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Deepening historical understanding in a transnational world: A review essay
Community College Enterprise, The, Fall 2003 by Aquila, Dominic A
Writing in 1962 for the American Historical Review, another American historian, David Potter, also raised the issue of "the historian's use of nationalism and vice-versa." He registered astonishment that historians, including himself, readily assumed that "the 2,500,000,000 people of the world would fall naturally into a series of national groups." Nevertheless, as David Hollinger notes in his brief discussion of Potter's essay for the Bender collection, Potter quickly and assuredly concluded that "nations were it." The title of Hollinger's own essay "The Historian's Use of the United States and Vice Versa," so similar as it is to Potter's essay of 1962, signals his fundamental alignment with Potter's conclusion. Yet at the same time Hollinger acknowledges and satisfies his obligation to answer a host of more complicated questions about history and nation-building, questions that did not weigh on Potter.5
Civilizations and history
Just over three decades before Potter's essay, Christopher Dawson published Progress and Religion (1929), a landmark book in the tradition of probing the partnership between history and the nation-state. Dawson worked in Britain but spent the last years of his life, the 1950s and 1960s, teaching at Harvard University. Like Spengler's more famous Decline of the West but without its pervasive pessimism and disillusionment, Progress and Religion was powerfully influenced by the way the nation-states of Europe and America during the First World War had dealt the final blow to the multinational empires of Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans. Equally impressive in WWI had been the surprising victory of the nation-state as an international unit of organization over its chief ideological competitor, Marxism. Foundational to Marxian doctrine was the assertion that workers' loyalty to their class traversed national boundaries. It was proven false when French, German, English, Russian, and American workers, despite constant pleas from the Communist parties of these nations for working-class solidarity, slaughtered each other on the battlefields of Europe. Although the burden of Dawson's book is an historical analysis of the connection between religion and the idea of progress, the new hegemony of the nation-state and the prospect of a world order (The League of Nations) based on the core value of progressive enlightenment, not only prompted Dawson's inquiry but figure prominently in his story. Even more so than Bender and his collaborators, Dawson lamented that professional historians in Europe and in America had become preoccupied with the nation-state as the organizing principle of their studies. The powerful influence of nineteenth-century German historians on the fledgling historical profession, according to Dawson, came packaged with their sense of urgency for national unification. The benefit of reading Progress and Religion as a complement to Rethinking American History is that Dawson shows clearly how the turn of professional historians toward the nation-state as the center of their scholarly studies was not at all an inevitable one. The road not taken by historians, according to Dawson's analysis, would have led them to "the general study of cultures or of civilization as a whole." But once the nation-state with its overriding interest in political unity took center stage among historians, the study of cultural unity was relegated to the more specialized branches of knowledge-anthropology, archeology, art history and ethnomusicology.6
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