrew W. robertson, and amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 57 ligations by making americans more capable of responding to others around the world. For example, Walzer writes, the demands for “justice” invoked by Prague’s 8 demonstrators resonated with Americans even if the specific meanings of justice would be understood and instituted differently within the two societies.61 It is precisely because americans’ thick traditions sustain certain values that appeals made on those values’ behalf from minorities or from people in other parts of the world resonate. cosmopolitan and other forms of transnational history aid this project by making clear how americans are affected by and affect the world, but cosmopolitan history will almost always be thin in nature. Subnational and transnational pluralist histories, on the other hand, are often thick in nature. every human being is part of myriad groups whose histories, traditions, and values are constitutive of his or her identity. these diverse identities might threaten democracy if they prevent citizens from relating to one another as members of a shared nation, but they can also be vital to sustaining freedom by ensuring that the national community does not have absolute dominion over our being. moreover, depending on the particular role a person is playing—historian, parent, church member—the self, as Walzer argues, “speaks with more than one moral voice.”62 Plural sources for personal identity and role-dependent moral obligations are particularly important in the context of nationalism because the nationstate is capable of coercion and violence in pursuit of its objectives. membership in other groups—including ethnic, religious, professional, and political interest groups—and an awareness of the obligations of one’s roles enables individuals to balance their deep identification with the nation against other goods that connect them to other human beings.63 Nonetheless, so long as human beings remain communal creatures who gain their commitments through thick traditions, american democracy and the demands of justice will depend on citizens sharing a common culture, and national history will remain a legitimate means to this worthy end. III calls to move beyond national history do not just concern identity, however, but also historians’ professional obligation to get the past right. this is what distinguishes us from those who invoke the past for other purposes, including commemoration.6 From daniel t. rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings to more recent work david Waldstreicher (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 200), 27-302; onuf and onuf, Nations, Markets, and War; gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New york: Knopf, 1992), 221-225. For a thought-provoking discussion of the complex interrelationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism during the era of the american and French revolutions, see Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution (charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 61. Walzer, Thick and Thin, 1-3. 62. Ibid., 85. 63. It is worth noting that a similar process works for all groups. National identities can check the dangers of other moral traditions and communities, including religious ones, that may otherwise become totalitarian. 6. lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage, and History”; michael Kammen, “History is our Heritage: the Past in contemporary american culture,” in In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (New york: oxford University Press, 1997), 213-225; History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, ed. edward t. linenthal and tom engelhardt (New 58 JoHaNN N. Neem emphasizing international and/or transatlantic connections, historians suggest that the national box cannot capture the basic causes that produce historical effects.65 For example, mae m. Ngai argues that the nation-centeredness of both the way americans conceptualize immigration and the legal regime that shapes and sustains those conceptions enables americans to imagine migrants as voluntary agents, whereas a transnational perspective would recognize that global migration is shaped by the disproportionate power of and relations between different nation-states. migrants come to the U.S. in part because of america’s relations with the world—migration is both cause and effect.66 the concern here is whether the close connection between national history and the nation-state has artificially distorted how historians have constructed their interpretations. In A Nation among Nations bender writes that from the moment of european contact with the New World—if not before—american history has been part of a larger global history. Historians must accept the “transnational nature of national histories. National histories are part of global histories; each nation is a province among the provinces that make up the world.”67 bender recognizes that nationstates have played too large a role in world history to be ignored, but, he argues, “the nation cannot be its own historical context.” this is an extremely important methodological claim. Historians have long assumed that the importance of their studies lies in their ability to alter parts of the national story. bender believes that historians must think beyond the nation as they contextualize the historiographical importance of their work. by conceptualizing american history as part of global history, historians will better understand the political, economic, social, and intellectual forces that have shaped the development of the modern world, including the United States. If they impose artificial national boundaries on their objects of study, however, historians will fail in their mission to explain the causes and the effects of past actions. “History and humanity are not in fact enclosed in boxes, whether national, ethnic, local, or continental,” bender concludes: “good empirical history ought to reflect this truth; it then proffers, as well, a fundamental ethical principle.”68 york: metropolitan books, 1996). See also allan megill, “History, memory, Identity,” History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 3 (1998), 37-62; yosef Hayim yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory [1982] (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). 