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Deepening historical understanding in a transnational world: A review essay
Community College Enterprise, The, Fall 2003 by Aquila, Dominic A
Deepening historical understanding in a transnational world: a review essay
Rethinking American History in a Global Age edited by Thomas Bender Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ix, 427 pp. Paper, $22.50^sup USD^. ISBN 0520230582.
Who Owns History: Rethinking the Port in a Changing World by Eric Foner New York; Hill and Wang, 2002. xix, 233 pp. Paper. $13.00^sub USD^. ISBN 0809097052.
Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past by Sam Wineburg Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2001. xiv, 255 pp. Paper. $22.95^sup USD^. ISBN 1566398568.
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Teaching U.S. History as Mystery by David Gerwin and Jack Zevin Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. xii, 163 pp. Paper. $19.50^sup USD^. ISBN 032500398X.
Introduction
The importance of understanding and teaching each academic discipline with a deep concern for global and transnational issues is today unassailable. In the 1980s and even earlier the need for such a global outlook weighed most heavily on disciplines that by their nature ranged beyond the confines of the immediate and the local. One thinks here of such subjects as macroeconomics, business, anthropology, area studies and international relations. But a greater appreciation for the reality of global interde
pendence-a reality that has actually existed since the fifteenth century-emerged in the past decade, and intensified following the chain of international crises and wars set off by the events of September 11, 2001. In this context of the need to understand America in a new, complex international system, it is not at all surprising to hear more and more calls from professional historians for a repositioning of American history in a global context.
The LaPietra Proposal
Recently, the most celebrated and influential voices for broadening the study and teaching of American history are the seventy-eight distinguished historians who met annually at New York University's La Pietra campus in northern Italy from 1997 to 2001 with the goal of examining and discussing a range of proposals for the internationalization of American History. New York University and the Organization of American Historians sponsored the conferences with significant financial support from several prestigious foundations.
Their final products were a collection of essays edited by Thomas Bender under the title, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) and a companion report, "The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession," which is a precis of the important conclusions and recommendations from the entire project. The La Pietra report is accessible to the public at the OAH
website, http://www.oah.org/pubs/ index.html, and should be read very much as a companion piece to the Bender volume.
Rethinking American History resituates the American past into a broader, transnational context, and calls attention to the massive monographic literature on the many subnarratives that have shaped America. In so doing, its authors hope their readers will come to appreciate and understand "every dimension of American life as entangled in other histories." But more fundamentally the La Pietra project revisits some long-held and widely accepted assumptions about the nature and purpose of American historiography. Perhaps the most important of these assumptions, which is applicable to the entire field of history, recognizes that the emergence and preeminence of the historical profession intertwines tightly with the growth and triumph of the nation-state as the world's predominant form of political organization. "Modern historiography," writes Bender in the book's opening line, "is inextricably linked with the modern nation-state."1
The moral responsibility of historians
Besides assessing the historiographical benefits and shortcomings associated with this link, the authors' reflections lead them to the awareness that the act of writing or teaching history is freighted with moral responsibility. In the book's first essay, "Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories," Prasenjit Duara writes of a double purpose for the study and teaching of history. "Historical education not only teaches us about the past, it forms the learning subject in ways in which it shapes understanding of the past." The task ahead of those who teach and write history, he urge, is to balance carefully the ways in which history forms one's self-identity along with a critical awareness of when and how the formation is occurring. As Duara puts it, the challenge is "to understand how historical education is also about the production of our moral and knowing selves."
Walter Johnson, another contributor, connects the morality of historical pedagogy with the reality that writing or teaching history is itself an historical event that is part of the nation's history and does not stand outside it. It is therefore incumbent on historians, writes Johnson, to take stock occasionally of their own "historicity," and especially of their own "complicity" with events that they often believe they are describing from "a perspective of Archimedean neutrality."2
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