65. daniel t. rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1998). examples include delay, War of a Thousand Deserts; leslie butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 2007); david armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2007); Ian tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Houndmills, UK, and New york: Palgrave macmillan, 2007); guarneri, America in the World; mae m. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 200). 66. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, esp. 26. See also matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New york: Hill and Wang, 2000). For a perspective that combines international perspectives with a focus on national politics, see carl J. bon tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 67. bender, A Nation among Nations, ix. 68. Ibid., 301. See also bender, Rethinking American History, 11-12. amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 59 Whereas bender urges historians to reframe narratives in a global context, thelen asks us to begin with “individuals instead of nations.”69 Historical interpretation should emerge from the bottom up, from how individuals conceptualize their own identities and from the communities to which they claim to belong. globalization has made us aware of the artificiality of national borders. Thelen urges us now to question the longstanding assumption that the historical experiences of people can be captured by national narratives. globalization has unleashed a plurality of experiences across and within national borders that must now be understood. Our interpretations must be crafted to better reflect better how ordinary people conceptualize their own lives. to the extent that transnational and sub-national histories help us better understand U.S. history, national historians should welcome them. to extent that they help us understand the history of the world, all historians must of course embrace them. but there remains a difference between understanding the relationship between the american nation-state and the world and vice-versa, which continues to place the american nation-state front and center, and assuming either that american history is, in bender’s framing, a province of world history or, as thelen concludes, a violation of individual integrity. From the perspective of national history, the nation remains the center of historiography. Is this methodologically justifiable? The answer is “yes” because national history and the identity it sustains are no more real or artificial than cosmopolitan or ethnic/racial/gender/class histories and identities. cosmopolitans ignore the fact that cosmopolitanism, like any other group identity, is an identity. all identities are premised on their relationship with other identities. there can be therefore no universal identity, and thus no universal framework for historical writing so long as historians continue to write about human communities. cosmopolitans are in this sense no less provincial than other groups—they are a group.70 cosmopolitan identity, first, relies on a conception of humanity abstracted from the communities to which actual individuals belong. as Himmelfarb writes, “to pledge one’s ‘fundamental allegiance’ to cosmopolitanism is to try to transcend not only nationality but all the actualities, particularities, and realities of life that constitute one’s natural identity.”71 more important, like nationalism, cosmopolitanism is a narrative project, a historical story that we tell ourselves in order to create the identity we prefer. as michael lang argues, the narrative of globalization emerged from the study of economics, reinforces the autonomy of economics from politics, and ultimately promotes a neoliberal economic agenda by framing market interdependence as a natural, rather than historically defined and ever-changing, phenomenon. In other words, contemporary cosmopolitanism is susceptible to a 69. thelen, “making History and making the United States,” 395. See also roy rosenzweig and david thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New york: columbia University Press, 1998). 70. benhabib, Situating the Self; craig calhoun, “the class consciousness of Frequent travelers: toward a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no.  (2002), 869-897; calhoun, Nations Matter, 165-167. more generally, see edward Said, Orientalism (New york: Vintage, 1979). 71. Himmelfarb, “Illusions of cosmopolitanism,” 77. See also michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New york: Farrar, Straus and giroux, 2009), 208-269. 60 JoHaNN N. Neem critique much like the one it makes about national history: if national history’s cosmopolitan critics claim that the nation distorts history by providing artificially circumscribed narratives, lang and others teach us that that the contemporary presumption of a globalized world and a universal humanity is doing the same thing—sending historians back in time to find a supposed global humanity’s primordial roots.72 efforts to globalize history, then, do not simply analyze past transnational transactions—which historians have long done—but do so to cultivate a new, alternative narrative that sustains and justifies global capitalism. In doing so cosmopolitan historians make the same mistakes that they accuse national historians of making.73 In addition, the assumptions that guide much contemporary cosmopolitanism are rooted in Western enlightenment notions of universality and rationality, and express claims to universality that have long accompanied american imperialism.7 they assume that liberalism, however universal it may be, is also natural. In contrast, the work of Foucault and other scholars demonstrates that liberal moral agents, with a sense of interiority and identity, are made by culture rather than found in nature.75 ethnic and other, more local, identities are also historically constructed.76 all identities are made over time and often serve particular interests. We must therefore ask ourselves of all identities—whether they be national, transnational, or sub-national—where did they come from and whose interests do they serve? as Hollinger argues, there is neither an ethical nor disciplinary reason to favor sub72. michael lang, “globalization and Its History,” Journal of Modern History 78, no.  (2006), 899-931. See also raymond grew, “expanding Worlds of World History,” Journal of Modern History 78, no.  (2006), 878-898, on the effort to construct a global narrative. For thoughtful examples, see margaret c. Jacob, “the cosmopolitan as a lived category,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008), 18-25; david Porter, “Sinicizing early modernity: the Imperatives of Historical cosmopolitanism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3, no.  (2010), 299-306. one might also add that economic globalization may serve the marxian expectation of producing a world-historical proletariat. 73. bender is aware of this risk: “It will do historiography no good to work free of the nation and its ideology only to embrace the ideology and process of globalization. Such a move promises new blindnesses, and there is besides the danger of complicity, conscious or not, in a triumphalism that justifies the current phase of capitalism.” bender, Rethinking American History, 12. 7. See charles bright and michael geyer, “Where in the World is america? the History of the United States in a global age,” in Rethinking American History, 63-99; Foner, “american Freedom in a global age.” 75. michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. alan Sheridan (New york: Vintage, 1977); Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. luther H. martin, Huck gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (amherst: University of massachusetts Press, 1988). Similar conclusions can be drawn from different perspectives: see charles taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1989); dipesh chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. 117-18; Jean l. cohen and andrew arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (cambridge, ma: mIt Press, 1992), 375-382. 76. For the invention of ethnicity, see Kathleen Neils conzen and david a. gerber, “the Invention of ethnicity: a Perspective from the U.S.a.,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12, no. 1 (1992), 31; david a. Hollinger, “authority, Solidarity, and the Political economy of Identity: the case of the United States,” Diacritics 29, no.  (1999), 116-127. See also rogers brubaker, “ethnicity without groups,” Archives Européenes de Sociologie 3, no. 2 (2002), 163-189; calhoun, Nations Matter, 160-161; Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, transl. yael lotan (london: Verso, 2009); James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New york: oxford University Press, 2007). amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 61 national or transnational communities over national ones when we craft interpretations of the past: If people do need to belong, and if there is no escaping the drawing of boundaries, these insights can apply to the national community of the United States as well as to more global and to more local solidarities. If all solidarities are ultimately constructs, and not primordial, it will not do to pronounce as artificial the cultural continuities that have developed in relation to the american nation-state, and to then take at face value the claims to authenticity made on behalf of other cultures. Indeed, the distinction between civic and ethnic eventually breaks down because over the course of time civic affiliations can help create those that are eventually recognized as ethnic. the history that has led so many citizens of the United States to call themselves americans is just as real as is the history that yields the identities brought here amid diasporas.77 rejecting national history therefore does not solve the disciplinary problem national history’s critics raise. Non-national groups, including those defined by ethnicity, are as likely as the nation to turn historians into tools because they too have agendas and interests that historians should not accept uncritically. the problem is not national history itself but that historians always risk becoming boosters, or at least reinforcing the vitality, of the groups about which they write. Since this is an ongoing disciplinary problem, getting rid of national history will not resolve it. The question, then, is how to maintain sufficient distance from one’s own subject when one shares in its group identity, whether that be a nation or an ethnicity, gender, religion, class, or any other group.78 the place to start is to recall Haskell’s recognition that “objectivity is not neutrality.” Neutrality requires us to have no agenda whereas objectivity asks us to engage with competing perspectives, to understand them sympathetically, to respond to them, and thus to make a compelling case for why our particular interpretation is more complete than others. Historians need not give up their allegiances, including their national ones, but rather they ought to be open to “collision with rival perspectives.” these collisions, Haskell argues, happen within scholarly communities that subject participants to norms concerning scholarship.79 It is vital therefore that national historians who share a group identity with their subject also see themselves as members of, and therefore responsible to, the historical profession. In other words, we must value what allan megill calls “disciplinary objectivity” by honoring those historians who apply the rules of their craft consistently and open themselves to critical peer review. 77. Hollinger, Postethnic America, 160-161. See also Hollinger, “the Historian’s Use of the United States”; Hollinger, “authority, Solidarity, and the Political economy of Identity.” like Hollinger, michael mcgerr wonders “how much should we bend the discipline of history to suit the needs of internationalism.” mcgerr agrees that transnationalists have an agenda and interests that are equally worthy of suspicion as those held by national(ist) historians. See mcgerr, “the Price of the ‘New transnational History,’” American Historical Review 96, no.  (1991), 1066-1067. robert H. Wiebe, in contrast, has sought to disentangle the legitimate human yearning for community that is expressed through nationalism with the dangers of state power and the alliance between nations and states in Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 78. In many ways the struggles about being Jewish and writing the history of Judaism with which yerushalmi grapples in Zakhor are similar to those of an american writing the history of the United States. 79. thomas Haskell, “objectivity is Not Neutrality: rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream,” History and Theory 29, no. 2 (may 1990), 129-157. 62 JoHaNN N. Neem While absolute objectivity may be impossible, by subjecting our work to constant criticism, we can hope to root out some of the prejudices that may bias it.80 disciplinary objectivity is possible because our selves are capable of being members of more than one group and therefore of balancing competing goods against one another. That part of our selves that identifies with the values, norms, and practices of professional history serves as a check on that part of us that identifies with another group. living up to the historian’s obligations may in fact be a source of pride for individuals, especially when it involves criticizing the groups they love most in the interest of historical knowledge. Another antidote to correct for the dangers of group identification—whether that group be national or any other—is, as Hollinger urges, to expand the professional community to include non-member historians. If we accept a continued role for american national history but also recognize that american historians’ insularity too often leads to justification, we might subject national history to peer review by historians of the United States based abroad. Foreign historians, less likely to share americans’ love of their country, will root out excesses and correct prejudices.81 the same is true for historians of any other group. National history’s critics incorrectly treat a problem of group history as limited to national groups. IV National history remains a viable methodology not only because rejecting national history on its critics’ terms requires rejecting the history of all groups but, equally important, because recent theoretical and historical work has transformed our understanding of what constitutes a nation, making our understanding of nations align better with our understanding of other groups in history. there is an irony between what eric Hobsbawm, one of the most prominent historians of nationalism, hoped for and what his insight, as well as those of such theorists as ernest gellner and benedict anderson, has in fact produced.82 Hobsbawm anticipated that by better understanding the historical processes behind nation-making we would finally put nations to rest. “The owl of Minerva, which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism,” Hobsbawm wrote.83 Instead, historians have used the new theoretical tools offered by Hobsbawm, gellner, and anderson to understand the development of American national identity. In doing so they have confirmed the historical reality of the american nation (and other nations), allowing us to be more confident that the nation is at least one of the containers of history. 80. allan megill, “objectivity for Historians,” in Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (chicago: University of chicago Press, 2007), 107-12. 81. Hollinger, “the Historian’s Use of the United States.” For a recent call to internationalize the community of scholars studying the United States, see emory elliott, “diversity in the United States and abroad: What does it mean When american Studies is transnational?,” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2007), 1-22. 82. eric Hobsbawm and terence ranger, The Invention of Tradition (New york: cambridge University Press, 1983); eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New york: cambridge University Press, 1993); ernest gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, Ny: cornell University Press, 1983); anderson, Imagined Communities. 83. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 192. amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 63 there is an important difference between the new foundation for national history and the assumptions that once guided national historians. Nineteenth-century national historians took the nation for granted. george bancroft’s generation believed that nations express the spirit of a people, that they are natural, and, as advocates of manifest destiny made clear, have a divine purpose. most historians no longer think in these terms. the nation is now considered a human creation best understood not from the perspective of god’s will nor of nature but of human beings.8 this is a profound shift. It has turned the nation into a technology. like any other technological innovation, nations have been used for good and for ill. With Hobsbawm’s help, nations have been brought down to earth, which has opened the door for some to imagine a future without them, but also has made nations more tangible and therefore less dangerous. If nationalism’s theorists have not succeeded in undermining nationalism they have been more successful in changing how historians approach the question of nationalism. older works on american national identity were usually intellectual histories that assumed the existence of an american nation. New work has focused on the institutional foundations of national identity. It asks us to think of nation-making as a historical process. by outlining an institutional, material basis for american nationhood, it has also provided a new foundation for intellectual historians wishing to study american identity. but this is not the same old thing again. Historians must now be attentive to how national identity and nations are always being formed, changed, and challenged. by paying attention to the institutional bases for nationhood, american historians have become more careful about when and where they ascribe a national identity to past actors. When we write about “americans,” we are forced to ask whether the people about whom we write would have considered this a relevant category. although this essay cannot go into detail about the development and transformation of american nationalism over its long history, it can provide a brief sketch of what historians have done in the period between the revolution and the civil War. our starting point is recognizing that colonial british america was not protoamerican. Not only was it ethnically diverse, but even the british settler majority did not identify with a nascent “american” identity. Instead, the majority of white inhabitants were embedded—politically, economically, and culturally—in the british empire. to the extent that there existed a collective political identity prior to 1776, most white settlers would have considered themselves britons.85 Having long considered themselves members of the british political and cultural nation, following independence Americans had to define who they were. There was no clear answer. Potential americans were divided by state, region, religion, 8. elías José Palti, “the Nation as a Problem: Historians and the ‘National Question’,” History and Theory 0, no. 3 (2001), 32-36; anthony d. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New england, 2000). 85. t. H. breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the eve of the american revolution: revisions once more in Need of revising,” Journal of American History 8, no. 1 (1997), 13-39. See also brendan mcconville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 2007); armitage, Declaration of Independence; Jack P. greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (athens: University of georgia Press, 1986). 6 JoHaNN N. Neem ethnicity, and interest. Few in the new republic, other than those who had served in congress or in the continental army, had any experience with the potential and purported american nation; both the institutional and experiential base for american nationhood was weak.86 It is no wonder that the newly independent states could not agree on most policies. recognizing these limitations, delegates met in Philadelphia in 1787 and proposed stronger ligaments to connect the various parts of the Union. Nonetheless, when the Constitution was ratified the United States remained, in John m. murrin’s words, “a roof without walls.”87 Using the insight of nationalism’s theorists, historians have explored how the walls were built. the establishment of a new federal government was itself an important catalyst for american identity because it created a national political institution that touched the lives of all those living in the new United States.88 In addition, federal support for a cheap postal service encouraged the circulation of print, increasing interaction between various parts of the Union while generating a national public sphere.89 National politics developed within this new national public sphere. despite the Founders’ hope for civic unity, american leaders were soon divided over the policies that the new government should pursue, resulting in the formation of political parties. The first political parties were elite institutions connecting political players across the Union into like-minded groups with a national orientation. As party competition intensified in the early nineteenth century, and as more white male americans gained the vote, political parties sought the loyalties of ordinary people. as a result, parties served as one of the primary institutional mechanisms through which both elite and ordinary americans experienced american nationhood. In parades, militias, and election-day beer and circus, individuals were asked to connect their local lives to national affairs.90 to 86. See, among many good sources, david c. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). Joseph J. ellis’s His Excellency: George Washington (New york: Knopf, 200) gives us a sense of how Washington’s sacrifices in the name of a nation that did not exist shaped his own commitment to strengthening the institutional foundations of that nation as its first president. 87. John m. murrin, “a roof without Walls: the dilemma of american National Identity,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. richard r. beeman, Stephen botein, and edward c. carter (chapel Hill: University of North carolina, 1987), 333-38. 88. richard r. John, “governmental Institutions as agents of change: rethinking american Political development in the early republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11, no. 2 (1997): 37-380. See also theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of oklahoma, 2003). 89. richard r. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal Service from Franklin to Morse (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1995). 90. Johann N. Neem, “civil Society and american Nationalism, 1776–1865,” in Politics and Partnerships: Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present, ed. elisabeth S. clemens and douglas guthrie (chicago: University of chicago Press, forthcoming); Skocpol, Diminished Democracy, 36-37; andrew W. robertson, “‘look on this Picture . . . and on this!’ Nationalism, localism, and Partisan Images of otherness in the United States, 1780–1820,” American Historical Review 106, no.  (2001), 1263-1280; Simon P. Newman, Parades and Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); david Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 1997); Joel H. Silbey, “‘the Salt of the Nation’: Political Parties in antebellum america,” in The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War (New york: oxford University Press, 1985), amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 65 mobilize voters, parties also relied on the press. as anderson argues, the press provides an imagined space in which nationhood can be experienced. the partisan press consistently reminded ordinary americans that national affairs mattered. It cultivated and then reinforced both partisan and national identity.91 religious institutions in civil society were equally important to forging national identity. ordinary men and women may have attended church for spiritual reasons, but their local churches were part of national denominations that linked congregants of a particular church into a larger national community of co-religionists. many americans also participated in religious voluntary associations—missionary and tract societies, temperance and anti-slavery associations—that were part of national institutional networks. the american bible Society, for example, was based in New york city, but its work was carried out largely by local auxiliaries in towns across the nation. In annual reports and other publications, the american bible Society forged an imagined community of citizens with common concerns. Money flowed back and forth between center and periphery. Churches and reform groups created a national religious public sphere joining americans across vast spaces into shared faith and interest communities.92 expanding markets added yet another connecting tissue between individuals. State, federal, and privately funded internal improvements provided the infrastructure for a domestic market that encouraged americans from various parts of the Union to meet each other and merge in the expanding West. the National republican, Whig, and republican parties supported high tariffs not only to protect domestic markets but because they knew that shared economic interests could foster national sentiment.93 responding to opponents of federally funded internal improvements, South carolina Senator John c. calhoun noted that “whatever impedes the intercourse of the extremes with . . . the centre of the republic, weakens the Union.” He urged americans to “bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals.”9 50-68. For a discussion of how partisanship gave women a political—and american—identity, see rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 91. anderson, Imagined Communities. See david Paul Nord, “Newspapers and american Nationhood, 1776–1826,” in Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper, ed. John b. Hench (Worcester, ma: american antiquarian Society, 1991), 391-05; michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999). 92. Neem, “civil Society and american Nationalism”; mark a. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New york: oxford University Press, 2002), 19-202; c. c. goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the American Civil War (macon, ga: mercer, 1985). the classic exploration of this question remains donald g. mathews, “the Second great awakening as an organizing Process, 1780–1830: an Hypothesis,” American Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1969), 23-3. 93. Stephen minicucci, “the ‘cement of Interest’: Interest-based models of Nation-building in the early republic,” Social Science History 25, no. 2 (2001), 27-27; brian d. Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); onuf and onuf, Nations, Markets, and War. 9. david m. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New york: Harper and row, 1976), 7-17; John l. larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 2001); minicucci, “‘cement of Interest’,” 26-267. 66 JoHaNN N. Neem american nationalism was not forged in an international vacuum. doing national history need not imply discounting relations between peoples and states in a global context. In fact, recent work makes clear that the declaration of Independence was as important as an international document as a domestic one. the declaration demanded the right of a newly formed american people to take their place among other states in the world.95 moreover, foreign concerns were as important for american nation- and state-builders as were domestic concerns in the early national era. the inability of the articles of confederation to protect american borders from Native americans and europeans, to enforce treaties and to make new ones, to protect american commerce, and to project a credible military threat convinced many american leaders of the necessity of a stronger central government that would, in turn, develop a stronger national identity.96 In his Farewell address President george Washington worried that a country divided at home would be weak abroad and reminded americans of the need “to concentrate your affections.”97 the international arena was important in another sense as well. Identities are dialectical. our sense of who we are is dependent on our sense of who we are not. these divisions are often spatial. In Said’s words, “imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away.”98 For Americans after the Revolution, the far away was the corrupt, “artificial” society of europe, which they contrasted to “natural,” and therefore superior, american society. Thomas Jefferson was confident that American freedom depended on rejecting—or othering—europe. Having “burst the chains under which [european] monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves,” americans had returned to the original, purer form of society that lay underneath.99 Similarly, St. Jean de crèvecoeur’s answer to his question, “what then is the american, this new man?” was: “He is an american, who, leaving behind him all his ancient [european] prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.”100 europe, in short, was america’s orient. 95. Peter S. onuf, “a declaration of Independence for diplomatic Historians,” Diplomatic History 22, no. 1 (1998), 71-83; armitage, Declaration of Independence. 96. leonard J. Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); bender, Nation among Nations, 102-105; Hendrickson, Peace Pact; Peter onuf and Nicholas onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776–1814 (madison, WI: madison House Publishers Inc., 1993). 97. george Washington, “Farewell address” (1796) in George Washington: Writings, ed. John rhodehamel (New york: library of america, 1997), 965. See tyrrell, Transnational Nation, 10-1. 98. Said, Orientalism, 55. For a critical analysis of this assumption, see arash abizadeh, “does collective Identity Presuppose an other? on the alleged Incoherence of global Solidarity,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (2005), 5-60. 99. thomas Jefferson to roger c. Weightman (June 2, 1826) in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. merrill Peterson (New york: library of america, 198), 1516-1517. See brian douglas Steele, “thomas Jefferson and the making of american Nationalism,” Phd diss., University of North carolina, 2003. 100. Hector St. John de crèvecouer, Letters from an American Farmer (london: J. m. dent and Sons, 1912), 3 (letter 3). amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 67 the development of american nationalism was not preordained. It was both a conscious project of political elites and the outcome of ordinary people engaging in politics, religion, and market activity, combined with the needs of foreign policy. recent historiography helps us understand how “america” emerged as a meaningful category in many people’s lives. Nonetheless, throughout the postrevolutionary decades the meaning of american identity was contested. Party conflict was just one manifestation of this challenge. Even as Americans came to think of themselves as americans, they continued to debate the ideas and policies that would best give expression to their shared identity. as andrew W. robertson, David Waldstreicher, and Jean Baker all argue, conflict over American identity was the vital catalyst to its formation.101 the same holds true in the religious sphere. It was precisely because americans separated church from state, producing competition between denominations for converts, that americans created a Protestant civil religion. Political and religious competition helped make america a common reference point for the United States’ white inhabitants. certainly, as david roediger, rogers Smith, ronald takaki, and many others have noted, this common reference point excluded many minority populations even as it constructed a common identity for most white americans.102 Historians must therefore be conscious of both the limits of national identity and its central historical importance for the majority of the United States’ inhabitants. the above synthesis gives a sense of the ways in which the denaturalization of the nation—made possible thanks to such works as Hobsbawm’s and anderson’s—has enabled historians to recognize the nation’s historical reality and its limits. Whereas once the nation was an assumption, now it can be seen as a product of specific historical processes. Far from abandoning the nation, then, we can now test whether americans (or any other group) had the institutional and intellectual foundations for nationhood. this makes the nation like other group identities—a historical construction that is always changing and always subject to pressure from competing group identities. We thus have two interpretive paradigms with different data to explain the past. one group of historians argues that nations and their stories distort the past; the other makes the case for the american nation as a real, historically constructed community. Whether we will have a scientific revolution and replace one with the other may depend less on the merits of either than on our present normative needs. but a possible middle ground exists between those who emphasize the historical reality of nationhood and those who focus on the individuals and groups that can best be understood through sub-national or transnational lenses. People in the 101. roberston, “look on this Picture”; Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes; baker, Affairs of Party. 102. david roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (london and New york: Verso, 1991); Smith, Civic Ideals; takaki, Iron Cages. the situation for african americans is particularly complex. although enslaved people were denied many of the basic categories of american, and human, freedom, much recent scholarship has demonstrated that enslaved people in the United States developed a distinct african-american culture that distinguished them from black people in other parts of the world. Northern free blacks also negotiated between being denied full membership in the american polity and their own cultural and political identity with the United States. 68 JoHaNN N. Neem past, as in the present, were sometimes defined and motivated by their national identity and at other times by their membership in other kinds of communities, including religious, ethnic, regional, gendered, professional, and class. Historians ought to pay attention to whether those individuals to whom we attribute national identities were indeed acting as nationals, and how other identities intersected with national identity to produce past beliefs and actions.103 the american civil War reinforces this case. much new work on the civil War has sought to understand when and how elite and ordinary Southerners came to think of themselves as members of a confederate nation.10 We now know that Southerners considered their economic interests much more closely tied to britain than to the North despite the efforts of northern National republicans, Whigs, and republicans to forge an integrated domestic market. the South, in essence, was part of a global commercial network that came to shape its identity in much more fundamental ways than in the North.105 the combination of economic interests and republican ideals convinced elite and ordinary Southerners to die for a Southern nation that was (they believed) being oppressed by the North. their sacrifice, as well as the sacrifice of their Northern counterparts, demonstrates both that national identity can change in response to new circumstances and that it is a very real thing in the lives of most people. good historical method should not take that away from them any more than it should rob individuals of their other group identities.106 103. In their recent article “National Narratives and their ‘others’: ethnicity, class, religion and the gendering of National Histories,” Storia della Storiografia 50 (2006), 59-98, Stefan berger and chris lorenz argue that national narratives—and thus national identities—historically made use of but trumped possible counter-narratives, and thus counter-identities, premised in ethnicity, class, religion, or gender. their observations point to the importance of accounting for the relationship between group identities while according national identity a prominent place among them. 10. gary W. gallagher, “disaffection, Persistence, and Nation: Some directions in recent Scholarship on the confederacy,” Civil War History 55, no. 3 (2009), 329-353; robert e. bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New york: cambridge University Press, 2009); aaron Sheehan-dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 2007); anne Sarah rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 2005); gallagher, The Confederate War (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997); James m. mcPherson, What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (baton rouge: louisiana State University Press, 199); drew gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (baton rouge: louisiana State University Press, 1988); Potter, The Impending Crisis. For some of the limits to sectional identity, see randall c. Jimerson, The Private Civil War: Popular Thought during the Sectional Conflict (baton rouge: louisiana State University Press, 1988), 180-237. Similar work has also been done to understand how northerners conceptualized their national project. See adam I. P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New york: oxford University Press, 2006); melinda lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); mcPherson, What They Fought For. 105. Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union; onuf and onuf, Nations, Markets, and War. 106. as Smith, The Nation in History, 57, writes, “constructing the nation away misses the central point about historical nations: their powerfully felt and willed presence, the feeling shared among so many people of belonging to a transgenerational community of history and destiny.” amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 69 V Nationalism can be dangerous. We need not look far to discover the hatred, and thus the violence, that nation-states can unleash. but war also demonstrates how much people are willing to sacrifice for the political community they love. As anderson writes, although cosmopolitan intellectuals reject nationalism as rooted “in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.”107 For this reason nationalism is necessary for the survival of democratic governments. If citizens in a polity do not have a collective identity, the losses may well outweigh the gains. democracies rely on citizens willing to contemplate the common good. Nationalism provides the glue that connects individuals together, linking poor to rich, minority to majority. It creates the commons. at its best it promotes sacrifice and charity. In our writing and teaching we can embrace national history only if the nations whose stories we reinforce, even when we are critical of their actions, are historically real constructions. We need more studies exploring the institutional and experiential foundations of american (and other) nationalism, including a better sense of which eras and which groups within the United States’ territory can best be captured by historical narratives that posit national identity as a central analytical framework and how national identity intersects with other communal identities. recent work on the development of american nationalism in the post-revolutionary era has started us in this direction. If the american nation is a historical community, it is now up to us to decide whether we as historians and as citizens will write our narratives in ways that reinforce or undermine it in the future. there is no reason to believe that the globalization of our identities, whether from a cosmopolitan or pluralistic perspective, will promote a shared humanity. Nations connect citizens because they bind us vertically to a particular territory. globalization will allow citizens to connect horizontally. We may end up with a world divided less by nations and increasingly by the horizontal bands of class. global capitalism has already produced a cosmopolitan elite who is at home in any major metropolis, whether New york, Paris, or mumbai. In craig calhoun’s words, we must remember the extent to which “felt cosmopolitanism depends on privilege.”108 by promoting the interests of a particular class, the globalization of american history may further what christopher lasch referred to as “the revolt of the elites.” Freed from the tethers that bind them to the less fortunate within their territorial communities, the winners in the global marketplace may absolve themselves of any responsibility for others. If lasch is right, the weakening of 107. anderson, Imagined Communities, 11. 108. craig calhoun, “cosmopolitanism in the modern Social Imaginary,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008), 106; calhoun, “class consciousness of Frequent travelers”; calhoun, Nations Matter, 165167. 70 JoHaNN N. Neem nationalism may turn out to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many.109 the demise of national history might also make possible the revival of the kinds of ethnic and religious violence that continue to wreak havoc in many parts of the world where both nationalism and liberalism remain weak. the United States, by proclaiming, if often failing to live up to, liberal values and by maintaining a thick national civic culture, creates a common site in which diverse peoples can participate as members of a shared citizenry, of a democratic nation-state. If human beings always belong to groups, it is worth asking whether the kinds of groups that might replace nation-states are better, or whether the nation-state, as a technology, has secured and can continue to secure liberal democracy better than other forms of social solidarity. National history should not be american historians’ only practice, especially since forming collective identity is not the only or even necessarily the primary purpose of professional history. moreover, we have learned too much about the past from histories that take sub-national or transnational perspectives. Sub-national and transnational histories teach americans how their past actions affected and were affected by people at home and around the globe, often in violation of americans’ own professed values. Whether the issue is economics and poverty, environmental change, or foreign policy and war, such histories urge americans to view themselves from the outside, as others might see them. yet the moral force of such histories depends on their readers’ nationalism. It is precisely because we americans share a collective identity and a thick tradition that sub-national and transnational perspectives can spur not just our pride and shame but also our sense of responsibility. In short, globalization has not displaced the need for national history but has made it all the more important. Western Washington University 109. christopher lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New york: W. W. Norton, 1995).